Thanksgiving: Integrating Religion and Culture

Dear Friends and Readers,

I offer this essay entitled, “Thanksgiving: Integrating Religion and Culture” as my greeting to you as we celebrate our national holiday. It is excerpted and updated from my book, The Gracious Mystery, pp. 126-128.

Peace,

Fr. Jim Bacik

Thanksgiving: Integrating Religion and Culture

Historically, the celebration of our national holiday has been a genuine response to the perception that we have been blessed by God. In 1621, after a severe winter and first harvest, William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, inaugurated a three-day thanksgiving celebration which included the Indians who had helped the Pilgrims survive. It is this celebration, with its clear religious message of gratitude to the Supreme Being, which continues to impress itself on the imagination of each succeeding generation of Americans. When President Washington proclaimed a nationwide day of thanksgiving in 1789, he made it clear that the day should be devoted to prayer and expressions of gratitude to God. The idea of setting aside a specific day for offering special thanks to God gradually spread throughout the states, aided in the middle part of the 19th century by the urging of Sarah Joseph Hale, editor of a widely read women’s magazine. In 1863, when President Lincoln invited all citizens to observe the last Thursday of November as a National Day of Thanksgiving, it was in order to give “thanks and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

Typically, our celebration of Thanksgiving is an intriguing mix of religion and culture, piety and patriotism. The American imagination has been touched by Thanksgiving meals as well as Eucharistic celebrations, by turkey and pumpkin pie as well as bread and wine, by Uncle Sam as well as Jesus Christ. We gather on Thanksgiving as both believers and citizens, and we thank God for both religious liberty and political freedom. We pledge allegiance to the cross and the flag. It is important for us to make sense out of this mix, to understand how faith and patriotism influence our minds and hearts and to establish a proper relationship between them.

At one extreme is Christian Nationalism that claims the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should privilege Christians in public life. At the other extreme is atheistic humanism that sees Christian religious faith as dehumanizing and detrimental to social progress.

Catholic Social Teaching provides perspectives for discerning the proper relationship between religion and culture. The God of the Exodus freed the Israelites from the slavery of Egypt and gave them blessings of political, social and economic freedom. Jesus Christ, who came to preach the good news to the poor and to liberate captives, identified himself with the hungry, the thirsty, and the homeless. Christ sent the Holy Spirit who guides the Church to the truth and strengthens the faithful for the struggle against evil. Personal sins get embedded in institutions and cultural norms that produce false consciousness, blinding us to cultural evils such as racism, sexism and homophobia. When the cross truly judges the flag the dark forces are exposed to the light of Christ who calls us to strive for justice.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving 2025, the traditional relationship between religion and culture has radically shifted. Partisan politics has become the new religion, providing the overarching framework and motivation for making judgments about public policies. To exemplify this radical shift, consider this story of a southern Baptist father who holds strong nativist prejudices against Catholics but would prefer that his daughter marry a Catholic than a democrat. Many of us have friendly open conversations with others on most topics, but become silent and guarded when talking about sensitive issues with those on the other side of the political divide. This is a dangerous threat to our democracy which harms all citizens. In this regard, a July 2025 Marist Poll shows that 76% of Americans including a majority of both democrats and republicans see a serious threat to the future of our democracy. Political expediency does not make for good public policy and easily moves toward dangerous approaches. This year we need the moral and religious message of Thanksgiving more than ever. We have indeed been greatly blessed as a nation dedicated to an experiment with the noble idea of self-government. We must do all we can to continue that experiment. As Christians we are called to make the cross the judge of the flag and to provide a moral framework for guiding that experiment. This Thanksgiving let us join in prayer that Abraham Lincoln’s “better angels” will bless us with wisdom and strength to do our best to preserve our fragile democracy.