Summary: Thanksgiving, once a relatively unexceptionable holiday characterized by a very large cheat meal and the sedentary contemplation of football, has become the latest casualty in America’s ongoing culture wars. On one hand, there is Donald Trump, trying, utterly without evidentiary foundation, to advance some kind of “war on Thanksgiving” narrative. On the other, there are the so-called Social Justice Warriors of the Sanders/Warren left, who have been enthusiastically taking Trump’s bait and, like the woke scolds they are, attacking the current Thanksgiving holiday with every bit of politically correct scorn they can muster.
While Thanksgiving merits careful, introspective examination, it decidedly does not merit either Donald Trump’s efforts to politicize it with a phony “war on Thanksgiving” or the Sanders/Warren left’s attempts to delegitimize and whitewash the holiday as some sort of racist enterprise.
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Cathedral City, November 28 – Today is Thanksgiving. Outside the rain is coming down slowly, steadily, heavily. If 19th centuryJapanese printmaker Ando Hiroshige were depicting the rain, he would use black lines to depict heavy precipitation, rather than the white lines he customarily used to betoken a lighter rain. A little bit west of here, in the San Gorgonio Pass communities of Banning and Beaumont, the snow is falling and sticking. Roads are closing at low-water crossings; withal, the weather this Thanksgiving day is simply miserable. It’s the kind of weather for crawling into bed with a boyfriend and beguiling the hours in languid lovemaking.
But still, it is Thanksgiving Day. And in Donald Trump’s America, that means a new front in America’s ongoing culture wars. At a rally in Sunrise, Florida the other night, Donald Trump, without any facts or evidence whatsoever, implied that the “radical left” was out to force a change of the name of Thanksgiving. Ever trafficking in divisive culture war political tropes, Gospodin Trump apparently wants to expand the so-called War on Christmas into a so-called War on Thanksgiving. Not surprisingly, Trump State Media (AKA Fox News), Trump’s Russian trolls on social media (particularly on Facebook), and Trump’s addlepated base eagerly embraced Gospodin Trump’s bullshit War on Thanksgiving narrative.
Of course, Trump and his handlers knew that they were baiting the Social Justice Warriors of the Sanders/Warren left, who, for their part, enthusiastically rose to debate by producing a whole raft of opinion pieces damning Thanksgiving as an awful, racist, white supremacist glorification of “genocide.”
Wow. Just wow.
As a man of the left myself, I had not thought it possible that others of the left, even those further to the left than me, could have been so foolish as to take Donald Trump’s bait. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the Sanders/Warren left should have allowed itself to be bereft of its higher mental faculties, its capacity for cogent, careful thinking, and its intellectual rigor so completely by the malignant narcissist in the White House. It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the dialogue and dialectic of the American left should have been reduced to such a pitiably reactionary state that taking Donald Trump’s bait and engaging him in exactly the culture war battles he is spoiling to fight constitutes Social Justice Warriors’ misplaced idea of disciplined thinking.
Some years ago, when the last of my unjustly maligned Boomer generation was in college, certain leftist academics ---who had considerably more intellectual rigor and intellectual chops than their current successors in the Academy can ever hope to possess— argued, with not inconsiderable justification, that Thanksgiving should be held up to careful, considerate, intellectually rigorous examination for the lessons that George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving day proclamations, as well as the original Thanksgiving celebrations themselves, had for the United States and for the American people.
On October 3, 1789, Pres. George Washington issued a proclamation designating Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a national day of Thanksgiving. The sentiments of Washington’s proclamation were unexceptionably Anglican. No surprise there; Washington himself was an unexceptionably Anglican Virginia Tidewater planter, a man with impeccable Anglican credentials, including a stint on the vestry of his Anglican parish church. Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation made absolutely no reference to any of the various antecedents of our modern Thanksgiving that we now celebrate.
Seventy-four years to the day after Washington had issued his Thanksgiving proclamation, Abraham Lincoln issued a like proclamation, not quite so Anglican in sentiments, which has become the basis for our modern American Thanksgiving Day holiday.
In neither case did either proclamation make any mention whatsoever of the 1621 “Thanksgiving” celebrated by the Pilgrims of the Plimouth colony in Massachusetts. Yet, somehow, this nonconformist Massachusetts Bay “Thanksgiving” feast has become the model for our current Thanksgiving Day celebrations and, in many ways, the source material for America’s foundation myth.
Who of us, at least those of us who attended elementary school somewhere in this country, cannot recall Thanksgiving Day pageants in which students, and sometimes teachers, got togged up in, for lack of a better phrase, Pilgrim drag and acted out the mythological narrative of Myles Standish, Priscilla Mullins, John Winthrop, and all the other Pilgrim Separatist Nonconformists who had come to Plimouth aboard the Mayflower, ostensibly seeking religious freedom.
