This Pilgrim Republic
Thanksgiving is a time when we pause to give thanks to God for his blessings on us and upon our ancestors. We remember the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth celebrated by our Pilgrim forefathers. While some are critical of Thanksgiving (and everything else that is America), for many it is a blessed day of family celebrating the passing of another year and the blessings this year held. It's a time of intentional gratitude, which is sorely missing in our culture today. This article captures well the history of Thanksgiving while at the same time offering a prophetic warning to Americans of this generation.
The Pilgrims brought with them to the New World a definite religious system and a less fully articulated set of related political ideas. Their model of political life was the covenant, which is to say it was contractual and a little bit ad hoc. Their politics were utilitarian in a sense: They did not come to Massachusetts for the purpose of living life under a new kind of political settlement, but for the purpose of living a Christian life in community, a purpose to which all questions of political administration ultimately were subordinated. Government was for them a means, not an end. It was legitimate to the extent that it was in harmony with their religious doctrine and desirable to the extent that it enabled them to live the holy life they had in mind for themselves. There was an element of procedural democracy in the Mayflower compact, but the Pilgrim political mind recoiled from democracy as such in all but its most limited form....We feast on this day of Thanksgiving, to acknowledge the inexplicable blessings of peace and prosperity that have been poured out on this pilgrim republic and its people without any thought or possibility of our deserving it. And peace and prosperity are worthy of being celebrated. But what about purpose? Are we so remote from that wretched winter at Plymouth that we have forgotten that this nation was founded for a particular purpose, and that the government was constituted not to raise up men over us to keep us in awe but only as a convenience suited to that purpose? If we cannot see the bone under the skin in ourselves as obviously as we do in the turkey, it is only because we choose not to see. We do not want to see, because we have returned, in spite of our regenerate national greatness and our considerable skill in map-making, to the Land of Goshen, to the land of comfortable idolatry under the watchful and benevolent gaze of the god-king. We are happy in harness, pleased to be liberated from that terrible liberty and all its unreasoning demands. We do not dare raise our eyes, because we are terrified of the prayer we would then be compelled to say. But we do not need prayers! We have silver and gold, and plenty of it, and a king to perform the needful rituals to satisfy the gods, that the crops and the GDP may grow. Or else we will, come next election.