This week, we celebrate our most Christian and theological holiday: Thanksgiving. While we associate the day with football and turkey, its roots are far grittier. The Puritans, those zealous Christians who sought to restore the church, gave us this holiday. But for them, it wasn’t just a feast; it was a celebration of their God-centered theology.
When the Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod in late 1620, they didn’t step into a paradise. They came ashore in a territory marked by tragedy, where previous explorers had been tortured and murdered. Yet, they found fields already cleared — the result of a disease that had devastated the native population. Later, they met Squanto, a man who had remarkably learned English after having been taken to England, and who returned just in time to teach the Pilgrims how to survive the harsh winter.
Where others might see coincidence, the Pilgrims saw the hand of God. So, they called for a “Thanksgiving,” a time to thank God for what He had provided. They didn’t just say, “This was fun, let’s do it again next year.” Thanksgiving was an expression of deep belief in Providence — the idea that God rules over everything.
Fasting vs. feasting
It may seem odd to modern observers, but the Puritans didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter. Instead, they kept the weekly Sabbath and two types of dynamic, spontaneous days: Fast Days and Thanksgiving Days.
They didn’t wait for a calendar date. If there were droughts, shipwrecks, or moral failures in the community, they viewed these as discipline from God. They would immediately call a “day of humiliation.” Families arrived early at church, dressed simply, and spent the day in prayer to afflict the soul. As a Puritan pastor defined it:
“An extraordinary part or act of Gospel worship wherein for a convenient season we abstain from the comforts of this life, and upon due examination of our ways towards God, and consideration of God’s ways toward us, we make a solemn and real profession that we justify God and judge ourselves.”
Here is the statistic that should shock us: The Puritans held three times as many days of fasting and repentance as they held Thanksgivings.
They understood a psychological and spiritual truth we have forgotten: to be truly thankful, we need “dark nights of the soul.” We must taste the bitter to appreciate the sweet. Today, we have kept the feasting but neglected the fasting.
The problem with ‘luck’
Thanksgiving is a genuinely Christian holiday because it rejects the concept of luck. If your good life is the result of random happenstance, there is no one to thank — you just got lucky. It would make no more sense to be thankful to the universe than it would be to sincerely thank the state government if you won the lottery.
Conversely, if you believe you are entirely “self-made” — that your success is solely due to your hard work and smarts — you have no need for gratitude, only pride.
True thankfulness arises when we believe in providence — that a holy God perfectly rules our affairs. It acknowledges that our location, our era, and our blessings are gifts, not accidents. We can’t be thankful to the “little god” of modern imagination — a deity who merely cheers for us but has no control over nature or history. We need the God of the Puritans.
In 1671, Pium, a “Red Puritan” and Native American convert, captured this spirit perfectly. His prayer reminds us that gratitude is about recognizing the Source of all things:
“Now we have food and clothes more than we were wont to have before we prayed to God, and we have contented ourselves therewith, and have bent our minds more to look after heavenly riches…
We do give humble thanks unto thy holy name, O Lord our God, for our life, health, food, raiments, and for the present food whereby we are refreshed. We thank thee, O Lord, for the love we find among our friends, and of our freedom in good discourse for the good of our souls. We do pray for a blessing upon both, that our food may strengthen our bodies, and our discourse may do good to our souls. Help me so to declare thy word and thy works, that I may win their souls to love thee, and to forsake their sins, and turn unto the Lord by true repentance. These and all other mercies we pray for, in the name, and for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen”
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.
