Happy Thanksgiving!

By now we’re all accustomed to the hijacking of religious holidays for both consumerism and multiculturalism, but I confess I still bristle at the usurpation of Thanksgiving as a red-letter day for the diversity movement. To use our national holiday as yet another opportunity to point out that we are not all the same only adds to the gnawing sense that America is a fractured culture.

In my mind, there is nothing as quintessentially American as Thanksgiving, with all the Rockwellian myth and traditions that surround it. For generations, Americans of every race, religion and ethnic origin have put their own spin on Thanksgiving celebrations, seamlessly adopting the holiday as their own while creating regional differences that reflect our rich identity as a melting pot. Thus wild rice stuffing in the north, corn bread stuffing down south.

Thanksgiving was established as a national holiday not to celebrate what is different about Americans, but what we hold in common ““ gratitude for another season of bounty, appreciation for the gift of freedom, and reverence for the God who created us and blesses us from year to year. -Townhall

Most children learn that the Mayflower settlers came to the New World to escape persecution and to establish religious freedom. But the early colonists actually pursued purity, not tolerance and sought to build fervent, faith-based utopias, not secular regimes that consigned religion to a secondary role. The distinctive circumstances that allowed these fiery believers of varied denominations to cooperate in the founding of a new nation help to explain America’s contradictory religious traditions ““ as simultaneously the most devoutly Christian society in the western world, and the country most accommodating to every shade of exotic belief and practice.

Concerning the Pilgrims who celebrated the First Thanksgiving in 1621, they didn’t travel directly from their English homes to the “hideous and desolate wilderness” of Massachusetts. They sailed the Atlantic only after living for twelve years in flourishing communities in Holland—the most tolerant and religiously diverse nation of Europe. They left the Netherlands not because that nation imposed too many religious restrictions but because the Dutch honored too few. The pluralism they found in Amsterdam and Leyden horrified the Pilgrims. They were separatists who considered themselves “a people apart” and who preferred isolation on a distant shore that facilitated the building of a unified, disciplined, strictly devout commonwealth, not some wide-open sanctuary for believers of every stripe. The famous Mayflower Compact defined their purpose explicitly as “the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith”¦” -Townhall