Last updated on November 20th, 2020 at 09:19 am
Recent warnings about the assault on faith, family, and freedom should give us pause as we celebrate the national holiday set aside to continue the Pilgrim tradition of rendering thanks to the Almighty. In the words of Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow, it was “the goodness of God” those intrepid settlers celebrated on that first Thanksgiving in 1621 as they gathered to “rejoice together.” But it was hardly the first time they had expressed gratitude to God, whom they had praised as soon they made landfall in the New World. “Being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land,” recorded William Bradford, “they 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.”
Such faith would guide the drama that would eventually forge a new nation under God. When showered with praise for leading the Continental army to victory against far superior British forces in the Revolutionary War, George Washington refused to take credit. “The praise is due to the Grand Architect of the Universe,” he insisted, “for rescuing our Country from the brink of destruction.” No wonder that later as president, he proclaimed November 26, 1789 “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God.”
Was it mere coincidence, then, that America’s greatest crisis would come when she had forgotten her God? As the Civil War threatened to destroy what Washington and the other Founders had established, President Abraham Lincoln in the spring of 1863 told Americans that “we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.” Accordingly, he designated April 30 of that year as “a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer” to “humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness,” and several months later proclaimed the last Thursday of November as an official national holiday—“a day of Thanksgiving and Praise” as well as “humble penitence” to “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”
About a year ago, Attorney General William Barr warned of another crisis in America. Speaking at the University of Notre Dame on October 19, 2019, he insisted that “the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today… is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy, but also drown out and silence opposing voices, and to attack viciously and hold up to ridicule any dissenters.”
Meanwhile, noted Barr, the government claims to “mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility,” but in ways that actually add to the problems. “So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion…. The [proposed] solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children. The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage. While we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them. We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state.”
Accordingly, “we cannot sit back and just hope the pendulum is going to swing back toward sanity…. The first thing we have to do to promote renewal,” Barr explained, “is to ensure that we are putting our principles into practice in our own personal private lives.” And “we should be particularly active in the struggle that is being waged against religion on the legal plane. We must be vigilant to resist efforts by the forces of secularization to drive religious viewpoints from the public square and to impinge upon the free exercise of our faith.”
The urgency of Barr’s warning was underscored by Justice Samuel Alito on November 12, 2020, in a keynote speech to the Federalist Society. Citing recent cases such as Little Sisters of the Poor, Masterpiece Cakeshop, and Calvary Chapel, Alito declared, “It pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” So also with freedom of speech, he continued: “You can’t say that marriage is the union between one man and one woman. Until very recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry. That this would happen after our decision in Obergefell should not have come as a surprise…. One of the great challenges for the Supreme Court going forward will be to protect freedom of speech. Although that freedom is falling out of favor in some circles, we need to do whatever we can to prevent it from becoming a second tier constitutional right.”
Never in our lifetimes has it been more urgent to “do whatever we can” to defend faith, family, and freedom. And never has it been more urgent to celebrate Thanksgiving as President Lincoln originally designated it be celebrated: as “a day of Thanksgiving and Praise” and “humble penitence” to “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”