This week, millions of Americans will gather in extended families, eat to excess, and watch football in a state of pleasant drowsiness. The unluckiest among them will go shopping.
Most will not think much about Pilgrims or Indians, unless they have young children who dress up as such at school. In The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History, Robert Tracy McKenzie encourages Christians to think about Pilgrims and Indians, but not for any of the usual reasons. The Puritan Pilgrims who traveled on the Mayflower and landed on Cape Cod were not American patriots, capitalists, or believers in the freedom of religion as we typically understand it today. They weren’t even first. Other Europeans had already organized thanksgiving services in Florida, Maine, and Virginia. McKenzie quips that what the early Plymouth settlers celebrated in 1621 could more accurately be called the “First American Protestant Christian Thanksgiving North of Virginia and South of Maine.”
The First Thanksgiving is actually only partly (even tangentially) about the feast that the Mayflower pilgrims celebrated in 1621. Larger sections of the book discuss McKenzie’s Christian understanding of the discipline of history, the history and theology of the Pilgrims, and the evolution of Thanksgiving in the United States. Those looking for a simple and engaging narrative of the first thanksgiving might be disappointed (at least until they’ve read about two-thirds of the book), but there are good reasons why McKenzie, history department chairman at Wheaton College, constructs his story as he does.
Real Story
For starters, we possess little reliable information about the 1621 thanksgiving, relying on a small number of early and often brief accounts. There were roughly 50 settlers present, the bereaved survivors of a terrible first winter that claimed the lives of more than half of those who sailed on the Mayflower. They could hardly have been sanguine about their small colony’s future prospects. “That the Pilgrims could celebrate at all in this setting,” McKenzie writes, “was a testimony both to human resilience and heavenly hope.”
The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History
Robert Tracy McKenzie
The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History
Robert Tracy McKenzie
In late September or early October, the Pilgrims celebrated their recently gathered harvest. They did so without pumpkin pie (no ovens), cranberry sauce (no sugar), and sweet potatoes (not native to North America). One of the settlers, Edward Winslow, recorded that they ate some kind of “fowl”—more likely to be goose or duck than turkey. Geese were much easier to shoot. The meal may also have included fish, shellfish, and perhaps eel, and the settlers would also have used vegetables such as turnips and carrots. Nor did they sit across from their native counterparts at a long table. Instead, McKenzie writes, “We should picture an outdoor feast in which almost everyone was sitting on the ground and eating with their hands.”
About 90 Wampanoag men and their chief Massasoit were present, but we don’t know whether they came with an invitation. A few years later, a delegation politely informed Massasoit that the Pilgrims “could no longer give them such entertainment as [they] had done.” It was, in any event, a fragile peace. In 1623, the Pilgrims placed the severed head of a Massachusetts Indian on their fort as a warning to native enemies and friends alike.
For the Pilgrims, this was not a holy day of thanksgiving, a long and solemn day of prayer, preaching, and worship. Instead, the “first” thanksgiving was a harvest celebration, including military drills and “recreations” (probably races, shooting contests, and so forth). Later generations of Americans temporarily managed to turn Thanksgiving into a church-centered day of worship and thanks, which eventually faded into an increased focus both on large family meals and football games.
Two Lessons
So what are we as Christians to make of this stripped-down, unromantic version of the “first” thanksgiving? McKenzie doesn’t advocate that we exchange our turkey for eel or substitute turnips for sweet potatoes. Instead, the meat of The First Thanksgiving is twofold. He gently makes a compelling case for why Christians should care about the past and how they should approach it. The human past is a “sphere that [God] has created”—a “form of natural revelation” to us that we are blessed to encounter in all of its humanity and complexity. “Inquire please of the former age,” Bildad counseled Job, “and consider the things discovered by their fathers, for we were born yesterday, and know nothing.” Given that nearly all of the experience of human beings is lost to us, we are blessed to know as much as we do about a topic such as the Puritan migration to the New World.
What might we learn from the early Pilgrims? McKenzie’s answer has little to do with the Pilgrims’ economic or political ideas and not all that much to do with the intricacies of their Calvinist theology. Instead, he suggests we take seriously the idea of pilgrimage. The Separatist Puritans who eventually boarded the Mayflower had given up on the Anglican Church and fled their native land for the religious toleration of Holland. They left Holland because they feared they couldn’t raise likeminded children in a culture they considered too licentious and tolerant, and because it was incredibly difficult to eke out a living there. The Pilgrims, in short, were pilgrims before they became colonists. Theirs was a spiritual and not primarily a geographical pilgrimage.
McKenzie concludes with the observation that, unlike the Pilgrims, we are too comfortable in this world. American Christians today rarely hunger for heaven. The Pilgrims, despite any of their faults, help us remember that we must “set [our] minds on things above” (Col. 3:2) and “lay up treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:20). “If in this life only we have hope,” McKenzie quotes the apostle Paul, “we are of all men the most pitiable.” The Pilgrims encourage us to swim against the tide of a materialistic and present-minded culture that does its utmost to distract us from the inevitabilities of aging, disease, and death. We have to remember that we are “strangers” and “aliens” even in a land that we love.
And one way we have forgotten that ultimate reality is by distorting “the Pilgrims’ story, clothing them with modern American values and making the future United States—not heaven—their true promised land.” For providing a model for how Christians should approach history, and for bringing us into fresh contact with a flawed but inspirational group of settlers, we owe Robert Tracy McKenzie our thanks.