Growing up in the public schools in Los Angeles, I too participated in this rather outré exercise in pageantry. It seemed somewhat odd to me to witness, for example, one of my classmates, an Ethiopian girl from an ancient, Christian, African civilization dressed up like a comely Wampanoag Indian maiden, or a Mexican-American kid named Cuauhtemoc, and his brother, with the equally Méxica/Aztec/Chicano name of Ahuizotl, portraying Myles Standish and John Winthrop respectively, while their sister Xochitl inhabited, with great aplomb, the role of Priscilla Mullins.
In all this cross-cultural cross-dressing and appropriation, it seems to have occurred to no one that the first Thanksgivings in what are now the United States occurred long before the Pilgrims arrived at Plimouth. On September 8, 1565, for example 800 Spaniards, under the leadership of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés came ashore to found the city of San Augustín, now St. Augustine, Florida. Almost immediately they came ashore, Menéndez and his company gave a feast for themselves and the local native tribe, accompanied by a Mass of Thanksgiving.
On April 30, 1598, a Spanish settlement party under Don Juan de Oñate held a feast of Thanksgiving in what is now the town of San Elizario, down valley from what is now the city of El Paso, Texas. A Mass of Thanksgiving was celebrated, a feast was had, and another pre-Plimouth Thanksgiving joined the historical record.
On December 4, 1619, English settlers at Berkeley Hundred in Virginia were celebrating what may very well have been the first English-speaking Thanksgiving in the Americas. Unlike the Massachusetts event, two-plus years later, the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving was also Anglican in its theology and its liturgics.
The conclusion that ineluctably forces itself upon the observer, particularly upon an observer who is Conformist, i.e. Anglican, in religion, is that the Massachusetts Bay-centric creation narrative foisted off upon the schoolchildren of such diverse communities as Los Angeles, El Paso, St. Augustine, or even Berkeley Hundred itself, has a number of serious flaws.
First and foremost, is the fact that the entire Plimouth Rock narrative sets up the Separatist, Nonconformist Pilgrims, as heroes of the piece akin to something out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with the Anglican Church of England in an unspeakably villainous role. Now we may assume that part of that narrative stems from the American penchant for equating religious freedom with the freedom of Nonconformity to have its own way. For in truth, freedom of religion in the United States has historically implied the freedom of Protestant Nonconformist religion.
For years, for example, the military only recognized two kinds of Christianity: Roman Catholic and a generic “Protestant.” It did not recognize as equally valid, equally separate branches all the Church the Eastern Orthodox churches, the ancient Eastern churches, including the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, the Lutheran churches or the Anglican/Episcopal churches. Indeed, in the “heroic Pilgrims at Plimouth Rock” narrative promulgated to schoolchildren around the country, the Anglican/Episcopal church comes in for particular condemnation.
Add to this Nonconformist bias the inescapable fact that Berkeley Hundred lies in the Commonwealth of Virginia, an undeniably Confederate state during the Late Unpleasantness, and it becomes fairly easy to determine why the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving of December, 1619, should have been swept under the metaphorical rug in favor of the 1621 events at Plimouth. Moreover, the Nonconformist bias in much of American historiography also accounts for the almost entire “whitewashing” of the San Augustín and San Elizario thanksgivings under Menéndez and Oñate.
Yet, despite the attempted scrubbing of these earlier Thanksgiving celebrations from American history, the idea of setting aside a day to give thanks is itself theologically unexceptionable. To those of us who are Conformist in our religion, the scriptural command that comes down to us from 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “[i]n every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you,” comes close to being a Kantian categorical imperative.
Occasions of Thanksgiving, therefore, whether on the officially proclaimed day at the end of November, or any other time, ought to be times when we eschew culture war disputations, when we turn aside from the Trumpian temptation to “own the libs,” when we avoid the equally tempting Bolshevik enterprise of demonstrating how woke we are, and when we avoid endless arguments over the propriety of the Oxford comma.
Thanksgiving, whether today or on any other day, should be a time for contemplating first things, eternal things, hopeful things, and holy things. From the standpoint of Conformist religion, Thanksgiving, in these final days of the liturgical season after Pentecost, as we gear up for Advent and Christmas, New Year’s and Epiphanytide, ought to be a time for stock taking, introspection, and getting in touch with what it means to be a part of a community in which, as former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reminds us, “[w]e have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others, the ones whose company we don't greatly like, whom we didn't choose....”
Perhaps, above all else, we ought to declare, even if fleetingly, an armistice in the culture wars and get in touch today with what it means to be thankful to live in a community where we have the opportunity to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others. It may be, in the end, what saves us.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City, where he served eight years on the city Council, and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He makes no bones about being gay and about being Conformist in his religion.
