Thanksgiving: An American Celebration of a Deadly Sin?

Thanksgiving: An American Celebration of a Deadly Sin? November 26, 2015

(Georg Emanuel Opiz, The Glutton, 1804; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100).
The Spirit of Thanksgiving (Georg Emanuel Opiz, The Glutton, 1804; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100).

I’m spiritual but not religious about Thanksgiving.

I show up only once a year, go through the motions, and don’t really make too much of a fuss about it.

You can't sell out Thanksgiving, which is always-already a festival of gluttony. By the way, you should ironically use your promo code on this book.
You can’t sell out or profanate Thanksgiving, which is always-already a festival of gluttony. By the way, you should ironically use your promo code to purchase this book.

However, I’ve noticed that in some Catholic quarters there is a push to make Thanksgiving Catholic.

I don’t know, I could be wrong about this, but isn’t it a little blasphemous to want to appropriate the only holiday that celebrates gluttony?

The last time I checked, gluttony, despite what all the postmodernists might say, is still one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

On thanksgiving you stuff yourself with junk food and then proceed to watch gladiators of the gridiron give each other concussions.

If this isn’t enough, the connection between piety and the worst elements of capitalism continues with what used to be Black Friday, but now extends from Wednesday to Monday.

If you insist on sinning and using the 30% off Amazon code HOLIDAY30 during checkout for your book purchases then at least be subversive in your sinning. Like a good cultural Marxist subvert late modern capitalism from within late modern capitalism.

Any purchase you make, not just books, after clicking on the links in the following pious book lists will charitably kick back money to our needy family.

If you’re going to be a glutton, then at least have the sense of humor to be a theologically serious glutton with the help of the following lists:

1. Top 10 Theology Books of the Last 10 Years (That I’ve Read)

2. Thanksgiving Special: Eating, Theology, Philosophy, and the Hungry Soul

3. TOP10 Books On Theology and Neuroscience

4. Or indulge in my many other booklists.

But in all seriousness, there is no better analysis of American Catholicism’s (and Christianity’s) decadence, of which appropriating Thanksgiving is but a minor symptom, than the following excerpt from David Bentley Hart’s post on American reactions to Pope Francis:

Who knows? America is such an odd combination of Christian pieties and post-Christian habits of thought. What other country could produce persons, for instance, who believe it possible to be both Christian and libertarian (which makes me think of Enoch Soames, the “Catholic diabolist”)? With our occult belief in the possibility of limitless “wealth creation,” how do we dare acknowledge the limits of nature, human or cosmic? But Francis cannot ­really concern himself with our peculiarities and perversities. For all its economic power, American Catholicism is only one minor and rather aberrant party within the worldwide communion; and Francis is writing for his Church, not for America. Of course, it is possible that one day a Christian view of reality will take root even here, in this the first constitutionally and culturally post-Christian land in Western history. But—and, again, not being a Roman Catholic, I may have no right to say this—I do not think it is incumbent on the pope to hold his tongue until it does.

You already knew that and didn’t fall for making Thanksgiving Catholic.

But beware of the other national holidays, which celebrate wrath and pride, and so on.


Browse Our Archives