American Exceptionalism 2024

 Joseph Nye Jr. at Project Syndicate:

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, three broad camps are visible in America’s debate over how the United States should relate to the rest of the world: the liberal internationalists who have dominated since World War II; the retrenchers who want to pull back from some alliances and institutions; and the America Firsters who take a narrow, sometimes isolationist, view of America’s role in the world.

Americans have long seen their country as morally exceptional. Stanley Hoffmann, a French-American intellectual, said that while every country considers itself unique, France and the US stand out in believing that their values are universal. France, however, was limited by the balance of power in Europe, and thus could not pursue its universalist ambitions fully. Only the US had the power to do that.

The point is not that Americans are morally superior; it is that many Americans want to believe that their country is a force for good in the world. Realists have long complained that this moralism in American foreign policy interferes with a clear analysis of power. Yet the fact is that America’s liberal political culture made a huge difference to the liberal international order that has existed since WWII. Today’s world would look very different if Hitler had emerged victorious or if Stalin’s Soviet Union had prevailed in the Cold War.

American exceptionalism has three main sources. Since 1945, the dominant one has been the legacy of the Enlightenment, specifically the liberal ideas espoused by America’s founders.

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A second strand of American exceptionalism stems from the country’s Puritan religious roots. Those who fled Britain to worship God more purely in the new world saw themselves as a chosen people. Their project was less crusading in nature than anxious and contained, like the current “retrencher” approach of fashioning America as a city on a hill to attract others....

The third source of American exceptionalism underlies the others: America’s sheer size and location has always conferred a geopolitical advantage. Already in the nineteenth century, De Tocqueville noted America’s special geographical situation.

Religion, Virtue, and Guns

 David French:

It’s now common to see men and women armed to the teeth, open-carrying during anti-lockdown protests and even outside public officials’ homes. This is when the gun is used to menace and intimidate. It’s displayed not as a matter of defense but rather as an open act of defiance. It’s meant to make people uncomfortable. It’s meant to make them feel unsafe.

This transition from defense to defiance can destabilize our democracy. The concept of self-defense is rooted in a high view of human life. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, John Locke described a “fundamental law of nature” (his description of the “will of God”) that man be “preserved as much as possible” yet “when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred.”

Indeed, scripture makes multiple allowances for self-defense, in both the Old and New Testaments. While I respect Christian pacifism, I simply don’t see it required by the biblical text. My own view is that the refusal to protect innocent life can constitute a grave moral wrong. If a violent man came after my family, and I did not do everything in my power to stop his attack—even if it meant killing him to save my wife and kids—then I would have failed a profound obligation as a husband and father.

Defiance is different. It’s rooted in the will to power. It is designed to implant fear, not to save lives but to exert control. It contradicts a core value of a classically-liberal society, that change comes through courts and the ballot box, not through intimidation and fear.

It’s even more disturbing to see that spirit of armed defiance so closely correlated with the religious right. The decision of Christians to provoke their fellow citizens into feeling palpable, physical fear of armed violence is deliberately malicious and cruel.

If you’ve read me at all, you know that I’m constantly talking about the relationship between rights and responsibilities. If, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, governments are “instituted among men” to secure our unalienable rights, then it is our responsibility to exercise those rights for a virtuous purpose. Otherwise, our constitutional experiment may fail.

Goodbye, Columbus Day

Jennifer Kingson at Axios: 

The Columbus Day sale — a longtime ritual for car dealers and department stores — is dead.

The big picture: Retailers are moving away from big sales events in general, and are especially eager to to distance themselves from this particularly disputatious federal holiday, which falls on Monday.

The intrigue: For years, states and municipalities have started renaming "Columbus Day" as "Indigenous Peoples' Day" to protest the legacy of colonialism that hangs over Christopher Columbus' so-called "discovery" of America.

• The last thing retailers want is to get caught in the culture wars.
• "I think this one is an easy one that they can just say, 'Hey, I'm just going to rename the sale or cancel the sale and not worry about it," says Katie Thomas, leader of the Kearney Consumer Institute, a think tank within the management consulting firm Kearney.
• Plus, fewer people get a day off of work for Columbus Day than in the past, so they don't have a long weekend to go shopping.

