Religion: Less Thanks on Thanksgiving

Famine once we had—

But other things God gave us in full

store,

As fish and ground nuts, to supply our

strait,

That we might learn on Providence to

wait.—Governor William Bradford of Plymouth.

No Pilgrim Father stayed home from the Thanksgiving service with which Bradford started America’s Thanksgiving Day tradition, Dec. 13 (Old Style), 1621. But only one person in 60 is expected to turn out for this year’s Thanksgiving service in the town where Thanksgiving started. At that, Plymouth’s turnout will probably be above the national average, for in this century Thanksgiving has been secularized into an occasion for turkey, football games, department-store parades.

Said a none-too-sanguine statement last week from Episcopal national headquarters urging greater church attendance on Thanksgiving: “The historical background of the day is religious, but the American people have come to observe it as a day of feasting and play.” Novelist Fannie Hurst once put it more pungently: “As the American moves farther and farther away from the soil, the reality of Thanksgiving fades into a pale symbol buried beneath an elaborate ceremonial of gastronomies.”