Pray for America this Thanksgiving

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Pray for America this Thanksgiving
A child praying | Wikimedia

Another tragic shooting, this time in California, has left five people dead and is reigniting the debate over U.S. gun policy just in time for America to sit around the Thanksgiving table.

Thanksgiving, however, is not about the turkey, the parades, the football, or even the pilgrims. It must not be overshadowed by the sales that begin that Thursday evening and continue into Black Friday. The true meaning of Thanksgiving, as defined by those who began the tradition, is actually the cure for what this fractured country needs: prayer for the United States.

The tradition of Thanksgiving began with President George Washington. On Oct. 3, 1789, Washington issued a statement, at the request of Congress, to set apart a “day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” In it, Washington implores his countrymen to take the upcoming Nov. 26 and devote it in service to the “glorious Being” by uniting in gratitude for the end of the war, the peace in the nation since, and the people’s liberties. But he also requests citizens to “beseech” God to forgive the country’s wrongdoings, to provide good government, and to promote virtue.

Following the birth pangs of the new country, Washington sanctified Thanksgiving for the nation’s future. The executive and legislative branches deemed it important enough to have this holiday — very much a holy day — for Americans to come together as one for the sake of their homeland. In the face of an untried challenge with a government based on protection of inalienable rights, equality, and consent of the governed, the people of the Founding generation sought a way to bridge the divide between state lines as a nation under one flag.

Exactly 74 years after Washington’s statement, President Abraham Lincoln made a Thanksgiving proclamation of his own to set every last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving to standardize the tradition across the states. Like Washington, he called for a “day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father.”

“I recommend to [my fellow citizens] that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also …fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union,” Lincoln said.

In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln took the time to call upon Thanksgiving to be a day of prayer so that God would heal the divided nation. With the U.S. facing its biggest crisis yet and, as many believed at the time, punishment for the horrific institution of slavery, it prayed for forgiveness, for the care of each other, and for the restoration of the country.

President Franklin Roosevelt would later change Thanksgiving to the second-to-last Thursday in November, after retailers complained in 1939 that a Nov. 30 Thanksgiving left insufficient time to do Christmas shopping.

Since then, however, Christmas has crept forward and overshadowed the all-American holiday, as radio stations begin playing carols 24/7 after Halloween. Thanksgiving doesn’t even earn the title of Black Friday Eve, since so many stores open their doors to the shoppers at 8 p.m., 5 p.m., even 1 p.m. on Thanksgiving, when the customers and employees should be at home with their families. There are other opportunities to score deals and get overtime pay.

America may have not just fought the Revolutionary War, and it may not be in the middle of the Civil War. But it is divided over its president and the character and purpose of the nation.

Instead of succumbing to the political arguments that will arise around the dinner table in a week, Americans should remember the unifying principles they hold in common. The values that Washington and his contemporaries feared the country would not be able to uphold are still standing. The union that Lincoln prayed would be healed was reformed.

This Thanksgiving, U.S. citizens should come together and pray for the future of the United States — for its strength and its unity in a divisive time.

 

Breana Noble is a senior studying politics and journalism.