[Apologetics] FW: Happy Thanksgiving!

[Art Kelly]

WSJ.com - A Very Christian DayThis is an interesting article.  It points our
that our country was founded by fundamentalist Christians.

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: David Franke [mailto:dfranke00 at comcast.net]
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 9:08 AM
To: dfranke00 at comcast.net
Subject: Happy Thanksgiving!


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



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      November 24, 2004


     COMMENTARY



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      A Very Christian Day

      By DAVID GELERNTER
      November 24, 2004; Page A12

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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."

      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."

      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.

      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."

      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.

      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.

      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.

      Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is the author, most recently, of
"The Muse in the Machine" (Free Press, 2002).

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            http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110126327115082678,00.html






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