Leftists Know the Past is Important. That’s Why They Lie About It.

The usual dissenters come out of the woodwork every October to denounce Christopher Columbus and every November to attack Thanksgiving. Here’s one from 2020:

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is being called “a racist piece of trash” and a “white supremacist” after defending the legacy of the Mayflower Compact and criticizing an article in the New York Times that called the story of the Pilgrims a “myth” and re-examined the “cruel history” of Thanksgiving.

Most people have no idea why Columbus Day was established. It’s a shocking story about the lynching of eleven Italian men in New Orleans. Check out this article. This video is excellent at addressing myths about Columbus and his discoveries.

This one is from actor John Leguizamo, who used Twitter on Sunday (11/21/22) to proclaim, “Happy indigenous Survivors’s day! F*ck Thanksgiving!” Leguizamo was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1962. Here’s some history from his country of origin:

But the pre-Columbians weren’t living in paradise either: the continent had head-chopping Aztecs who sacrificed 80,000 folks in just four days to inaugurate one pyramid. The Maya had similar bloody death cults, while further south the humourless Incas founded an empire nominally on trade but backed by ruthless might. Any detractors were killed along with family, friends, pets, plants and the back garden sprinkled with salt.

A case could be made that Leguizamo would never have been born had the Conquistadors not arrived to rescue Colombians from the bloodthirsty pagans. And get this, “Going further back in time, it was determined that Leguizamo’s maternal lineage includes the 16th-century Spanish conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar….”

The Case for America’s Christian Heritage

Even some of our nation’s Founders who did not identify as Christians could not escape the impact the Bible had on our nation’s founding and the moral precepts that held the fledgling nation together. America’s Christian heritage is writ large in its state Constitutions, charters, laws, symbols, and repeated reliance on the overruling providence of God. It’s not enough, however, to relive history. The principles that were true and necessary centuries ago for building nations are equally true and necessary today.

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We are told today that the Thanksgiving that was practiced in the early years of America’s founding was all about “racist genocide.” Smallpox had decimated many native people since there was no acquired immunity. There was no known cure. Europe had suffered for many years from outbreaks of smallpox. It was inevitable that Europeans and anyone else who had made their way to the New World would have brought smallpox and other communicable diseases with them. Smallpox had killed millions from every stratum of society. Between 1702 and 1703, nearly a quarter of the population of Quebec City in Canada died during a smallpox epidemic:

Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 300 million people in the 20th century and around 500 million people in the last 100 years of its existence. Earlier deaths included six monarchs. As recently as 1967, 15 million cases occurred a year….

U.S. Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln all contracted and recovered from the disease. Washington became infected with smallpox on a visit to Barbados in 1751. Jackson developed the illness after being taken prisoner by the British during the American Revolution, and though he recovered, his brother Robert did not. Lincoln contracted the disease during his presidency, possibly from his son Tad, and was quarantined shortly after giving the Gettysburg address in 1863. Famous theologian Jonathan Edwards died of smallpox in 1758 following an inoculation.

Global eradication of smallpox did not happen until 1977. It was Western medicine that made it happen.

–Listen to Gary’s two-part interview with Rick Welch about America’s Christian Heritage. Click here for Part One and here for Part Two.–

Back to the racism charge. The Plymouth Colony served as a sanctuary for Black people. There’s speculation that “[s]ome blacks may have come from Virginia or from English colonies in the Caribbean.”

From 1623 to 1640, Colonists of black ancestry arrived in Plymouth Colony…. Although they did not have full equal rights with the English Pilgrims, they were accepted as members of the Plymouth community.

Black Pilgrims served in the Plymouth militia by the 1640s. The white English Pilgrims trusted the black Pilgrims enough to arm them with guns and weapons. These Pilgrims of black heritage would have been given military training including best usage of their weapons and marching in formation. The integrated Plymouth Pilgrim Militia included English, African Americans and Native Americans.

The Pilgrims in 17th-century Plymouth accepted the concept that blacks had God-given rights. One of these was their right to attend the Pilgrim Congregational Church. People of black heritage had the right to learn the Pilgrim [Geneva] Bible. Pilgrims taught their children to read in order to understand the teachings in the Bible. This was an accepted method of education for all colonists. All Pilgrims of black heritage would have been included — even freemen, blacks who were indentured servants and those who were slaves. (Cape Cod Times)

Of course, I do not want to dismiss the truth that in early America, the slave trade flourished and became one of our nation’s most grievous sins, a clear violation of God’s law (Ex. 21:16; 1 Tim. 1:10; Rev. 8:13). In addition, Native people were treated ruthlessly, but this can’t be blamed on the first Thanksgiving.

As Mary Grabar, author of “Debunking Howard Zinn,” wrote for The Federalist in 2019, [Howard] Zinn deconstructs the Pilgrims’ “first” Thanksgiving to advance his Marxist ideas of oppressors versus the oppressed.

In these simplistic narratives, the Pilgrims are portrayed as wicked oppressors and the native people as angelic, oppressed victims. This is the narrative now being peddled in elementary schools around the country.

In her critique of Zinn-inspired literature used in Portland, Oregon, public schools, Grabar wrote: “It makes a cartoonish presentation of myriad people groups from the Bahamas and South America to New Mexico and New England. They are falsely oversimplified as universally peace-loving, Mother Earth-respecting, generous, and welcoming. All Indian tribes are lumped together as a mass of childlike people oppressed by the greedy capitalist explorers and settlers.” (National Interest)

The Plymouth colony learned the hard way that common ownership of property and goods was a failed economic model, something that today’s critics of Thanksgiving have not learned. It was and is a form of slavery and economic depression.

God and Government

With a fresh new look, more images, an extensive subject and scripture index, and an updated bibliography, God and Government is ready to prepare a whole new generation to take on the political and religious battles confronting Christians today. May it be used in a new awakening of Christians in America—not just to inform minds, but to stimulate action and secure a better tomorrow for our posterity.

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William Bradford, the colony’s first governor, wrote in Of Plymouth Plantation that a communal lifestyle was “[f]or this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.” When families were given their own land to work, the results were immediate. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been….”

On September 24, 1789, the first House of Representatives recommended the First Amendment of the newly drafted Constitution to the states for ratification. The next day, Congressman Elias Boudinot from New Jersey proposed that the House and Senate jointly request that President Washington proclaim a day of thanksgiving for “the many signal favors of Almighty God.” Boudinot said that he “could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining, with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings he had poured down upon them.”[1]

Roger Sherman spoke in favor of the proposal by reminding his colleagues that the practice of thanksgiving is “warranted by a number of precedents in holy writ: for instance, the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the temple…. This example, he thought, worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion.”[2]

[1] The Annals of the Congress, The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, Compiled From Authentic Materials by Joseph Gales, Senior (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1:949–50.

[2] Annals of the Congress, 950.

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources