Giving thanks, in spite of Thanksgiving propaganda

Flashback more than a decade ago: New York University psychologist Paul Vitz and his colleagues announced that they had studied 60 representative social studies textbooks and had found Christianity virtually excluded. In books for grades one through four that introduced children to an understanding of American society, they found not a single word about Christianity.

Vitz and his colleagues wrote of how fifth-grade history texts made it appear that religious life ceased to exist in America about a century ago. Fundamentalists were described as people who followed an ancient agricultural way of life. Pilgrims were described as “people who took long trips.” I hope textbooks have improved since then—but today, in teaching college students, I see the results of past propaganda. Many students are up to speed on low points of American history (Wounded Knee, lynchings, “McCarthyism”) but have never learned about Christian and Jewish poverty-fighting and the many other blessings for which we should be thankful.

When parents a decade ago objected to blatant omissions and propagandizing in textbooks, some school administrators responded comically. After one child told her mother that Thanksgiving was when “the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians,” the mother called the principal and suggested that it might be educational to point out on Thanksgiving the Pilgrims thanked God. The principal of the New York suburban school replied, “That’s your opinion.”

Focusing on the present again, I see the results of such postmodernism— there are no facts, only opinions— among many students. They have been taught that there are multiple truths, with each person supposed to be a god unto himself. The idea that propelled the Pilgrims to cross the Atlantic and live in wilderness—that God Who creates objective truth does exist, and that His cause is worth living and perhaps dying for—seems weird to many thoroughly modern subjectivists.

To say that the Pilgrims thanked God: Is that a matter of opinion, as the New York principal suggested? Let’s examine some segments of America’s first great piece of journalistic/historical writing, William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, written from 1630 to 1650—and then let’s see what relevance such writing has to us, as Thanksgiving approaches.

Bradford described, first, how the Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic in 1620 encountered storms in which “the winds were so fierce and the seas so high” that disaster seemed imminent. Finally, safe on land, the Pilgrims “fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth.”

Then Bradford described the other difficulties that life in the wilderness brought: During their first winter in America half of the Pilgrims died, and at one point only seven of 100 were healthy. In all their travails, one question stood out: “What could now sustain them but the Spirit of God and His grace?” Those who survived “cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice and looked on their adversity.” That’s why they held a Thanksgiving feast the following autumn. The Pilgrims were bold and courageous to pack themselves into a small boat, sail through big waves, and then face wilderness—but millions of other pilgrims have, like them, risked all to come to America. All four of my grandparents crossed Europe and the Atlantic Ocean 90 years ago, leaving Russia to come to a land where the streets were paved perhaps with gold, certainly with freedom.

Immigrants from southeast Asia and Cuba have made their way here during the past several decades in boats often smaller than the Mayflower, but with sharks even larger all around them. Many immigrants from Mexico have come by land, getting down on their knees upon arrival in Texas and thanking God for all He had done for them. Those of us born in this land of liberty have even more to be thankful for—but many of us take all we have for granted. Many of us have driven or flown tens of thousands of miles this year, come through illness without damage, and watched as tornadoes or crime passed us by. How rude of us not to offer thanks. How foolish to worship idols of various sort—power, money, sex—rather than the Creator of heaven and earth.

Neither textbooks nor Thanksgiving parade television hosts are likely to thank God. That’s all the more reason why each of us should give thanks as we rise in the morning, as we walk and talk with our children, and as we sit down for Thanksgiving dinner.

Copyright World Magazine, worldmag.com. Reprinted by permission. Marvin Olasky is Provost of The King’s College in New York City, editor-in-chief of WORLD Magazine, and a former professor of journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.