It’s that time of the year Americans celebrate Thanksgiving Day in memory of the feast the Puritans (also known as Pilgrims) held with the local Indians in order to rejoice after their first harvest in the New World that fall of 1621.
But who were those Puritans who, along with the colonists of Jamestown in Virginia some ten years earlier, are considered the first permanent European residents of America? The American Puritans have been looked at with approval and disparagement depending on who is telling their story. As I searched to learn more about them, I found their story emblematic of America’s historical experience in several respects.
Years before the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, they had become a fringe group of the Protestant Church of England. The most radical of them, the Separatists, dissatisfied with the insufficient break of official English Protestantism from the Papacy, sailed to Leiden in Holland. Not finding the variety of Protestantism practiced there to their taste, they boarded the Mayflower and on they sailed across the ocean to the New World. In the ensuing years they were joined by more Separatist and a wave of Non-Separatist Puritans (more loyal to the Church of England) who chose to colonize the area that later became Boston.
Because of their more radical break from Roman Catholicism and their life style, engrossed by religion, some choose to consider American Puritans as extreme religionists. In Fantasyland, Kurt Andersen writes that “America was founded by a nutty religious cult.” I think this view is only partly true. Puritans did away with most of the ecclesiastical order of the mainline Christian Churches. They believed they could reach salvation and earn God’s grace through faith, reading and religious instruction and less through ritualistic ceremonies and deeds. They also believed that at the Eucharist, Jesus became present to them only spiritually. There was no transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. In comparison to other Christians, these beliefs hardly qualify the Puritans as a nutty religious sect.
But, at a time Christian Europe was leaving behind centuries of Church and religious dominance over the lives and minds of the people and was moving into a more secular and reasoned worldview, the Puritans were an anachronism. In the words of a historian “Puritans were Englishmen who had accepted Reformation without the Renaissance.” Everyday life was circumscribed by religious edicts; millennialism (the imminence of Paradise) was a perpetual expectation; and the specter of Satan led to witch hunts, usually against poor women as well as natives, Africans and Asians. That was the nutty and out-of-the-times side of Puritans. On top of that, they were intolerant to other religions. They persecuted the Quakers, they banned Anglican priest, and Catholic priests risked their lives if they showed up in Puritan territories.
However, contrary to common wisdom that such behavior could only be the result of illiteracy and unschooled thought, Puritans were great readers and friends of education. It is reported that the literacy rate was 60% among American Puritans but only 30% among the population of England. Alas, their devotion to reading and education was driven by the need to be able to read the Bible and conduct administrative affairs, and not to explore new ideas. Even so, thanks to high literacy, Puritans became successful managers and makers of things.
Looked at through the lens of American history, the Puritans seem to be an early prototype of the American paradoxical combination of religious zealotry, fantastical ideas, and conspiracy theory tendencies on one side and strong work ethic, entrepreneurial acumen, and pragmatism on the other. This paradox has survived – even thrived – to this day. This is one observation to ponder about.
The second observation is that those first Americans were Christians but intolerant to others, even fellow Christians. So, as zealous Christians argue today, America was indeed founded by Christians; but not by Christians that would have allowed other faiths to survive. That freedom was given to Americans later.
And this brings me to a third observation: That a little more than 150 years after the coming of the theocratic Puritans, thirteen states ratified a constitution that was anything but theocratic or religious. By the time of the Revolution, secularism and reason had won over religious zealotry and intolerance in organizing the political life and protecting the freedoms of the people.
My Thanksgiving Day Memory
Three hundred fifty years after the Puritans celebrated their first thanksgiving, I celebrated mine. It was, however, my second Thanksgiving Day in 1972, I still remember more fondly. I was studying at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and the university had arranged with local families to invite international students, like me, to spend Thanksgiving in their homes. Our host was not some wealthy cosmopolitan family. It was a working-class family living across the downtown on the other side of the Allegheny river. Their home was a two-story frame house, very common in the working-class neighborhoods of Pittsburgh at a time the city was still the steel capital of the US. The host was a construction worker or a brick layer as he described his job to the curious Taiwanese student. Sitting among members of the family and relatives, there we were, four or five of us – a Greek, two or three Chinese from Taiwan and possibly a Mexican. We felt like we were part of that family. They took pride and enjoyment explaining to us what Thanksgiving was all about and what we were eating if some food, like cranberry sauce, looked new to us. It was a Thanksgiving celebration in the right spirit. The new American natives offering hospitality and breaking bread with a bunch of foreigners.
I used to tell this story to the Chinese students of the Zarb Business School at the Thanksgiving Dinner we organized for them. I hoped that my story and the dinner would be the warmest memory they would take back home. The generous hospitality of that brick layer still coming alive some forty years later.
Let's Reason 