The Soprano crime family had a different take: 

Politics as Religion, Religion as Politics

Linda Feldmann at The Christian Science Monitor:

The United States has long been known for what some sociologists call “civil religion” – a shared, nonsectarian faith centered on the flag, the nation’s founding documents, and God. But the God factor is waning, as so-called nones – atheists, agnostics, and those who self-identify as “nothing in particular” – have risen to more than a third of the U.S. population, according to a major 2020 survey out of Harvard University.

From MAGA devotees on the right to social justice warriors on the “woke left,” political activism that can feel “absolute” in a quasi-religious way is rampant. At the same time, American membership in houses of worship has plummeted to below 50% for the first time in eight decades of Gallup polling – from 70% in 1999 to 47% in 2020.

And as American politics has become polarized, so too has the nation’s religious profile. The mainstream Protestant center has hollowed out, its population shrinking dramatically. Today, religious Americans tend to choose their congregation with an eye toward partisanship – to the point where the choice of presidential candidate can lead a voter to move to a new church.

“Liberals and ‘nones’ went to the left; conservatives and Evangelicals went to the right,” says Ryan Burge, an expert on religion and politics at Eastern Illinois University, and author of a new book called “The Nones.” “There’s no middle anymore.”

Attitudes on Patriotism and American Exceptionalism

Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

Despite a lackluster federal response to the COVID-19 outbreak and a violent assault on the US Capitol, Americans remain firm in their belief that American culture and the American way of life are superior to others. More than half (53 percent) of Americans say that the world would be much better off if more countries adopted American values and the American way of life. Approximately four in 10 (42 percent) disagree with this statement.

There is even greater agreement among the public that the US has always been a force for good in the world. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of Americans agree, while about one in four (24 percent) reject the idea that the US has been consistently virtuous in its actions abroad.

Fewer Americans believe the US has a special relationship with God. Nearly half (45 percent) the public believe that God has granted the country a special role in human history. Roughly half (49 percent) of Americans disagree.

There are massive generational differences in views about American exceptionalism. Young adults are far more likely to challenge notions that the US serves as a moral beacon. Less than half (46 percent) of young adults (age 18 to 29) believe the world would be better off if more countries adopted American values and lifestyle. In contrast, seven in 10 (70 percent) seniors (age 65 or older) agree with this statement. Young adults are also far less inclined to believe the US continues to be a force for good in the world.

Overall, most Americans feel proud about their national identity. More than six in 10 say they are extremely proud (34 percent) or very proud (28 percent) to be an American. But this sentiment masks considerable cleavages among the public along the lines of race, political affiliation, and generation.

There are sizable generational divisions in feelings of pride about being American. Older Americans express much more pride in their nationality than do younger Americans. In fact, seniors are more than twice as likely to say they are extremely proud to be American than are young adults (55 percent vs. 23 percent).

No religious group expresses greater pride in their national identity than white evangelical Protestants. More than three-quarters of white evangelical Protestants say they are very or extremely proud to be an American; half (50 percent) say they are extremely proud. More than four in 10 white Catholics (46 percent) and white mainline Protestants (43 percent) also report being extremely proud about their national identity. Considerably fewer Hispanic Catholics (29 percent), black Protestants (27 percent), members of non-Christian religious traditions (26 percent), and religiously unaffiliated Americans (20 percent) report they are extremely proud to be American.

President Biden at the National Prayer Breakfast

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American public life.  Yesterday, President Biden delivered a message to the National Prayer Breakfast.

Loving Your Opponents in a Time of Polarization

Phil Wegmann at RCP:

If God was anywhere in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, it may have been at the Washington Hilton, where lawmakers from both sides had gathered for the National Prayer Breakfast. It was a morning of quiet reflection and humble worship in a city consumed by ego and partisan strife.  

Arthur Brooks delivered the sermon, and the conservative scholar begged the political congregation to take seriously “a national crisis of contempt and polarization.” He asked for a show of hands to make it personal: “How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?”

Almost everyone raised their hands. ... “I’m going to round that off to 100 percent,” Brooks nervously quipped, suggesting that “the rest of you must be on your phones.”  

