Thanksgiving: Prayers of a Christian Nation

For all the to-do about Christmas and Easter and their commercialization, it is Thanksgiving whose banner we should be holding high above our heads, to the utter contempt of charlatans for whom belief in anything is suspect, and things like God and Country are vile.

But the holiday celebrated as Thanksgiving contains more venom than just that. First of all, they want to believe that thanks is something one can offer into the air, or to the universe, or perhaps to the Earth Mother. No, we generally do not offer gratitude except to what we believe to be a conscious agent. To whom are we giving thanks? To the God of Abraham, who sent His Son to die that we might share in his inheritence and be adopted as sons. Our inheritence is the one they built in famine and death, that our Founders, some 150 years later, well understood: that men have a right to their conscious, and to the fruits of their industry. The operating principle of the American Republic is this: that free citizens shall not be compelled.

We have lost our way - and make no mistake that this is a battle the enemy intends to win.

The Thanksgiving story contains America's first and most decisive experiment with communism. In the interests of their investments, the Old World backers of the Massachusetts colony required the colonists to store their resources and property communally. It was an utter disaster, punished, it seems, by the natural laws of economics and the human demand for freedom, and also supernaturally by all manner of disaster. Collectivism was the first thing tried in this new world, and it utterly failed. These colonists, through prayer and council with one another, realized that they had done something immoral by compelling men to work for other men, and they repented their sin - their sin of socialism! - and restored a free, interest-driven economy.

On this Thanksgiving, find your most sanctimonious liberal friend, and tell him that you are so thankful to your God for providing you a nation where private industry and individualism are rewarded. If he dares to argue, look at him with faint astonishment and marvel that he could possibly disagree.