Perhaps more than any other national holiday, Thanksgiving demonstrates America's fundamental identity as a Christian nation, a nation "under God." The Pilgrims who celebrated the first Thanksgiving in October of 1620 were deeply religious Christians who had sailed to this land primarily in order to worship God freely without government interference. They thanked God for the blessings of liberty as well as for the blessing of an abundant harvest that he bestowed upon them. Four centuries later, the Thanksgiving tradition that they started continues up to this day. More than two hundred years after that first Thanksgiving celebration, during a time of great national crisis, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln officially instituted Thanksgiving as an annual national holiday set on the fourth Thursday of November.
Today our nation is again in crisis as our federal government, led by President Barack Obama and his cohorts in the U.S. Senate, is now attacking the very foundation of religious liberty on which America was built by legislating immorality and attempting to reshape our country into a radically secularist nation without God. Thus our country's fundamental identity risks being lost. We must heed the warnings of our Founding Fathers that without the indispensable supports of religion and morality, our liberty will soon collapse. Faith in God and the observance of his Law is the foundation of our religious freedom as well as of all our other freedoms.
We should also gratefully recall the sacrifices of those who fought and gave their lives to defend the rights to life and religious freedom that we enjoy today. Their faith and courage should inspire us to continue praying and working for the end of legalized abortion, the repeal of the HHS mandate, and the defeat of radical secularism, so that this great nation will once again be "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
Happy Thanksgiving.
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