Michael Hoffman - Thanksgiving Celebrates Indian Genocide?

A few decades after King Philip’s War, David Brainerd was born. He was a Puritan burdened with poor health who was orphaned at age fourteen and subsequently expelled from Yale. He overcame his disadvantages and physical frailty to give his life to leading Native Americans to Jesus, dying at the age of 29 from exhaustion and “consumption” (tuberculosis). His diary was published by theologian Jonathan Edwards and remains a signal inspiration to missionaries crossing oceans and racial divides to toil in the vineyard of the gospel and racial healing, even unto our day.

 CONTRA CRIMINAL POLITICS

Prejudice toward Pilgrims and Puritans (the former sought to separate from the official Anglican Church, the latter worked to remain and “purify” it), predates “woke” hatred. These brightly dressed, hard-drinking, hard-living Calvinists who were known to usually quickly remarry after the death of a spouse, have been routinely portrayed by literary giants from Hawthorne to Mencken as happiness-hating prudes who prohibited love, life and alcohol.

Actually, their principal concern in England and a reason they were driven from their birthplace, was their intolerance of the criminal politics practiced by a monarchy and aristocracy knee-deep in the familiar lip service paid to Yahweh’s scriptural standards, including weighty matters of economic justice and courtroom jurisprudence. The Puritans worked to enforce God’s laws against avaricious bankers and merchants, usurious interest rates, and sham trials consisting of convictions for capital crimes that lacked the obligatory two witnesses, protesting the perjury that was common due to ignoring God’s prescribed punishment (the sentence the perjurer sought to inflict on the innocent was to be inflicted on the perjurer). In the Bible, imprisonment is only for battle captives and those awaiting trial and not to be employed as a form of punishment.

These were among the many practical Biblical reforms Puritans sought to enforce in order to crush criminal politics and bring about the kingship of Christ. Undoubtedly the Puritans were far from perfect and their unjust persecution of Catholics and Quakers (among others) would lead Roger Williams to found Rhode Island as a sanctuary for dissidents.

SALEM

The modern world has sought to indelibly stain the Puritan founders of our nation with a solitary cudgel, the Salem Witch Trials, erasing the achievements of early New England by means of the fate of the innocent of Salem and one judicial episode which was, on balance, contrary to the general order of justice which their courts typically adjudicated.

Salem has been rendered into a cartoon due to the fact that its most instructive context has been suppressed. The false witness put forth by the crazed girls at the Salem witch trials was in many instances not a matter of Puritan theology and Bible belief, but rather of post-traumatic stress at a level of intensity that resulted from the horrors of Indian attacks which they had survived — rape, abduction and watching their siblings and parents tortured to death in the course of the Natives’ slaughter of Puritan villages and farms. Cornell University Prof. Mary Beth Norton pioneered the unearthing of these revisionist facts in her indispensable book, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.

In terms of the founding of our nation, the Mayflower Compact is a simple document, revered not for its eloquence or genius, but for the equal standing in the eyes of the law which it affirmed for everyone, from the wealthiest would-be entrepreneur to the lowliest indentured servant, a harbinger of Thomas Jefferson’s recognition in the Declaration of Independence that human rights are endowed by our Creator, not any government of men.

Fanatics with a hidden agenda denounce Pilgrims, Puritans and Jefferson for failing to practice their principles with perfect consistency. In bad faith these zealots smother the towering achievement of the Founders: that by establishing the great antidote to tyranny, the recognition that human beings are the image-bearing creatures of God (imago Dei), they bequeathed to us a patrimony of liberty which over time, incrementally lifted all boats and endowed all races and colors with fundamental human rights.

This is what ennobles our national holiday on the fourth Thursday of November, and causes us to offer our gratitude to our heavenly Father, and the ancestors who kept faith with His will for us and our posterity.
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Michael Hoffman is the author of ten books of history and literature and the editor of Revisionist History, a research newsletter intended for scholars and activists. He resides with his family in northern Idaho.

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