Pilgrims

The past is dead? Time for news analysis of America's scrambled Protestant marketplace

The past is dead? Time for news analysis of America's scrambled Protestant marketplace

Starting with a band of Anglicans landing at Jamestown in 1607 and then Pilgrim dissenters at Plymouth in 1620, various forms of Protestantism collectively dominated what became the United States. That broad cultural hegemony persisted through Revolution, Civil War, Catholic immigration, industrialization, globalization, and Protestants’ countless internal squabbles, splits and reunions.

But the Religious Landscape Study from the Pew Research Center tells us the U.S. population is now only 46.6% Protestant. Add to that these newsworthy numbers on Protestantism’s Big Three and we find a scrambled scenario of historic proportions that invites thorough journalistic analysis.

* Last week the Southern Baptist Convention reported its worst-ever decline of 457,371 members from 2021 to 2022 – and of 1.5 million just since 2018 – to the current 13.2 million. The denomination had posted steady gains over a century until recent years. 

Oh, here’s a newsroom calendar alert: That slide should roil the Baptists’ important June 13-14 annual meeting in New Orleans, alongside disputes over female pastors and sexual abuse response, and a competitive presidential election.

* The news service of the United Methodist Church, #3 in size among U.S. Protestant groups, last week posted tabulation of departures since 2019 of 2,996 conservative congregations, roughly one-tenth of the denomination, with more in process. Most are joining the newborn Global Methodist Church. (Update: This week, Methodist conservatives put dropouts at 3,356 congregations, with another 1,000 or more likely.)

* Meanwhile, other Protestants are gaining. In particular, The Religion Guy has proclaimed the following as 2022’s “Story of the Year.” In November, the latest U.S. Religion Census revealed that independent, non-denominational congregations are now decisively the nation’s largest grouping of Protestants, with 21 million adherents in 44,319 congregations. Most are Evangelicals. This relegates the Southern Baptists down to #2 in size.

Pew Research defined three categories, “Evangelical Protestants” at 25.4% of Americans, “Mainline Protestants” at 14.7%, and members of “Historically Black” church groups at 6.5%.


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With 400th anniversary, those Plymouth Pilgrims will make the ideal Thanksgiving feature

A brave band of sectarian Protestants facing a harsh winter ahead stepped ashore 400 years ago to establish Plymouth Colony, England's second foothold in America following Jamestown.

The date was December 18, but most readers probably think about these "Pilgrims" on Thanksgiving Day, which is patterned after their legendary 1621 harvest feast with Native American guests.

Print and broadcast media professionals who are already planning Thanksgiving features could not do better with sourcing than to debrief award-winning historian John G. Turner of George Mason University (jturne17@gmu.edu, 703-993-5604) about his timely book "They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty" (Yale University Press).

The Pilgrims were supposed to arrive at New York harbor, but were lucky to land safely anywhere due to leaks and damage on the Mayflower.

Their "first Thanksgiving" was apparently no formal observance of gratitude to God, and the menu was probably fish and venison, not wild turkey. Whatever Plymouth Rock signified, the colonists subjected it to later neglect. The acclaimed "Mayflower Compact" was not the New World's first constitution but a hasty bare-bones agreement.

Since Plymouth was absorbed in 1691 into the wealthier Massachusetts Bay Colony, run by rival "Puritan" Christians, many historians have dismissed it as an unimportant backwater. But Turner uplifts the Pilgrims' significance, then balances their contributions against their sins, well summarized in this National Review piece. The most important story theme for journalists is the role of these pioneers at the beginnings of American democracy, human rights and religious liberty.

The Pilgrims received hosannas as democratic pioneers from 19th Century boosters like John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster, but Turner says they "were neither democrats nor theocrats."

The colony was run by the believers, but did not require everyone to join the church or attend worship. They did, however, make everyone pay taxes to support their churches. They fled England to escape religious persecution, yet sent Baptists and Quakers into exile. (To be fair, in most countries religious dissenters faced prison or worse.)

State and church leaders were both elected, and lay elders shared power with the clergy -- all rather foresighted and with far-reaching implications.


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Why God continues to have a place at Thanksgiving tables and in Thanksgiving stories

As millions of Americans sit down today to a turkey dinner with all their favorite side dishes, many will pause to say a prayer or otherwise give thanks.

That’s part of the story, after all. The one central theme to the holiday that endures to this day is the idea of giving God thanks. It’s the reason why the Pilgrims held a feast in the first place a year after making landfall in what is now Plymouth, Mass.

Even as a growing number of young people identify with no religion, Americans are still largely thankful to God. While the day is marked with football games and parades, it’s also true that Thanksgiving, one of the least commercial holiday’s celebrated in America, has a religious origin that has been debated ever since the Pilgrims marked the original Thanksgiving dinner in 1621 following their first harvest.

Two years away from the 400th anniversary of the holiday and days away from another Thanksgiving, historians and scholars continue to debate what the feast continues to mean for Americans. The holiday, while rooted in religious tradition, remains one of the things that ties modern secular society to this country’s colonial past. More than a Protestant holiday despite its roots, the day is celebrated by all denominations and viewed as uniquely American.

The day we now call Thanksgiving was observed by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in October 1621. The feast lasted three days and, according to attendee Edward Winslow, was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims, like the colonists that followed them, celebrated a thanksgiving several times a year when the harvest was plentiful. It was highlighted by attending church services and thanking God before a large meal. Throughout the American Revolution, a day was set aside for giving thanks. Connecticut, for example, was the first to do so. The biggest change by the 17th century was that politicians were the ones calling for a Thanksgiving rather than church authorities.


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Catholic connection to Thanksgiving Day? That's a great story that is rarely told

If Christmas is referred to as “The greatest story ever told,” America’s first Thanksgiving could very well be “The greatest story you’ve never heard before.”

The reason for that is because the first recorded Thanksgiving meal between the Pilgrims and Native Americans at Plymouth in 1621 may not have been the first of its kind. In fact, some historians say it actually took place more than 50 years earlier in St. Augustine.

Spanish documents, first highlighted by University of Florida Professor Michael Gannon, revealed that the first meal between European colonists and Native Americans on U.S. soil took place on the grounds of what is now the Fountain of Youth in 1565.

The city’s founder Pedro Menendez de Aviles and the colonists broke bread with the Timucua Indians soon after the Spanish made landfall on September 8. In Gannon’s book, The Cross in the Sand, he noted, “It was the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent settlement in the land.”

De Aviles came ashore on that day and subsequently named the land St. Augustine in honor of the saint on whose feast day was August 28, the day Florida was first sighted by the ships. Members of the Timucua tribe greeted the fleet. Records show it was a peaceful exchange.

In his memoirs, Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, who celebrated mass that day, wrote: “The feast day [was] observed… after mass, [Menendez] had the Indians fed and dined himself.”

Although Gannon’s book was published in 1965, no one paid attention to it until 1985 when a reporter from The Associated Press called the professor looking for a new angle on the holiday. When the wire service put the article out for its member newspapers to print a few days before Thanksgiving, the story sent shockwaves across New England. Gannon was immediately dubbed, “The Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.”

The meal celebrated by the Spanish had already been planned as a feast to honor Mary, the mother of Jesus, and coincided with their safe arrival. Historians like Gannon have argued that the first real Thanksgiving didn’t feature Protestant separatists in Massachusetts, but Catholic explorers in Florida.

Gannon, a legendary figure among Florida historians, died last year at age 89. Gannon may have died, but the Catholic case for Thanksgiving lives on thanks to other historians, researchers and writers who argue the honor should go to Spanish settlers.


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Your Thanksgiving think piece: How did 'prayer shaming' become a news media thing?

So it's Thanksgiving.

Has anyone heard whether it's OK to offer "thanksgiving" on this day, or has the implication that there is a Supreme Being to whom thanks should be is given been declared a microaggression? Is "thanksgiving" sliding into the "thoughts and prayers" category in American life, both public and private?

That's the subject lurking beneath the surface of an interesting news-related think piece that ran the other day at The Catholic Thing website.

The headline: "Resist 'Prayer Shaming' This Thanksgiving."

I noticed the essay and started reading it. Then I noticed that this piece was written by veteran journalist Clemente Lisi, who is one of my faculty colleagues at The King's College in New York City. Lisi is a New Yorker through and through and has two decades of experience in various newsrooms in the Big Apple, including reporting and editing duties at The New York Post, ABC News and The New York Daily News.

The overture of this piece quickly links the holiday and recent news trends:

Thanksgiving and prayer are intimately linked. While the holiday ... has its roots in Protestant England (the very first Thanksgiving in 1621 was held by the Pilgrims who fled Europe seeking religious freedom), Americans of all faiths have since embraced this uniquely American holiday of giving thanks to God.
You wouldn’t know this from how the mainstream media has generally chosen to cover it in recent years. Thanksgiving has lost its religious meaning -- many people don’t offer a prayer before addressing the turkey -- and has been replaced with a focus on football games and Black Friday shopping. Christmas, unfortunately, has also become less about Jesus and more about consumerism. It’s part of a larger trend whereby our society becomes gradually secularized, even on explicitly religious holidays. And prayer, so central to the lives of millions of Americans, is invisible to those who deliver the news to you each day.

This raises an interesting question for any GetReligion readers who are online today, either before or after the feast.

The key question: Was there any "Thanksgiving" coverage in your newspaper today?


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Is capitalism biblical? You don't have to be a pope to ask that question

Is capitalism biblical? You don't have to be a pope to ask that question

JOHN’S QUESTION:

It has always been my understanding from Proverbs (condemning the “sluggard”), and Paul’s instruction that missionaries earn their keep and not be a burden, that the Bible encouraged hard work and a responsibility to give of our blessings to the poor — personal responsibility vs. government responsibility. The trend toward government socialism seems to discourage that. Is capitalism biblical?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

In America, it’s springtime for socialism. A Harvard survey of those ages 18–29 showed 33 percent support socialism compared with 42 percent for capitalism, and socialist support reached 50 percent among Democrats. A poll of Iowa Democratic caucus-goers found 43 percent considered themselves socialist vs. 38 percent capitalist. Sliding regard for big business accompanies the related success of Socialist-plus-Democrat Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Sanders is arguably the most secularized candidate ever to wage a major presidential run (can you name any competitors?). Even so, he was the only U.S. politician the Vatican invited to speak at an April economics conference (Sanders cited no Bible verses), where he briefly met Pope Francis. That was called a courtesy, not endorsement, but the pontiff appears soft on socialism, which sets conservative Catholics abuzz.

Francis joins previous popes in teaching biblical tenets of concern toward the needy and against the sins of greed and materialism. But he’s more outspoken than his predecessors in assailing free markets and urging government redistribution of wealth.


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