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Thanksgiving as a call to moral community

James Calvin Davis explores the wisdom that Christian tradition brings to American Thanksgiving, as well as the ways in this holiday might prompt us to discern the imperatives of our faith in new ways. 

Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash

Thanksgiving is a high holy day for Puritan scholars like me. Each year, at some point during the Thanksgiving season, I like to pick up my worn copy of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford was a leader of the Pilgrims, a particular band of Puritans whose migration from England to New England remains the mythic point of origin for our Thanksgiving holiday. Of Plymouth Plantation journals the story of their harrowing trek from Old to New England, including the fears and struggles that dominated the colony’s first years. Bradford gives firsthand account of the disease, death, resource scarcity, uncertain relationships with Americans, and disruptive internal political contentions that challenged those Pilgrim settlers. Of Plymouth Plantation is a remarkably easy read for a four-hundred-year-old text, and the tale it weaves is full of tension and intrigue. When they got their colony on its feet, Bradford tells us, the Pilgrims celebrated their survival and the loving providence of God with a feast of thanksgiving. Ever since his journal was rediscovered (around the Civil War), the story of the “First Thanksgiving” has served as the template for generations of American celebrations.

Early in his text, Bradford includes a letter written to the Pilgrims as they were preparing to leave England. The letter was written by John Robinson, a leader in the broader Puritan movement who for some reason was unable to travel with the Pilgrims to New England. In his letter, Robinson advises his friends on the kind of community they should strive to create. Above all, he urges them to establish a community that exudes thanksgiving for the grace of God. Live gratefully, he tells them, as a matter of collective character.

A healthy society is one in which people navigate their differences with care and patience, never forgetting that they are fellow pilgrims on the same journey of life

Robinson warns his Pilgrim friends that they will face disagreement and conflict in the process of creating and maintaining social community. They will not always agree on who they should be or what they should do. In those moments, he warns, they should remember to exercise forbearance toward one another. Here Robinson surely had in mind the admonition in Romans 2, where Paul teaches that a failure to exercise grace with others is an affront to the grace God first extends to each of us. Divisive judgmentalism is akin to despising the forbearance of God, for anyone who truly appreciates the grace God extends to us in our sin must extend similar grace to others. A healthy society is one in which people navigate their differences with care and patience, never forgetting that they are fellow pilgrims on the same journey of life. Without forbearance, every moment of disagreement or conflict risks becoming an occasion for sowing mistrust, and Robinson warns them that no society can survive when citizens learn to treat each other as enemies. Rather than attacking every difference, or assuming the worst in one another, Robinson insists that they actively avoid giving or taking undue offense. The practice of mutual forbearance, he says, marks a people as grateful to God.

For he reminds them that none of them can navigate a treacherous future alone. Instead, a truly grateful society is one that sticks together, with everyone working to pass their blessings onward in a shared commitment to the common good. Sometimes the common good requires some sacrifice from our individual interests or pursuits. What we consider a right or an entitlement sometimes must yield to the obligation we have for the safety and good of others. But in the end, a society that prioritizes the common good is one in which everyone benefits, for then we satisfy the mandate Jesus gives when he assures us that in feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger and doing generous things for the least among us, we extend grace to Christ. The common good, including the needs of those most vulnerable, is the focus of a people grateful for the blessings God has bestowed on them.

Instead, a truly grateful society is one that sticks together, with everyone working to pass their blessings onward in a shared commitment to the common good.

If a civil community is to commit to the common good in a spirit of gratitude, says Robinson, then that community needs leaders who reflect that priority on grateful generosity. Choose leaders who are wise and godly, he advises. Choose leaders who understand themselves to be the beneficiaries of grace, who do not live under the delusion of being self-made but who comport themselves with gratitude and humility, and who lead people with wisdom and integrity toward the common good. Political leadership without moral integrity leads perfectly nowhere. Robinson knew this, so he implored his Pilgrim friends to choose from themselves leaders who would reflect the values they collectively cherished, which in turn makes it easier to honor, obey, and respect the offices those leaders occupy.

I am struck by the timeliness of Robinson’s old advice. In our moment, many of us despair over the demise of common community and collective character in the United States. As the recent election cycle displayed, hyper-partisan ideological enmity is the tenor of our politics, and that spirit of suspicion and hostility now haunts our engagement with even kin and neighbors, let alone strangers. Tribalism overwhelms our politics and numbs our attention to the common good. Self-interest serves as the dominant measure of what is right and good, a moral coup that politicians exploit by appealing to our baser instincts and pitting us against one another. Our political culture is perhaps more divisive than it has been at any other time in American history since the Civil War.

