Celebrating Thanksgiving Christianly

On Thursday, our nation will celebrate Thanksgiving Day. Millions of Americans will gather with family and friends, some of whom will have traveled great distances for the holiday. The day will be marked primarily with food. According to some estimates, well over 80% of Americans will eat turkey at some point this week. That means that as many as 46 million turkeys will be eaten on one day, which makes up about half of the festive fowl consumed during the course of the entire year.

Thanksgiving has deep roots in American history. In 1621, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe, who were indigenous to present-day Massachusetts, celebrated an Autumn harvest feast. The meal commemorated the Wampanoag sharing their food with the Pilgrims the previous winter, which helped the new settlers survive their first year in the New World. This is the famous “first Thanksgiving” of American tradition, public school pageants, and Charlie Brown holiday specials.

During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress periodically called for special days of thanksgiving, prayer, and repentance. In 1789, George Washington proclaimed Nov. 26 to be the first official Thanksgiving holiday. In 1863, during the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln called for a Thanksgiving holiday on the last Thursday in November. Thanksgiving subsequently became an annual tradition observed around the same time each year.

Thanksgiving isn’t technically a religious holiday like Christmas or Easter, both of which are rooted in the traditional Christian liturgical calendar. However, Thanksgiving isn’t really a secular holiday, either. Historically, Thanksgiving has been informed by the Biblically saturated worldview that permeated American culture for most of our history. The Pilgrims were devout Protestants who had come to North America to establish a Christian commonwealth independent from the Church of England. Not all the Founding Fathers were Christians, but none of them were late-modern secularists. Even the least-orthodox among them believed in God, affirmed Judeo-Christian moral values, and believed it was a good thing for the citizens of the new nation to be characterized by Christian virtues.

Even more important, Thanksgiving is a holiday steeped in Biblical principles. The Bible emphasizes the role of thanksgiving in worship (Psalm 95:2; 100:4; 105:1-2; Colossians 3:15-17), commands believers to give thanks to God (Psalm 106:1; Colossians 3:17; Ephesians 5:18-20; 1 Thessalonians 5:18), and reflects on the importance of cultivating a thankful heart (Philippians 4:6; Colossians 4:2). A posture of Thanksgiving is evidence of spiritual maturity (Colossians 2:6-7), because believers understand that every good gift comes from God (James 1:17), most importantly God’s unmerited grace toward His people (2 Corinthians 4:15).

Unfortunately, with every passing year Thanksgiving—like all of our national holidays—becomes increasingly captive to commercialization. For almost a century Thanksgiving has marked the unofficial beginning of the Holiday shopping season. All the way back in 1939 and 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November in an effort to jump-start the shopping season a week earlier. Many Americans didn’t appreciate the move, so in 1941 Congress passed a law declaring Thanksgiving a federal holiday to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November.

Today, “Black Friday”—traditionally the day after Thanksgiving when millions of Americans are off work and begin their Christmas shopping—has become a veritable season unto itself. It wasn’t that long ago that Black Friday sales began first thing on Friday morning. Shoppers would scour the newspapers for advertised deals earlier in Thanksgiving week, then wait in line overnight to take advantage of the “doorbuster” sales when stores opened on Friday. Today, countless businesses offer Black Friday deals in early November. Often, these deals last for days past the week of Thanksgiving.

Years ago, I heard the church historian Timothy George refer to the arrogance of amnesia. He lamented that we no longer remember who we are and how we got here, but we assume we are better than everyone else. While he wasn’t referring specifically to Thanksgiving, I believe his words are appropriate for this holiday. When we celebrate Thanksgiving Christianly, we are pushing back against the arrogance of amnesia that characterizes the spirit of the late-modern American culture.

Celebrating Thanksgiving Christianly doesn’t necessarily mean foregoing any shopping around the holiday. Nor does it mean boycotting turkey and dressing, skipping dessert, ignoring football on the television, or skipping out on a post-lunch nap. What it does mean is becoming what the 18th-century Anglican minister Ambrose Serle called “Christian remembrancers.” Thanksgiving is an opportunity for Christians to remind ourselves of God’s character, His promises, His faithfulness, and His blessings. So this Thanksgiving, let’s express gratitude to God for His past grace, marvel at His present grace, and pray for His future grace—for our individual lives, for our families, and for our nation.