Religion and Generations

Daniel Cox and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux at FiveThirtyEight:

Millennials have earned a reputation for reshaping industries and institutions — shaking up the workplace, transforming dating culture, and rethinking parenthood. They’ve also had a dramatic impact on American religious life. Four in ten millennials now say they are religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center. In fact, millennials (those between the ages of 23 and 38) are now almost as likely to say they have no religion as they are to identify as Christian. 1

For a long time, though, it wasn’t clear whether this youthful defection from religion would be temporary or permanent. It seemed possible that as millennials grew older, at least some would return to a more traditional religious life. But there’s mounting evidence that today’s younger generations may be leaving religion for good.

Social science research has long suggested that Americans’ relationship with religion has a tidal quality — people who were raised religious find themselves drifting away as young adults, only to be drawn back in when they find spouses and begin to raise their own families. Some argued that young adults just hadn’t yet been pulled back into the fold of organized religion, especially since they were hitting major milestones like marriage and parenthood later on.

But now many millennials have spouses, children and mortgages — and there’s little evidence of a corresponding surge in religious interest. A new national survey from the American Enterprise Institute of more than 2,500 Americans found a few reasons why millennials may not return to the religious fold. (One of the authors of this article helped conduct the survey.)

Washington's 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation

Sam Wineburg at Zocalo Public Square:

George Washington issued what might be considered the first executive order. To commemorate the end of a bloody Revolutionary War, Washington set aside the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving and prayer. His 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation was short, a mere 456 words, punctuated by references—“Almighty God,” “the Lord and Ruler of Nations,” “the great and glorious Being,” “the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be”—to a Supreme Being.
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Historians were not deaf to Washington’s religious references. While the clergy and the scientists saw them as evidence of Washington’s devotion, the historians stressed the president’s precision in crafting a vocabulary that would unite the dizzying array of Protestant denominations in post-revolutionary America without alienating the small but important groups of Catholics, Jews, and freethinkers dotting the American landscape. It was precisely because he understood that Americans did not believe the same thing that Washington was scrupulous in choosing words that would be acceptable to a wide spectrum of religious groups.

In his own time, Washington’s reluctance to show his doctrinal cards dismayed his Christian co-religionists. Members of the first Presbytery of the Eastward (comprised of Presbyterian churches in Massachusetts and New Hampshire) complained to the president that the Constitution failed to mention the cardinal tenets of Christian faith: “We should not have been alone in rejoicing to have seen some explicit acknowledgement of the only true God and Jesus Christ.” Washington dodged the criticism by assuring the Presbyterians that the “path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.”

Similarly, a week before his 1789 proclamation, Washington responded to a letter from Reverend Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard College from 1774-1780. Langdon had implored Washington to “let all men know that you are not ashamed to be a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Once again, instead of affirming Christian tenets, Washington wrote back offering thanks to the generic “Author of the Universe.”

Thanksgiving Proclamations

Richard Samuelson at Law and Liberty:

George Washington set the tone for the office in many ways, none more so than in his Thanksgiving Proclamation, given in October, 1789, seven months after he took the oath of office. Why have such a proclamation at all? Where in Article I, Section 8 (the section that lists the powers the people gave the federal government) is the power to proclaim a federal holiday? In 1791 James Madison would criticize Alexander Hamilton’s assertion that the U.S. government has the authority to create a national bank, for nowhere in the Constitution did the people give the federal government the right to create a bank or to create a corporation (an entity that had traditionally been regarded as a “person” in the eyes of the law). And fourteen years later, the Louisiana Purchase would tie President Jefferson in knots, for nowhere did the people give the U.S. government the right to acquire territory. Yet Madison lost the national bank argument in 1791 and by 1816 he had changed his mind about its constitutionality. Meanwhile, Jefferson didn’t stop the Senate from ratifying the Louisiana Purchase. In other words, he and Madison implicitly accepted that there are some powers that belong to government due to the nature of the thing, and when the people created the U.S. government they, of necessity, allowed it those powers without which no government can function.

The authority to proclaim a Thanksgiving might seem trivial to us—mere words, and an idle declaration. But it is, in fact, fraught with meaning, for the assumption of such authority highlights the degree to which a President is, by nature, much like a monarch—albeit an elected one. Similarly, it points us to the limits of secular nationalism.

