The story of the Pilgrim fathers really is the founding myth of our nation. Myth in this sense is a story, whether true or false, which shapes a particular culture. There continues to be an effort to change this story among certain liberals and post-modernists (in some ways me among them) because of some of the things it says and some of the ways it is interpreted to tell us who and what we are. The actual facts of the story are, as we know, quite different from the myth. It reminds me of the only part of the movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, that I liked. (It really was a terrible movie, I thought, not being fond of the grunt and grimace school of acting, but I went to see as a protest against the protesters.) Anyway, the one scene in it that I liked was at the very end. You probably remember how the movie went. Jesus decided not to continue his ministry to the point of crucifixion but to marry Mary Magdalene and live a normal life. At the end he heard Paul preaching Christ crucified and risen, and he went up to him and said, "But that's not what happened!" Paul replied, "No, but that's what ought to have happened."
That's the way it is with our founding myth. It's not what happened, but it's what ought to have happened - at least from certain points of view - and it is used in its ought-to-have to justify, to explain and to shape our culture. One of the essential controversies of our present-day United States is whether that is really what we are or not. Should we hark back to what the Pilgrims stood for in our mythology, or should we reject it in order to find ways to shape our society differently?
Not all myths need to be examined for their factual reliability. The story of Washington and the cherry tree, for example, is one that probably only has positive consequences. It does no one any harm at all to think that our first president was of unimpeachable integrity from a very early age. Of course, it is also one that everyone with the smallest education knows was written by Parson Weems and has no basis in fact. It may be that it is even easier to discover the factual unreliability of innocuous myths because we have no real stake in them. Those that really matter, that shape the way we think about our selves and our environment, are the ones that we tend to be unable to question, even when they need questioning. They need it when they are used to support cultural assumptions that have some negative consequences.
I have been informed by a usually reliable source that the reason for the adoption of the story of the Pilgrim Fathers as the primary founders of the United States was a reaction to a wave of immigration just before the Civil War from places other than the British Isles. It was an attempt to make it clear that we are first and foremost of Anglo-Saxon descent, and we ought to stay that way. It does make sense. At that time - the same time as the death of the Whig party and the rise of the Republicans - there was a short-lived political party called the Know-Nothings. Their first and only presidential candidate was former president Millard Fillmore, and their platform was the closing of our borders to Catholic and/or non-English-speaking immigrants. It was Lincoln, however, who established the last Thursday in November as an annual Thanksgiving Day to be used not only to give thanks for the bounty of the year, but to remember our forebears of Plimoth Plantation. It does not hurt, at a time when a nation is tearing itself apart, to have a story of the nation's founding which establishes a sense of pride and belonging. It may be, however, that the story is used nowadays less as a unifying idea than as a way to force people into a mold that is no longer large enough to fit all of us into. There are too many people and too many ideas that perhaps no longer run in step with the story of the brave little band of pilgrims in search of religious freedom.
It may be important to remember, for example, that not only were the British not the first European colonizers even of the east coast of North America, (St. Augustine, founded by the Spanish in Florida long predates any other) but the Pilgrims were not even the first British colony to be established. Jamestown had been in existence for several years and an Anglican church had been established before the Pilgrims were given a land grant in Virginia by the English king, who was probably thrilled to be rid of them. They had been, after all, causing him a great deal of trouble, and it was not long after they left England that the great debate finally came to a head, a civil war ensued, and the king was himself beheaded. They were headed for Virginia, but in those days navigation was not the exact science that it later became, and they landed instead in what is now Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts in late November. Cruising on up the coast they found what seemed to be a friendly landfall in the place they named New Plimoth or Plimoth Plantation on the day after Christmas in 1620. Not that they would have noted that. They didn't celebrate Christmas, considering it a Pagan holiday, which indeed it mostly is.
There has been an attempt to distinguish them completely from the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Boston a few years later in order to make them seem warmer and less rigid than those who came later. Puritan, after all, is not a word that evokes the warm fuzzy feelings that our founding myth tends to awaken in us. Nevertheless, they were in the same mold but even more radical, and they believed that the Anglican church had gone so far down the road of sin and popery that there could be no saving it, no way to purify it, and they became separatists. The Puritans, as their name implies, merely wanted to purify the existing church. A recent way to change the Pilgrims' identity is to say that they didn't all have religious reasons for coming. That is perfectly true. We know that Miles Standish, for instance, was more interested in adventure (and possible wealth) than religion, and there were others, called strangers, who may have been England's first experiment in the transportation of felons. However, it was the religious radicals who conceived and financed the journey. They believed in a state founded upon the true church. Their idea of the true church. The Mayflower Compact, signed November 21, shortly before the landing at what became Provincetown, organized the colony according to the ideals of congregational polity. They rejected music, decoration and festivals in their churches, and mandated the same earnestness in their daily life. It was the requirement both for believers and for strangers.
