Our Great American Holiday

As an American abroad, I’ll readily confess to a bit of nostalgia come Thanksgiving time. As a national rite, the holiday is sublime in its simplicity: turkey, family, eating–and an implicit spirituality as unobtrusive and essential as bedrock. I do celebrate here in Rome with other expats, but the Italian interpretation of cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pumpkin pie, while sometimes whimsical and frequently tasty, is never quite the same. Thanksgiving is quintessentially American, expressing what is best about our country–and perhaps also something of what we seem to be losing.

Pace President Biden, but America is more than just an idea. It’s a country. A country of flesh and blood, of rivers and farmland, a country with its quirks and tragedies and traditions and triumphs. A good number of triumphs, I’d say, from coming out of the colonial period with a constitution that–despite some recent testing–functions to this day, to putting a man on the moon. Some triumphs–like abolishing slavery, an institution as old as civilization itself–were inextricably mixed with tragedy. Our story is a human story.

But as human stories go, it’s a good one. Good enough, in fact, to have inspired my ancestors and those of many others to make great sacrifices to become a part of it. Others–think of the Civil Rights movement–made equally great sacrifices to become fully a part of it. In either case, it’s a story worth joining.

But, despite our individualistic ethos, none of us, as individuals, wrote the story ourselves. Some of it we inherited thanks to the work and sacrifice of others, and some of it–our remarkably fortunate geography, for example–is the unmerited gift of our Creator. And the only reasonable response to such a gift is gratitude.

America, while more than just an idea, is rather unique as countries go in that our way of doing things requires a few foundational ideas to work. If we don’t continue to believe that we’re endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights to life and liberty, then the basis for our public life will crumble in due course. Other countries exist without such principles (Presidents Xi and Putin might find the Creator’s laws a bit cumbersome), but we’d become something else without them.

And perhaps we are becoming something else. As a nation we’ve become less religious and, consequently, less grateful. We’re more apt to condemn our ancestors than to thank heaven for them, an attitude that, as I’ve made the case before, is ultimately self-defeating.

Thanksgiving is a religious holiday, though religious in a broad, tolerant, American sense. Its religious content gives it a fundamentally different character than, say, May Day in the Soviet Union. Recognizing the goods in our lives as gifts implies a benevolent deity–though not much more doctrine than that. And while generic monotheism may not be enough for salvation, it is a belief most religions can get behind and allows us to celebrate together. It’s wonderful American Catholics have a special Thanksgiving Day Mass.

More could be said of the spiritual ideas that hold American life together. They don’t comprise anything like a full theology, and what is lacking in them leaves us open to some of our characteristic vices, like materialism. In fact, that materialism comes out as soon as Thanksgiving has ended on the aptly named Black Friday. Still, Thanksgiving itself has held up better than Christmas against commercialism, and that’s not nothing. As virtues go, gratitude is something like the vitamin C of the spiritual life. To those who come to me for confession, I sometimes recommend counting up one’s blessings since feeling grateful is pretty good protection against sin.

As with any holiday, Thanksgiving involves a bit of mythology (remember The Mouse on the Mayflower?), but its semi-historical tales point in a wholesome direction–pilgrims and Indians, cooperation and hope, hard work and sharing. Have Americans always lived up to those ideals? Hardly. But that’s all the more reason why we need to keep retelling our story rather than dismantling it. And it’s a helluva lot better than celebrating the dawning of the age of the guillotine on Bastille Day like the French.

Even if Thanksgiving’s generic monotheism is theologically a tad bland and its mythology not scrupulously historical, the day still points to a store of common values, a culture, a kind of faith. That common faith and culture once transcended political differences and, in fact, made it possible to support those differences. Snobbish types on the other side of the Atlantic might deride American culture as thin, but its elasticity is what made it possible for Americans to be enthusiastically patriotic while simultaneously holding on to other thick forms of identity–Catholics and Jews alongside the Protestant majority, ethnic traditions, regional loyalties. At times these created tension but not, usually, contradiction. As the religious base of our common values has eroded and we’ve attacked our foundational stories, we no longer have a common ethos to fall back on when we find ourselves differing on politics or anything else. And so politics becomes our all, and our divisions become our culture. As Lincoln once observed–quoting, yes, the Bible–a house divided against itself cannot stand for long.

Is there a way beyond the valley our culture seems to be going through? I’ll admit, rather little in the news of late has made me optimistic, but we Americans have been blessed before–blessed well beyond our deserts. Nothing will get better without remembering the Creator who endows us with his gifts. Perhaps if we not only repeat the phrase “God bless America,” but remember what it means, He will again.

And, as our great national holiday suggests, we can start with being grateful. Grateful as we eat our turkey, grateful for cranberry jelly straight out of the can (with the rings still molded into it), grateful for a continent’s spectacular landscapes, grateful for the gift of life, grateful for a people who thought to set aside a day for gratitude.