The Myth of Thanksgiving’s Christian Origins

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. With the Thanksgiving celebrations of this week, I want to take on a myth many Christians assume without thinking: the idea that Thanksgiving is, in its origins, a Christian holiday—something the Church established, shaped, and handed down the way we did Christmas or Easter. Growing up, many of us were taught a simple story: that the Pilgrims came to America searching for “religious freedom” and that their peaceful feast with their Indigenous neighbors set the pattern for a harmonious and God-favored nation. But when we look closely, that story quickly unravels—starting with the Pilgrims (or should I say the Puritans) themselves. These were not people seeking the kind of broad religious liberty we value today. They were separatists who believed the Church of England—my own Anglican tradition—was, in their view, far too broad, allowing for too much diversity of belief and practice, and making room for people with more catholic or more protestant perspectives to live and worship together. In contrast, the Pilgrim’s version of “religious freedom” was not the freedom for all to worship according to conscience. It was their own freedom to build a society governed strictly by their own religious convictions, in which dissent was not only discouraged but punished. They left England because they faced persecution, yes—but that was because they wanted a Christianity that was much more narrow. And then they proceeded to create communities in the New World where those who disagreed with their theology could be fined, banished, or worse. Our contemporary vision of a pluralistic society would have been entirely foreign to them. And then there is the story of their relationship with Indigenous peoples. The myth we often tell—of Pilgrims and Wampanoag neighbors joyfully sharing a peaceful feast—allows us to feel warm and morally tidy. But the real history includes forced alliances, land theft, broken treaties, massacres, and the devastation of entire nations through disease and warfare. By the mid-1600s, Puritan militias were engaged in military campaigns that today we would rightly describe as genocidal. Entire villages were destroyed. Indigenous people were enslaved, displaced, or coerced into conversion. The so-called “peace” represented in the First Thanksgiving was brief, fraught, and overshadowed by a much larger pattern of violence and domination. The myth smooths out that violence and tells us a story of innocence that does not belong to us. And yet, here is where Christian faith can offer something different—not by baptizing the myth, but by grounding our thanksgiving in truth. In the Episcopal Church, Thanksgiving is indeed a Major Feast in our Prayer Book. But the feast we keep is not a celebration of national mythology. It is a moment to practice gratitude rooted in honesty: to give thanks for God’s providence while also acknowledging the sins of our ancestors, the suffering of Indigenous peoples, and the long shadow of religious authoritarianism and racial injustice that still shapes our world. So perhaps this year, part of our thanksgiving should be gratitude for the historians and Indigenous voices who have insisted on telling the real story, even when it disrupts our comfort. Gratitude for those who have called us away from our darker impulses—our religious rigidity, our fear of the other, our willingness to marginalize people who do not share our background or beliefs. And gratitude for the opportunity, in our own generation, to ask a better question than the myth ever asked: What would it look like to actually build the kind of society the First Thanksgiving story pretended to describe—a society marked by mutual respect, shared abundance, justice, and genuine peace? That, I think, would be a thanksgiving worthy of the Gospel. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.