I wish that it were true that they came to these shores for religious freedom, and if it were not for those religious fascists who keep telling us that we were founded as a Christian nation rather than one of religious freedom, perhaps we could continue to believe it. The only religious freedom they were interested in, however, was their own. They established the church in their image and required everyone to support it and live by its rules. They believed that they could and would establish the Kingdom of God on earth by living according to the guide that they found in the Old and New Testament, and deviation from that guide was not allowed. The real push for religious freedom came later, led, of course, by Thomas Jefferson, and centered in what had been the earlier colony in Virginia. The Virginia colony had been established for secular rather than religious reasons. For the individuals who came to Virginia first the goals were economic and probably adventurous. For their supporters in the court of England, the goal was, as always with nations, the expansion of land and power. It was not those who looked for the establishment of the Kingdom of God who believed in religious freedom but those who sought kingdoms on this earth. That is, perhaps, understandable, and it may be a reason to continue to remind ourselves that the Pilgrim Fathers were neither the first nor the only founders of our country.
One of the most charming aspects of the myth of the Pilgrims is the relationship with the Wampanoag Indians who greeted the Pilgrims in friendly fashion, helped them to survive and flourish and were invited to the first Thanksgiving to share in the fruits of labor that they had helped to provide. It is quite possibly true. It is also true that as the colonies in Massachusetts increased in population and began expanding further, they began to encroach on land that the Wampanoags used, closing it to them, and it was not long before King Philip's War began. King Philip was a chief of the Wampanoag, and the war was bloody and bitter. The colonists, as you know, won it, and though there are descendants of the Wampanoags still living in Connecticut and Massachusetts, their defeat in that war led almost to their extinction. It was the first in the many betrayals of trust between European newcomers and the people who had first migrated to this great land.
Having said all that about the lack of truth in this founding myth of ours, I don't want you to think that I believe that we should just throw it out as we so often seem to be urged to do when we discover that our heroes are not quite as we have been taught to believe. I think it will still be appropriate to celebrate Thanksgiving only in part in celebration of the fruits of the earth and family solidarity when we can find them to celebrate, but in part also in celebration of that small, courageous band. There are things of worth and beauty in the story that it would be sad and even dangerous to lose. The lies our teachers taught us sometimes have a kernel of important truth.
The story of the founding of Plymouth, of the Pilgrim Fathers, is being used again as it has been used in the past to justify structures of self-righteousness, of oppression and of repression in our country. It is possible to use it so. Surely much about the Puritan point of view was oppressive and self-righteous. Nevertheless, there is much in the story to admire and to appropriate, much that we should refuse to cede to those who would make it the enemy of freedom. There is a better reason that it became our founding myth than that they were European Christian radicals. Indeed that in itself would never have accomplished it. It is not the way we want to think of ourselves. Instead what gave it its mythical stature is that it is a link with those characteristics of freedom, generosity, commitment and accountability that have done so much to make our nation what it is. On Thanksgiving Day, then, let us continue to tell the story of the tiny band whose courage and faithfulness brought them through incredible dangers and hardship - half of them were lost that first year before the first Thanksgiving - and did much to change the world. Let us tell of the tiny ship, the fruitful land, the rock upon which the Pilgrims landed. Let us tell also of the ideal of the city on the hill, the city dedicated to all goodness and holiness, the redemption of the world. Let us tell of the kindly people who welcomed them and gave them the help they needed so that half of them survived. Let us tell of the danger, the hunger and the want that could not daunt them. Let us tell of the first Thanksgiving when in spite of all that they had suffered, they celebrated with joy and shared that celebration with the friends who had aided them. Let us tell of their thankfulness and faithfulness to that which is greater than safety, greater than plenty, greater than life itself, the ideal of goodness and of holiness. Let us tell the story in such a way that we will add to our understanding, to our respect for, all people, to our own faithfulness to our ideals. Let us be thankful for all those things for which they were thankful and for something more: for the story that leads us to freedom and to love.