This is the third of five Thanksgiving week articles which will be posted here on Doug’s Blog, and are meant to be read aloud to your family in preparation for our national celebration of gratitude to the Lord Jesus Christ. Article One: Journey To Scrooby—A Thanksgiving Pilgrimage; Article Two: Seven Things to Do With Your Family on Thanksgiving; Article Three: Seven Quotes to Read at the Thanksgiving Table; Article Four: Refuting the Seven Myths of the Radical Left About Thanksgiving; Article Five: Seven Pilgrims to Welcome to Your Thanksgiving Table.
By Douglas W. Phillips and Elijah Brown
For close to a decade and a half, I have had the honor of leading more than a thousand people on Faith and Freedom Tours in Plymouth and the Boston area. Plymouth and the story of the Pilgrims which is honored through our national Thanksgiving Day celebration is one of the most precious stories of faith, fortitude, and the providential care of God for his Church in the history of Western Civilization. Not surprisingly, it is a historical record which is under great attack from revisionist historians and radical leftists groups. During my own tours of Plymouth, I have personally been heckled by representatives of radical Marxist Indian groups, have actually watched as markers which bring a false witness to the Pilgrim legacy have been placed on the most sacred historic locations of the Pilgrims at the urgency of these groups, and have spoken to members of the Plymouth community who have been physically assaulted by radical leftists when presenting the Pilgrim story. Some of these incidents have been documented in my article Plymouth Crock.
Behind this assault on the great Pilgrim legacy are a series of myths rooted in a historical revisionism which is not only at war with Christianity, but with a fair and reasonable account of the facts which inform our interpretation of the origins of the American nation in Plymouth. With the help of Elijah Brown, the following is presented to offer some perspective on the debate.
Thanksgiving Day should stand out in our hearts as one of the most sacred and significant days of celebration of the year. The importance of Thanksgiving Day does not merely stem from its patriotic value as the oldest national celebration in American history. The day should not be observed simply to maintain a historical tradition that was cherished long before it was officially declared a national holiday. Thanksgiving Day is momentous because it not only calls our remembrance to the awe-inspiring work of God’s providence among our forbearers, but also allows us to connect with them in a real way by demanding a perpetual reflection on the providence of God in our own lives. Whether joyfully or with more than a little misgiving, on Thanksgiving Day the nation acknowledges that we are the heirs of our Pilgrim Fathers. Thanksgiving provides a national identification that should connect with every American on a deep and intimate level. It is a day that points to the firm conviction that every good and perfect gift comes from above, and that we are the residual beneficiaries of God’s favor bestowed upon, and celebrated by our ancestors, during that first Thanksgiving feast. As we gather around our family tables in celebration of God’s providence and provision we are the fulfillment of the hope of those godly men and women; we are the enduring testimony to the fruition of their multi-generational vision of faithfulness.
At the same time, it is perhaps for this very reason that the hallowed importance of Thanksgiving Day is diminished in our modern culture. The necessary reflection on God’s providence invoked on this day is something that the unregenerate heart simply cannot grasp, much less celebrate. The essential theme of man’s utter dependence on God is something to which men shaped by the egotistical philosophy of the enlightenment cannot relate. The exclusive adoration and deep fidelity to Jesus Christ practiced among the Pilgrim Fathers is something that this secular generation finds intolerable. For this reason, each year the observance of Thanksgiving Day has gradually diminished into a day celebrated by an excess of parades, food, and football. Thanksgiving Day has been even further eroded by the radical left who, out of their hatred for God, has revised history to distort and pervert America’s Christian heritage. While the Christmas holiday has inherited its fictitious flying reindeer and Easter has inherited a fictitious egg laying rabbit, it seems that Thanksgiving has inherited a fictitious historical narrative, equal to those other absurdities, and accompanied by a barrage of unwarranted ridicule and speculative doubt.
For this reason, there are many who view Thanksgiving Day as a national day of mourning. While Thanksgiving Day is a happy time, many cannot celebrate the occasion without a small feeling of shame for the oppressors and remorse for the oppressed. Of course, such an understanding of history is based on a fictitious and speculative view of Pilgrim/ Indian relations. It is incumbent on Christian families of this generation to debunk the myths invented by those who seek to divorce history from truth because they have rejected God, the sovereign author of history. By debunking these myths we hope to reflect on the true meaning of this day of thanksgiving and restore a culture that gives proper glory, honor, and thanksgiving to God. We confront these unhappy skeptics to defend the honor and preserve the legacies of the Englishmen and Native Americans that gathered in friendship during that first thanksgiving harvest. The myth-making ability of modern skeptics seems to be limitless, but here let us contend with those myths that have been the most widely propagated and generally believed concerning our Pilgrim Fathers and their Native American friends.
