Thanksgiving

As with most everything American, Thanksgiving Day means different things to different people. For some, it is a day off from work reserved for eating good food and watching football. For many, it's a holiday to enjoy time with family and to suffer through the miseries of American travel. For others, it is a very lonely day filled with regrets and frustrations over what they're not thankful for. And increasingly, Thanksgiving is seen as an unpleasant reminder of how terribly Native Americans were treated by the early European settlers of America, and how the US continues to this day to overlook and 'whitewash' its unsavory past (and present). As you can see, even the most authentically American holiday on the calendar is far from monolithic in its significance.

But while the factionalistic tendencies of pluralism have pretty much chewed up Christmas and increasingly reduced it a controversial sore on American life in the last decade, Thanksgiving has largely avoided such controversy. But concerns about the Native American side of Thanksgiving certainly carries the risk of embroiling the holiday in similar scrums, and in our society, I fully expect this to happen. Thanksgiving won't be banned in public schools the way Christmas is constantly at risk of. Instead, students will get a revised history lesson about Thanksgiving's darker side, in the hopes that a more well rounded appraisal of the holiday will be inculcated into future generations.

What these initiatives miss, however, is that Americans in some ways are quite similar to many peoples around the world in at least one important way. In short, we, like many in the world, enjoy myth. Mythology is thought to be a mark of unsophistication by those who believe they are sophisticated. We look at the religious and cultural practices of other nations and shake our heads at how so many people can wholeheartedly believe things that to us, are clearly mythological and disprovable. But what we fail to see is that we do the same thing. The myths we believe may be sanitized, but they are still myths. In regards to Christmas, many of us happily go along with the secular mythology that is the modern Santa Claus, Rudolph, and Frosty. We know that such things aren't real, but if any of them are attacked, as Santa Claus often is, we rally to the defense of a myth, often vigorously. Thanksgiving is much the same way. When the aura of Thanksgiving is threatened by viewpoints that tarnish its absolute goodness, we stridently resist, not because the facts are on our side, but because we want to hold onto myths. The converse is also true. Word that Thanksgiving might become an opportunity to highlight American cruelty to Native Americans will cause many who think that America is inherently bad to rejoice. This isn't because the Native American angle on Thanksgiving is the whole story or is totally unbiased in its own right, but because there are people who believe the myth that America is simply not a force for good in the world. In the end, many of us are much more interested in holding onto our respective myths and beating back all threats than we are in sincerely seeking the truth and allowing our beloved myths to be better shaped by the truth.

For me, Thanksgiving is a wonderful day to reflect on God's goodness to me, and to be challenged ever more by God's insistence to be salt and light in a world that desperately needs both. I don't minimize Thanksgiving either by blowing off the Native American angle, or reducing it to a gluttonous day off. Instead, I see the day as a chance to renew my fidelity to God by 'keeping it real' rather than succumbing to myth. As Paul says in 2 Tim 4.3-5:

For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.

Happy Thanksgiving in the Truth.