Our Thanksgiving script includes expressions of gratitude for our many blessings.  Thanksgiving has also become a time to perpetuate some bad history.  The truth is hidden from American children when they learn about Thanksgiving by constructing paper Pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses.  The earliest encounter between the newcomers and the natives was theft, when some Pilgrims came across corn that the locals had hidden for safekeeping.  The overriding policy throughout American history was annihilation not friendship.   More damaging, however, is the loss of the deeper experience of self-reflection that the first Thanksgivings were meant to inspire

Thanksgiving has turned into a secular national holiday with a focus on celebrating the good life, and our modern presidents naturally want to participate.  This year President Trump continued with the tradition of issuing a Thanksgiving Day Proclamation.  It was very nice.  It was completely disconnected from the reality of 2020.     The President is still tweeting that the recent election was rigged and that he is therefore the victim of the greatest crime in United States history.  Most Americans are having a greatly curtailed Thanksgiving as we are in the midst of a dangerous surge in Covid.  Our president nonetheless proclaimed: “As we gather with family and friends to celebrate this season of generosity, hope, and gratitude, we commemorate America’s founding traditions of faith, family, and friendship, and give thanks for the principles of freedom, liberty, and democracy that make our country exceptional in the history of the world.”

 I am thinking today that some of the Thanksgiving messages written over two-hundred years ago might be more appropriate.  If we look at the earliest presidential proclamations the emphasis was on character building through prayer and repentance, and none of them connected Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and the Indians.

Washington proclaimed that a public day of prayer would be held on Thursday, November 26, 1789 in order to give thanks to God for peace and prosperity.  The American people, however, needed to do more than just be thankful. Thanksgiving Day was a sincerely Christian day.  The forgiveness of sins with the promise to be better was the central message.  Washington wrote that the American people should “beseech [God] to pardon our national and other transgressions to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed.  To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue.”

John Adams issued two proclamations for a National Day of Thanksgiving in 1798 and again in 1799.  In 1798 Adams expressed with his typically tangled and turgid sentences that May 9^th should be designated “as a day of Solemn Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer” when we acknowledge before God “the manifold Sins and Transgressions with which we are justly chargeable as Individuals and as a Nation; beseeching him, at the same time, of his infinite Grace, through the Redeemer of the World, freely to remit all our Offences, and to incline us, by his Holy Spirit, to that sincere Repentance and Reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable Favour and Heavenly Benediction…”  In addition to praying for continued economic prosperity, Americans must pray “that the principles of Genuine Piety and Sound Morality may influence the Minds and govern the Lives of every description of our Citizens.”

Due perhaps to his growing problems both foreign and domestic, Adams appeared to be in a darker mood in 1799 when he proclaimed that a day in April would be set aside for all Americans to “call to mind our numerous offences against the most High GOD, confess them before him with the sincerest penitence, implore his pardoning mercy… for our past transgressions.”  In Adams’s worldview, there was very little to be thankful for; we needed to stop being so very bad!  Americans needed God’s help to “arrest the progress of that impiety and licentiousness in principle and practice, so offensive to himself and so ruinous to mankind.”

(Thomas Jefferson did not issue Thanksgiving Proclamations, believing that such proclamations were an uncalled-for government intrusion into religious life.) 

James Madison’s 1812 Proclamation encouraged the American people to observe that day with “religious solemnity as a day of public humiliation and prayer.”  With the country once more at peace, James Monroe’s 1821 message was a tad more cheerful as he asserted the principle of American exceptionalism: “The establishment of our institutions forms the most important epoch that history hath recorded.”  It was our national mission to “preserve and hand them down in their utmost purity to the remotest ages,” and that would “require the existence and practice of the virtues and talents equal to those which were displayed in acquiring them.”

Lincoln’s Proclamation of 1863 was the most succinct and to the point.  It was meant to direct the people’s attention to blessings that were “of so extraordinary a nature” that it would soften the heart of those who do not tend to recognize the hand of God in all things.  It was nothing short of a miracle that in 1863 Americans had anything to be thankful for at all. Although engaged in a civil war, the [northern] economy was prospering and the nation was expanding.  God must be thanked “for such singular deliverances and blessings,” yet we should express profound and humble repentance “for our national perverseness and disobedience.”

That might have been a better line for Trump to begin his 2020 Thanksgiving Proclamation.