Consider President Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation. He begins with the universal “duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” But then he stops, as if he knew some might ask why the President is involved. Washington goes on, “Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me ‘to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a a form of government for their safety and happiness.’” Congress asked Washington to proclaim the day. An interesting request. Congress did not pass a law proclaiming a day of Thanksgiving. Such an act may, according to some constructions of the Constitution, have crossed over into an establishment of religion. Instead, they have merely asked the President to “recommend” such an observance to the people. But if it’s not a law, wherefore does the authority come from? It must adhere in the nature of the thing.

Pence

At The Guardian, Lloyd Green reviews biographies of Mike Pence:

Almost predictably, D’Antonio and Eisner manifest their displeasure with Pence from the outset. They rightly tag him for his tropism toward other people’s money and his discomfort with modernity. All of which is understandable, to a point.

What is disappointingly left unaddressed is that the US is the world’s most religious wealthy country, where two-in-five claim to pray daily and where evangelicals comprise nearly the same ratio in our armed forces, despite being only a quarter of the population.

The fact is the first amendment’s free exercise clause was designed to protect those who embrace discomforting creeds. In a narrow 7-2 decision this June, the supreme court sided with a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. In the majority’s view, the Colorado civil rights commission demonstrated “hostility” to the baker’s religious beliefs by ordering him to undergo anti-discrimination training.

Politicians less doctrinaire and more capable of nuance than Pence may yet be able to achieve a modus vivendi. With the Democrats in desperate search of a foothold in red America, the percentage of religious nones growing and evangelicals not backing down anytime soon, that result may even be a matter of civil and political necessity.

"In God We Trust" Stays on Currency

Associated Press:

A federal court has ruled that printing "In God We Trust" on U.S. currency doesn't amount to a religious endorsement and therefore doesn't violate the U.S. Constitution. The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reports the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago made the ruling Thursday in a lawsuit brought by a self-declared Satanist, Kenneth Mayle. He argued that the motto propagates a religious view he opposes.

A lower court tossed the suit citing a Supreme Court decision that a motto on currency isn't something people display prominently and thus that people are not forced to publicly advertise views that clash with their own.

From the ruling:

The inclusion of the motto on currency is similar to other ways in which secular symbols give a nod to the nation’s religious heritage. Examples include the phrase “one nation under God,” which has been in the Pledge of Allegiance since 1954, see Pub. L. No. 83-396, ch. 297, 68 Stat. 249 (1954), as well as the National Day of Prayer, which has existed in various forms since the dawn of the country and is now codified at 36 U.S.C. § 119. Lynch, 465 U.S. at 676–77. Moreover, when the religious aspects of an activity account for “only a fraction,” the possibility that anyone could see it as an endorsement of religion is diluted. Freedom From Religion Found., Inc., 885 F.3d at 1047. In the case of currency, the motto is one of many historical reminders; others include portraits of presidents, state symbols, monuments, notable events such as the Louisiana Purchase, and the national bird. In this context, a reasonable observer would not perceive the motto on currency as a religious endorsement.

God and the State Constitutions

At Pew, Alexandra Sandstrom writes:

The U.S. Constitution never explicitly mentions God or the divine, but the same cannot be said of the nation’s state constitutions. In fact, God or the divine is mentioned at least once in each of the 50 state constitutions and nearly 200 times overall, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.

All but four state constitutions – those in Colorado, Iowa, Hawaii and Washington – use the word “God” at least once. The constitutions in Colorado, Iowa and Washington refer to a “Supreme Being” or “Supreme Ruler of the Universe,” while Hawaii’s constitution makes reference to the divine only in its preamble, which states that the people of Hawaii are “grateful for Divine Guidance.”

Prosperity Gospel

Theologian Michael Horton writes at The Washington Post:

Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration will include Paula White and possibly other members of his inner circle, Darrell Scott, “Apostle” Wayne T. Jackson and Mark Burns. They’re all televangelists who hail from the “prosperity gospel” camp. They advocate a brand of Pentecostal Christianity known as Word of Faith.
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Most evangelical pastors I know would shake their heads at all of this. Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore tweeted, “Paula White is a charlatan and recognized as a heretic by every orthodox Christian, of whatever tribe.” Yet increasingly one wonders whether modified versions of the prosperity gospel — religion as personal therapy for our best life now — has become more mainstream than we realize.

Thanks to the First Amendment, Christian orthodoxy has never been a test for public office. But it is striking that Trump has surrounded himself with cadre of prosperity evangelists who cheerfully attack basic Christian doctrines. The focus of this unity is a gospel that is about as diametrically opposed to the biblical one as you can imagine.

Since “evangelical” comes from the word “gospel,” that should make more of a difference to those who wear the label than it does at the moment. The prosperity gospel may be our nation’s new civil religion. It doesn’t offend anyone (but picky Christians). It tells us everything we want to hear and nothing that we need to hear most.

Is God Dead?

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American political and civic life.

David Masci and Gregory A. Smith write at Pew:

Fifty years ago this month, Time magazine published one of its most famous and controversial covers. Splashed in bold red print across a black background was a short, simple and yet intensely provocative question: “Is God Dead?”
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But a half century after the Time article was first published, a recent Pew Research Center survey shows that belief in God is strong in the United States. Indeed, according to our 2014 Religious Landscape Study, nearly nine-in-ten American adults say they believe in God or a universal spirit.

To be sure, the share of people in the United States who say they believe in the Almighty has dropped a bit recently, from 92% in 2007 (when the Center’s first Religious Landscape Study was released) to 89% in 2014. And among the youngest adults surveyed (born between 1990 and 1996), the share of believers is 80%.

In recent years, there also have been small declines in other measures of religious commitment. For instance, between 2007 and 2014, the share of Americans who say they attend church or another house of worship at least once a week has dropped from 39% to 36%. During the same period, the share of Americans who say they pray daily also has dropped 3 percentage points, from 58% to 55%.

Perhaps more strikingly, the number of people who no longer consider themselves to be part of any religious denomination or tradition has risen dramatically in recent decades. Between 2007 and 2014, for example, the share of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated jumped from about 16% to almost 23% of the adult population. However, it’s also important to point out that a majority of these “nones” (61%) still say they believe in God or a universal spirit.

The Pope's Address

Pope Francis illustrated the ongoing significance of the Declaration as well as the close connection between religion and American civic culture.

From the Pope's address to Congress today:

Yours is a work which makes me reflect in two ways on the figure of Moses. On the one hand, the patriarch and lawgiver of the people of Israel symbolizes the need of peoples to keep alive their sense of unity by means of just legislation. On the other, the figure of Moses leads us directly to God and thus to the transcendent dignity of the human being. Moses provides us with a good synthesis of your work: you are asked to protect, by means of the law, the image and likeness fashioned by God on every human face.

A relief portrait in the House chamber

Moses on the east side of the Supreme Court building:

Here I think of the political history of the United States, where democracy is deeply rooted in the mind of the American people. All political activity must serve and promote the good of the human person and be based on respect for his or her dignity. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776). If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and  finance. Politics is, instead, an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life. I do not underestimate the difficulty that this involves, but I encourage you in this effort.

Atheism, Religion, and America

At Politico, Nick Spencer asks why there are not more atheists in the United States.  Consistent with Tocqueville, he says:

At the same time, the nation’s new constitution did not refer to God (beyond the reference to the Year of our Lord in Article VII), precluded any religious test from becoming a requirement for office, and, most famously, in its First Amendment, legislated against Congress making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This did not, of course, prevent individual states from legislating about religion and many retained established churches well into the 19th century, but it did mean that there could be no formal national endorsement of Christianity.

This could be construed as de facto godlessness—indeed it was and is—but in reality it ended up being the nation’s strongest bulwark against atheism, denying the church the temporal power that had done it so much harm in Europe and effectively draining the wells of moral indignation on which atheists drew. Other factors helped: The new nation’s powerful sense of Providentialism, whilst not necessarily Christian, was certainly harder to sustain on an atheistic worldview; some form of watered-down deism thus ran through patriotic veins. But the overriding factor for atheism’s anaemic American history lies less in its culture than in its politics.

Religion, Economics, and Public Policy

At The New York Times Magazine, Binyamin Applebaum writes about David Brat, the economist who won an upset victory against House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in a GOP primary.

On the campaign trail, Brat declared that bankers should have gone to jail and that “crony capitalists,” like Cantor, had undermined the system. “I’m not against business,” he said. “I’m against big business in bed with big government.”