MYTH #1: The first thanksgiving was a pretext for “bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades.”
A diligent appeal to the actual historical source documents reveal a very different account of what took place between the Pilgrims and Indians. From the beginning, William Bradford relates that the Pilgrims and Indians made a binding peace accord which contained six principle terms: (1) That neither group would harm one another; (2) that any who does harm will be held accountable; (3) that they will not steal from one another and anything stolen will be restored, (4) that they would become military allies, protecting one another in instances of attack; (5) That neighboring confederates would also be welcomed to the peace accord, and (6) that when they met they would come unarmed. Both parties honored this treaty, which remained unbroken for over half a century following the first thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims treated each Native American tribe individually and never attacked any tribe unless they had been attacked first. Conflicts and wars that occurred prior to 1675, were always carried out by the Pilgrims in conjunction with their Native American allies, and always according to the terms of the treaty. If a Plymouth citizen treated an Indian improperly, they were tried in a court of law and punished. In 1638, the Colony of Plymouth hanged three colonists for the murder of a single Indian. In that same year a colonial court of law denied a town the right to retaliate against wrongs committed by an Indian tribe, because it was found that the town had committed an earlier violation of Indian rite.
In 1675, the peace accord was broken, but not by the Pilgrims. The treaty was broken by King Phillip of the Wampanoag tribe, who rejected Christianity and declared war on the Colonists. King Phillip’s first acts of aggression were carried out on Native Americans who remained friends with the Colonies. In addition, the colonists were by no means swift in declaring war against King Phillip. The hard decision came only after eight towns were attack in a period of three months; children were burned alive in their homes, and their parents subjected to cannibalistic ritual torture. King Phillip’s war was, per capita, the most devastating war ever to be fought on American soil. This bloody war marked a turning in the relations between the Indians and settlers.
MYTH #2: The first thanksgiving was not Christian and was not a thanksgiving.
Two original source documents provide first hand accounts of that first thanksgiving among the Pilgrims and their Indian friends. William Bradford writes of that time “they found the Lord to be with them in all their ways, and to bless their outgoings and incomings, for which let His Holy name have praise forever, to all posterity.”1 Edward Winslow relates that on that first thanksgiving “for three days we entertained and feasted... . yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”2 The Pilgrims together with a large company of Indians celebrated three days of thanksgiving unto God for His providence in providing for them a land and a bountiful harvest. While it is not clear that the Indians present during the celebration believed in Jesus Christ, it is known that through the missionary efforts of the Pilgrims a great number of Native Americans, including their king, did believe. Not only was this gathering a time of giving thanks for an abundant harvest, their thanks was directed toward the God of Christianity for the harvest He had provided for them.
MYTH #3: The Pilgrim Fathers were racists who treated the Indians as an inferior race.
Racism as we understand it today is a modern invention predicated on an evolutionary view of man which understands various races as following similar, but differing paths of evolution. According to the evolutionary worldview, some races of men have more quickly evolved or have evolved better than others have. However, this way of thinking would have been foreign to the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth.
The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth understood men and cultures in light of a biblical worldview. This means that they did not consider men as members of any particular race, but as men divided by tribes, tongues, and nations. Almost from the beginning, the Pilgrims and Indians enjoyed a relationship of common ground and mutual respect for one another.
Moreover, the Pilgrims invited Indians to partake in a desegregated society. Many Indians like Squanto, lived among the Pilgrims and were highly esteemed by the Pilgrims. There are records of Indians who were permitted to sit on the juries of the Pilgrims. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Harvard College accepted Native Americans as students, having as part of its original charter the education of the English and Indian youth of this country. The common schools and grammar schools established by the Pilgrims had accepted Indian children as students almost from the beginning of their existence.
MYTH #4: The primary reasons for the Mayflower voyage was to further the financial ambitions of the Pilgrims.
If an historian wanted to understand the reasons why the pilgrims risked everything to come to America, it would be expected that he might consider the reasons the Pilgrims themselves gave for coming to America. William Bradford’s Plymouth Plantation provided the following reasons: (1) there were threats of war in Holland and the Pilgrims did not want to become entangled in a foreign war; (2) there were not enough opportunities to support the multigenerational vision they shared for their families; (3) they desired to find a place where they would be able to preserve the faith among their children; and (4) they desired to come to America for the advancement and propagation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Pilgrims had a bold vision for a biblical family and a biblical community. They left Holland to be a “city on a hill”, an example of what God can do through a small group of faithful families. It is tragic that we find that many of the bad influences related to materialism, youth culture, entertainment, excess, and complacency that the Pilgrims sought to leave behind them in Holland, are the types of things many look forward to on Thanksgiving Day.
