As millions of Americans sit down today to a turkey dinner with all their favorite side dishes, many will pause to say a prayer or otherwise give thanks.

That’s part of the story, after all. The one central theme to the holiday that endures to this day is the idea of giving God thanks. It’s the reason why the Pilgrims held a feast in the first place a year after making landfall in what is now Plymouth, Mass.

Even as a growing number of young people identify with no religion, Americans are still largely thankful to God. While the day is marked with football games and parades, it’s also true that Thanksgiving, one of the least commercial holiday’s celebrated in America, has a religious origin that has been debated ever since the Pilgrims marked the original Thanksgiving dinner in 1621 following their first harvest.

Two years away from the 400th anniversary of the holiday and days away from another Thanksgiving, historians and scholars continue to debate what the feast continues to mean for Americans. The holiday, while rooted in religious tradition, remains one of the things that ties modern secular society to this country’s colonial past. More than a Protestant holiday despite its roots, the day is celebrated by all denominations and viewed as uniquely American.

The day we now call Thanksgiving was observed by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in October 1621. The feast lasted three days and, according to attendee Edward Winslow, was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims, like the colonists that followed them, celebrated a thanksgiving several times a year when the harvest was plentiful. It was highlighted by attending church services and thanking God before a large meal. Throughout the American Revolution, a day was set aside for giving thanks. Connecticut, for example, was the first to do so. The biggest change by the 17th century was that politicians were the ones calling for a Thanksgiving rather than church authorities.

Thanksgiving has endured over the centuries, waves of immigration and wokeness — even though the way the holiday is taught in American classrooms has changed in recent years. The reason may be that this uniquely American tradition has a universal meaning to everyone, regardless of faith, place of birth or even if one isn’t religious.

“This is a day we are asked to give thanks to whatever supreme being we believe in as well as our families,” said Melanie Kirkpatrick, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of the book “Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience.” “That goes back to our early history where we had to come together to survive.”

Pilgrims arriving to Massachusetts sought a religious freedom, but differed from one another. The Pilgrims — a majority of whom were Separatists — sailed on the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth. A few years later, the Puritans would go on to establish their own Massachusetts Bay Colony in what is today Boston. Both groups were Calvinists — but differed in their views regarding the Church of England. Puritans wished to remain in the Anglican Church and reform it; the Pilgrims wanted complete separation from the church.

William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth Colony at the time, wrote the following regarding the first Thanksgiving:

“They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they can be used (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to the proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.”

Bradford’s account never used the word thanksgiving. Kirkpatrick noted that for the Pilgrims, “that was not what they would have seen as a thanksgiving. That would have been a day set aside for worship.”

Continue reading “Why God continues to have a place at the Thanksgiving table” by Clemente Lisi, at Religion UnPlugged.