Instead of arguing for any specific regulation, however, Brat said that the system simply needed more virtue. “We should love our neighbor so much that we actually believe in right and wrong and do something about it,” he wrote in a 2011 essay for Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology. “If we all did the right thing and had the guts to spread the word, we would not need the government to backstop every action we take.”

The idea that religion plays a role in economic growth was most famously advocated by the German sociologist Max Weber. In his 1905 book, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” he argued that Protestant countries developed more quickly because they embraced hard work as a virtue. Over the decades, others have continued to see merit in the theory, including J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who presented statistical evidence for it in a 1988 paper. Even Friedrich Hayek, a professed agnostic, grudgingly acknowledged the role of religion. “Like it or not,” he once wrote, “we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilization that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true.”

Religion and the study of economics are even more closely intertwined than the article suggests.  The connection involves not just a conservative advocacy of individual virtue, but a liberal advocacy of government action. As we note in our textbook, many of those who attended the 1885 first meeting of the American Economics Association were members of the clergy, eager to use economics to advance the Social Gospel.  Its founding platform said:  "We hold that the conflict of labor and capital has brought to the front a vast number of social problems whose solution is impossible without the united efforts of Church, state, and science." Said founder Richard Ely:

We who have resolved to form an American Economics Association hope to do something
toward the developing of a system of social ethics. We wish to accomplish certain practical results in the social and financial world, and believing that our work lies in the direction of practical Christianity, we appeal to the church, the chief of the social forces in this country, to help us, to support us, and to make our work a complete success, which it can by no possibility be without her assistance.

 

Can Religion Solve Our Problems?

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life. Gallup reports:

Fifty-seven percent of Americans say that religion can answer all or most of today's problems, while 30% say that religion is largely old fashioned and out of date. Americans have in recent decades become gradually less likely to say that religion can answer today's problems and more likely to believe religion is out of date.

The latest update on this long-term Gallup trend comes from Gallup's May 8-11 Values and Beliefs survey. Gallup asked this question once in the 1950s, once in the 1970s, and multiple times in the 1980s and each subsequent decade.

The 82% choosing the "can answer today's problems" options in 1957 is in line with a number of other measures from that decade showing a high level of religiosity, including religious service attendance, importance of religion, and the percentage of Americans with a formal religious identity.

But Americans' belief that religion can answer most problems dropped -- to 62% -- when Gallup next asked the question in the 1970s, and it remained at about this level in the 1980s and 1990s. Americans' belief that religion offers answers fell to 60% in the 2000s, while those stating the secular belief rose to 25%.

Thanksgiving History

At The American Enterprise Institute, Amy Kass and Leon Kass write:

The first Thanksgiving Day celebrated under the new Constitution took place on November 26, 1789, the first year of George Washington’s presidency. At the encouragement of the House of Representatives, President Washington proclaimed a day to be devoted to “public thanksgiving and prayer” and sent money to supply debtors in prison with provisions, thus beginning the Thanksgiving Day tradition of charity. Washington’s proclamation, however, did not result in a new holiday: John Adams, Washington’s successor, recommended a “National Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” rather than a thanksgiving day, while Thomas Jefferson opposed the proclamation of both thanksgiving and fast days as counter to the separation of church and state.

Although many states, particularly in New England, continued to have annual observances of thanksgiving, there wasn’t another national Thanksgiving Day until Abraham Lincoln proclaimed one in 1863 to celebrate the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg — an act we owe, in part, to the efforts of Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. The editor of the popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book and famous author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” Hale had devoted an entire chapter to the importance of Thanksgiving traditions in her 1827 novel, Northwood. She campaigned to make the day a national holiday, year after year sending letters to governors, congressmen, senators, and to the White House, addressing notes to at least six different presidents.

By 1855, 14 states recognized the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day, with two others celebrating the holiday on the third Thursday. Territories such as California and Oregon even proclaimed the holiday before being recognized as states. In September 1863, Hale published an editorial once again urging President Lincoln to proclaim a national Thanksgiving Day. On October 3 — the same date on which Washington had offered his Thanksgiving Proclamation — Lincoln declared that Thanksgiving Day would be observed on the last Thursday in November. Writing in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln urged Americans to remember the “gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy” and to “fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it.”