Revisiting Robinson’s sermon in Of Plymouth Plantation, however, reminds us of the moral aspirations that are at the foundation of America’s story. To a band of Pilgrims committed to establishing a godly community, Robinson points to a timeless truth: you are what you do. Actions and character reinforce one another. If you want to lay claim to being a godly society, a community grateful for the divine grace that watches over and protects it, then your actions and attitudes need to reflect that grace and godliness. Practice forbearance with each other. Care for the common good. Choose and honor virtuous leaders. Remember what binds you together, and practice the virtues of thanksgiving, especially when things are not going well.

This ethic captured in a Pilgrim’s journal is inherently biblical: “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Colossians 3:12, NRSV). These days Christian Nationalists bellow for a Christian America, but the problems with their call are legion, including their simplistic view of history, their tone-deafness in a religiously pluralistic nation, and their arbitrary and anachronistic set of moral priorities. If we wish to claim Christian conviction as an important source of American moral identity, Robinson shows us clearly what that would entail: live and care for one another with the grace that God first extends to us.

If we wish to claim Christian conviction as an important source of American moral identity, Robinson shows us clearly what that would entail: live and care for one another with the grace that God first extends to us.

To be committed to living as a grateful nation requires more than a single holiday and its momentary rhetoric. A truly thankful nation has gratitude in its DNA. Gratitude for grace inspires our own exercise of grace with one another. Gratitude for divine generosity inspires generosity toward the least in our midst. Gratitude for unconditional love inspires the embrace of the marginalized in our proximity. Gratitude for God’s reconciliation inspires the inclusion of the alien and stranger within our boundaries. Gratitude to God, when authentic, becomes the character of a people and is reflected in the character of their leaders.

When we American Christians celebrate Thanksgiving and hearken back to that first Pilgrim Thanksgiving long ago, we ought to do more than take a minute between the parade and the presentation of turkey to count our blessings. If we want to follow the template of our Pilgrim ancestors, our act of thanksgiving must take the form of a commitment to moral community — to live with one another in the grace that God first extended to us — and not just with fellow Christians, but with non-Christian citizens, immigrant sojourners, and neighbors around the world. Anyone who tempts us to redefine our social responsibilities as anything short of this kind of grace lived in the world, lived for the common good, stands in violation of both biblical principle and our national heritage.

If we want to follow the template of our Pilgrim ancestors, our act of thanksgiving must take the form of a commitment to moral community … and not just with fellow Christians.

I am well aware that the early history of the United States was more complicated than Bradford represents it. Neither the atrocities committed against Indigenous Americans nor those on African slaves is adequately represented in Of Plymouth Plantation, though they are inescapable parts of our larger national story. American history is morally complicated, to say the least, and we must honor the truth of that dubious history and confront its consequences, a legacy that remains part of who we are as a nation to this day. But I do not think the murkiness of our national history prevents us from revisiting earlier chapters of our story and extracting chastened lessons from it. The mythic tale of the first Thanksgiving reminds us of some of the better angels of our national origins. A vision of a society committed to the common good. Inclusive embrace of the stranger. The deliberate practice of patience, forbearance, and mutual concern as collective character. Leaders who are chosen and respected for their virtue and wisdom. The regular habit of giving thanks for the good gifts we enjoy.

What might it mean for Americans to give thanks this year as a genuine expression of gratitude, but also as a challenge to ourselves — to be a nation of virtue, of neighborliness, of forbearance, and of commitment to the common good, as those first Pilgrims imagined?

Thanksgiving is an act of moral community. Our Pilgrim heritage reminds us of that. What might it mean for Americans to give thanks this year as a genuine expression of gratitude, but also as a challenge to ourselves — to be a nation of virtue, of neighborliness, of forbearance, and of commitment to the common good, as those first Pilgrims imagined? For those of us who identify with Christian tradition, to take up that challenge is part of what it means to commit to the new life we are called to live in Christ, as an anthem of thanks to the God who first loved us, and as a witness to the world of God’s grace and glory.

This essay is based on “Thanksgiving Leftovers” in American Liturgy: Finding Theological Meaning in the Holy Days of US Culture. Cascade Books: 2021 (www.wipfandstock.com).

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