Can We Still Give Thanks?

The nation senses the approach of Thanksgiving this year with different expectations. People are anxious as living costs escalate, jobs disappear, houses are lost, investments crumble and retirement funds evaporate. Then there’s the election and the war. Some of us may even wonder what reasons we have to be thankful.

No one wants to be told how good we’ve had it while the once-solid pillars of our future appear to tremble. We know there are parts of the world where such uncertainty has been a way of life for generations. But this is America, where five percent of the planet’s population has been able to consume 50 percent of its resources.

Our opulence has come at a cost. We failed to perceive that credit means debt. Now, overseas investors buy our assets. We look to the government to save the day and all it seems able to do is enact more laws and print more money. Our currency says “In God We Trust,” but has that been true?

Many Americans can identify with a Southerner during the Civil War whose world had changed so drastically that he remarked, “I feel as though I’m no longer living in the land of my birth.”

We’ve heard enough gloom and doom. We’re looking for a bright side. So was President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 when he signed a bill officially making the fourth Thursday in November a federal holiday called Thanksgiving. The people of his time also had misgivings about the future.

It was a point of transition from one of America’s most difficult periods to another. The Great Depression had started with the 1929 stock market crash, and prosperous America experienced dust bowls, bread lines and massive unemployment. Even as the government’s “New Deal” intervened in nearly every aspect of public life, tendrils of the financial collapse stubbornly clung to the nation and spread abroad.

Meanwhile, years of international saber rattling gave way to armed conflict in many places around the world. The forces of fascism were attempting to subjugate entire populations. Foreign flags were planted on the soil of Asia and Africa. Europe had been overrun. Its last bastion, Great Britain, stood bravely in the face of U-boats and bombers, depending on a 21-mile-wide channel to separate it from a cruel, imperialistic dictator.

For the U.S., the shift from crisis to crisis came when the Japanese launched a surprise attack against the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor and catapulted us into World War II. It seemed to be a struggle for the freedom of people around the world. In terms of lives and resources, it proved to be the most costly and widespread conflict the world had ever seen.

Americans were desperate for good news in 1941, just as they were in 1863 when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving in November. The nation was embroiled in a bitter Civil War which would cost the lives of 600,000 Americans at the hands of their countrymen. And the President declared it was time to give thanks!

The American colonies had done the same thing in 1777 when they were in the throes of the Revolutionary War. Although that Thanksgiving Day celebrated a victory over the British at Saratoga, four more years of privation and attrition lay ahead as the Continental Army tangled with the world’s premier military power.

America has typically thanked God in the midst of demoralizing circumstances and an uncertain future. The Continental Congress called it “the indispensable duty of all men” to thank God. George Washington, as the President of a struggling new nation, proclaimed “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer” in which the people would acknowledge God “with grateful hearts.” Abraham Lincoln wrote that God’s gifts to this nation “should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people.”

These observances over the centuries remind us that the United States has weathered many storms. We have seen God’s sovereign hand of deliverance in our affairs. Even as we have suffered, we have remained One Nation Under God.

The threats we perceive today are disconcerting, just as when British soldiers ravaged the colonial countryside, or when brothers donned different uniforms and shed one another’s blood on the soil of their homeland, or when excess debt led to financial panics, or when enemies overseas threatened our well-being. The need to thank God in the midst of our uncertainty has always been critical.

Thanking God is not a matter of satisfaction with our circumstances, as though we were conferring our approval. Thanking God is an expression of dependence.

This Thanksgiving Day is an opportunity to thank God for the things which have made our nation great, and to declare that He is our source, not wealth and power and prestige. It is time to reaffirm the reason for our prosperity: “In God We Trust.”