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<DIV><SPAN class=500501414-24112004>This is an interesting article. It
points our that our country was founded by fundamentalist
Christians.</SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=500501414-24112004></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=500501414-24112004><FONT
size=4><STRONG>Art</STRONG></FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma size=2>-----Original Message-----<BR><B>From:</B> David
Franke [mailto:dfranke00@comcast.net]<BR><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, November 24,
2004 9:08 AM<BR><B>To:</B> dfranke00@comcast.net<BR><B>Subject:</B> Happy
Thanksgiving!<BR><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=859185713-24112004><FONT size=2>I don't agree with him on
Lincoln, but overall this is a very thoughtful column on the social meaning
and significance of Thanksgiving. Important to read especially for
non-Christians or nominal Christians. Happy Thanksgiving,
everyone! --David</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=859185713-24112004><FONT size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
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<TD><SPAN class=boldTwelve><FONT
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<P class=articleTitle style="MARGIN: 0px">A Very Christian Day</P><SPAN
style="FONT: bold 12px times new roman, times, serif">
<P style="FONT: bold 12px times new roman, times, serif">By <B>DAVID
GELERNTER</B><BR><SPAN
class=aTime>November 24, 2004; Page A12</SPAN></P></SPAN>
<P class=times>The First Thanksgiving is one of those heartwarming stories
that every child used to know, and some up-to-date teachers take special
delight in suppressing. Many teachers approach children nowadays with the
absurd presumption that they are triumphalist little bigots who must be
taken down a notch and made to grasp that their country has made mistakes.
In fact they are little ignoramuses who leave high school believing that
their country has made nothing but mistakes, and they never do learn what
revisionist history is a revision of.</P>
<P class=times>It is especially sad when children don't learn the history
of Thanksgiving, which is that rarest of anomalies -- a religious festival
celebrated by many faiths. The story of the first Thanksgiving would
inspire and soothe this nation if only we would let it -- this nation so
deeply divided between Christians and non-Christians or nominal
Christians, where Christians are a solid majority on a winning streak and
many non-Christians are scared to death, of "Christian fundamentalists"
especially.</P>
<P class=times>Christian fundamentalists were the first European settlers
in this country, and Thanksgiving is their idea. (Puritans were one type
of Christian fundamentalist -- "fundamentalist" insofar as they focused on
biblical basics. The Pilgrims were radical Puritans.) Many Americans are
afraid that fundamentalists are inherently intolerant and want to stamp
out all religions but their own. Yet that first thanksgiving was
celebrated by radical Christian fundamentalists, and American Indians were
honored guests -- as every child used to know. Obviously fundamentalists
are capable of tolerating non-Christians on occasion. In 17th-century
America, some Christians used the Bible to explain exactly why American
Indians must be treated respectfully. But another fact about that first
thanksgiving is also worth pondering: no one tried to convert anyone else.
Most of today's fundamentalist groups don't fish for converts either --
but those who do ought to contemplate thanksgiving number one.</P>
<P class=times>The Pilgrims celebrated that first thanksgiving in 1621;
Edward Winslow describes it in a letter to a friend. "Our harvest being
gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a
more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of
our labours." There was a great celebration, "many of the Indians coming
amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king, Massasoit with some
90 men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted." The Indian
contingent "went out and killed five deer which they brought to the
plantation."</P>
<P class=times>The first settlers mostly wanted to be friends with the
Indians -- and not only for obvious practical reasons. Alexander Whitaker
was an early Virginia settler. His description of America was published in
1613. He doesn't think highly of American Indian religion, but goes on at
length about American Indian talent and intelligence. ("They are a very
understanding generation, quick of apprehension"; "exquisite in their
inventions, and industrious in their labour.") And after all, he points
out, "One God created us, they have reasonable souls and intellectual
faculties as well as we; we all have Adam for our common parent: yea, by
nature the condition of us both is all one."</P><REPRINTSDISCLAIMER>
<P class=times>In time, attitudes changed. American settlers and American
Indians fell to treating one another savagely, and the Indians got the
worst of it. But human greed and violence, not Christianity, brought those
changes about. Christian preachers did not always condemn them -- but,
Christian or not, they were mere human beings after all.</P>
<P class=times>The Massachusetts Bay Colony -- settled by fundamentalists
only slightly less radical than the Pilgrims -- declared its first
thanksgiving in 1630. By the late 1700s, independence was in the air, and
the Continental Congress proclaimed many days of thanksgiving. President
George Washington lost no time declaring the first thanksgiving under the
new constitution in 1789. Each of these early proclamations was good for a
single occasion. But after President Lincoln had proclaimed thanksgiving
days in 1863 and '64 -- specifying the last Thursday in November both
times -- this characteristically American festival became a yearly custom.
Lincoln was not only America's greatest president; he was our greatest
religious figure, too. In his last speech -- four days before he was
murdered, with the Civil War at an end at last -- he proposed one more day
of thanksgiving. "He, from whom all blessings flow, must not be forgotten.
A call for national thanksgiving is being prepared."</P>
<P class=times>What to conclude? In a democracy where the majority is
Christian, you can no more nitpick public life free of Christianity (as if
it were so much lint on a frazzled sweater) than you can hold down the top
on a pot of boiling water. Public life in this country has been
fundamentally Christian since the first European settlers arrived. It
continued Christian when the new nation won its independence and
proclaimed its Bill of Rights, and will stay Christian forever, or until a
majority decides otherwise -- no matter how many antireligious rulings are
extracted from how many antidemocratic power-mad judges.</P>
<P class=times>Yet the fear of Christian fundamentalism that haunts a
significant minority of Americans ought not to be casually dismissed. Some
groups still see it as their duty to make converts of non-Christians.
History suggests that they had better approach their mission with
exquisite tact, or their designated target populations will soon come to
hate their guts. I spend a fair amount of effort trying to convince
friends and colleagues that their hostility to Christianity is ignorant
and bigoted. But when a deadly earnest young Christian approaches,
displays an infuriating though subliminal holier-than-thouness, and tries
to convert me -- it happens rarely, but occasionally -- I metamorphose for
an instant into a raging leftist.</P>
<P class=times>But that long-ago First Thanksgiving still speaks to and
for every American, and we ought to listen. It speaks to Christians; they
thought it up. It speaks to Jews -- Pilgrim Christianity was a profoundly
"Hebraic" Christianity; the Pilgrims saw themselves as a chosen people
arrived in a promised land; their organizations were based on "covenants,"
and they were devoted to the Hebrew Bible. (Late in life the eminent
Pilgrim father William Bradford began studying Hebrew, so he might behold
"the ancient oracles of God in their native beauty." More than most
American Jews can say.) Those who are neither Christian nor Jew are also
present in spirit, represented by the great king Massasoit. Everyone is
"entertained and feasted," and everyone leaves with the same faith that
brung 'im. Thanksgiving speaks for Americans too: it is just like us to
set a day aside for a national thank you to the Lord, or (anyway) to
someone. Americans continue to be what Lincoln called us, the "almost
chosen people," struggling to do right by man and God.</P>
<P class=times><I><B>Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is the author,
most recently, of "The Muse in the Machine" (Free Press,
2002).</B></I></P><!-- article end -->
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