{"id":106530,"date":"2018-11-21T00:24:21","date_gmt":"2018-11-21T07:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=106530"},"modified":"2018-11-19T23:30:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T06:30:23","slug":"thanksgiving-and-the-puritan-paradox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2018\/11\/thanksgiving-and-the-puritan-paradox.html","title":{"rendered":"Thanksgiving and the Puritan Paradox"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This week\u2019s piece for the Catholic Weekly<\/em>, in honor of Thanksgiving:<\/a><\/p>\n

On November 22, we Yanks will be celebrating\u00a0Thanksgiving<\/a>. It\u2019s not quite an exclusively American feast. Our Canadian neighbours celebrate it too, but in October, which I think is more sensible since eating turkey twice in one month (November 22 and December 25) is a bit much.<\/p>\n

As the story goes, the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts Bay Colony because they were seeking \u2018religious liberty\u2019. Actually, they were seeking the freedom to be harsher with themselves than English law allowed. They weren\u2019t big on religious liberty.<\/p>\n

The Anglican Church of their day was, they thought, impure because it still preserved a lot of Catholic piety and beliefs that they wanted to purge. They were second generation fanatics bent on Doing It Right and showing Mom and Dad what Real Christianity [TM] is.<\/p>\n

They disliked the Romish ways of their Anglican fathers and their compatriots in England would, about 30 years after the landing at Plymouth Rock, cut off the head of King Charles for failing to be as intolerant as they wanted him to be.<\/p>\n

Here on our shores, the Puritans would, like every other religious community except the Catholics and the Quakers, crush the religious freedom of everybody who was not them.\u00a0 In Maryland, the only Catholic colony, religious liberty lasted right up to the moment Catholics became a minority, at which point Catholic religious liberty was smashed.<\/p>\n

\"Pilgrims\"
Pilgrims Going to Church, George Henry Boughton, 1867.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Puritans loathed the \u201cRomish idolatry\u201d of our Catholic statues and images. But only the religious statues and images. For some reason, they completely disconnected their fetish about religious imagery from all other forms of imagery.<\/p>\n

One hilarious consequence of this is seen in\u00a0King\u2019s Chapel in Boston<\/a>. Built by the prosperous local burghers in the 17th<\/sup>\u00a0century as a Calvinist shrine, it contains not the slightest trace of imagery depicting Jesus, Mary, or the saints.<\/p>\n

But the local merchants who paid for the joint were not going to be denied their shot at advertising to the worshippers. So King\u2019s Chapel is stuffed to the rafters with statues and busts\u2014aka \u201cgraven images\u201d\u2014of rich men.<\/p>\n

The Puritans also hated Romish feasts and holy days. Some of the more fanatical ones even wanted to rename the days of the week \u2018First Day\u2019, \u2018Second Day\u2019 etc. since they felt it was a sin to name pagan gods.<\/p>\n

The Interregnum under Cromwell was a period in which the Puritans tried to ban everything the English found fun, including Christmas. They were the original Grinches and it is not for nothing that\u00a0Chesterton<\/a>\u00a0remarked that, in America, we have a feast to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and in England they should have a feast to celebrate their departure.<\/p>\n

\"St
Some of the 140 saints\u2019 statues atop St Peter\u2019s Basilica Square in Rome.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This killjoy spirit had trouble taking root in America beyond New England because the Puritans never managed to dominate the other colonies. We Yanks started as a mongrel breed of various Europeans and the fun of certain Christian holidays won out over Puritan buzzkill in the end.<\/p>\n

One of the curious paradoxes of this is that the legendary feast the Puritans themselves celebrated to thank God for surviving their first winter took hold as a piece of the American mythos.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More here.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week\u2019s piece for the Catholic Weekly, in honor of Thanksgiving: On November 22, we Yanks will be celebrating\u00a0Thanksgiving. It\u2019s not quite an exclusively American feast. Our Canadian neighbours celebrate it too, but in October, which I think is more sensible since eating turkey twice in one month (November 22 and December 25) is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[270],"class_list":["post-106530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-exalted-felicitations-of-the-day"],"yoast_head":"\nThanksgiving and the Puritan Paradox<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week's piece for the Catholic Weekly, in honor of Thanksgiving: On November 22, we Yanks will be celebrating\u00a0Thanksgiving. 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