MYTH #5: The Pilgrims stole land from the Indians.
When the Pilgrims arrived in America, the Native Americans had no concept of private land ownership. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims bought plots of land from the Indians anyway. In addition, the Pilgrims respected the borders of Indian Territories and even protected the land occupied by the Native Americans from other invading Native American tribes according to the peace accord. To this day, many of these original land contracts exist and can be seen in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Early historians like Bradford, Winslow, and Elliot also provide first hand accounts of these land transactions.
While there were possible instances of abuses among certain individuals, the general rule of law among the Pilgrims required the purchase of land at a fair price, the respect for land markers, and the observance of private property. Historian Alden Vaughan, although not always favorable to the Pilgrims, wrote, “There is no evidence that any New England land for which the native claimant existed was taken under the guise of vacuum domicilium.... Plymouth Colony set a patterns of Puritan land acquisition that was later observed by Massachusetts Bay and its off shoots.”3
MYTH #6: The Pilgrims were somber, rigid, and joyless group of people.
If the Pilgrims had been somber, cold, ridged, and joyless people, they would have had legitimate reasons for it. In England, they had been persecuted and forced to flee to Holland where they were strangers in a strange land. When they embarked for America, they spent almost two months on the Mayflower below deck, and were not permitted to venture above the deck of the ship. Once they landed in America the winter came upon them so fast that half of them died the first winter. During this time they buried their dead at night under the cover of darkness to hide their numbers from the Indians who they feared might raid them.
Yet, in spite of all of this, the Puritans were always joyful, kind, and longsuffering. They wore colorful and fashionable clothing and enjoyed entertaining and feasting in the company of both friends and strangers. They were diligent to care for the poor and the sick even among those who had persecuted and ridiculed them with the vilest language. They were hard working and industrious, but always looking for opportunities to enjoy the company of others. The first thanksgiving itself provides a window into the kind of happy people the Pilgrims were. On this occasion they aside three days to celebrate by sporting, entertaining, showing hospitality, giving gifts, and enjoying the plentiful harvest.
MYTH #7: The Pilgrims came to America for religious liberty, but denied it to others.
Contrary to what is now commonly taught and widely accepted, the Pilgrims did not come to America to gain religious liberty. To be sure, this was a primary reason for leaving England, but the Pilgrims had enjoyed religious liberty in Holland for over 12 years. Yet they came to America with the express goal of “the advancement and propagation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Religious liberty with pluralism today was never an idea that would have been tolerated among the Pilgrim and Puritan congregations. God had commanded, “You shall have no other Gods in my presence.” Since God is omnipresent, this meant that the public worship of idols could not be tolerated.
However, this does not mean that the Pilgrims were indifferent to those who did not believe in Jesus Christ. From the beginning there were non-Christians, and differing denominations that lived among the Pilgrims at Plymouth. They were never ostracized or denied equal rights under the law. William Bradford relates one story in which a group of non-puritans complained that it offended their conscience to work on Christmas day, as the Pilgrims did not celebrate Christmas. As it was a matter of conscience, they were allowed to take the day off for the observance until they were taught otherwise. While they did not adhere to modern notions of religious pluralism, they did not persecute those who did not share their convictions.
Conclusion
Ultimately, these myths do not originate from a desire to cast the Pilgrim Fathers into doubt, as much as it is an attempt to cast doubt upon the God of the Pilgrim Fathers. The skeptic in America is like a man who is dying of thirst while floating on an ocean of water, because he is a member of a civilization that was miraculously established by the providence of God, but he finds no place for himself in it. His only alternative is to invent a false view of history that exalts the idea of a “noble savage” who loves and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator.
As we gather around the family table for Thanksgiving Day we should consider the fact that we are the fruition of God’s blessing poured out on our Pilgrim Fathers. The liberty that we enjoy is a product of the first chartered documents of the Pilgrims who, beginning with the Mayflower Compact, examined the Scriptures and drafted these charters on principles of self-government and freedom under God. As we lift up our hearts in song and thanksgiving to God we affirm the success of their multi-generational vision; gathering in confirmation that their toil and hardship was not in vain. On Thanksgiving Day we gather as living testimonies of what God can do through a small number of faithful families who forsake all else to advance the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
i William Bradford, *Of Plymouth Plantation*, (Vision Forum Inc.; San Antonio, Texas:2003) pg. 89
ii Edward Winslow, *Mort’s Relation, A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth*,(Applewood Books; Bedford. Mass.:1963) pg. 93
iii Alden T. Vaughn, New England frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675, (Oklahoma University Press; Norman Ok: 1995) p. 113