“If we met the Pilgrims today, we probably wouldn’t like them very much.”
The words hit me like a wave of cold sea water heaving over the gunwale of The Mayflower. My 8 year old and I were watching a documentary about the Pilgrims last week. He loves movies. I love history. So we compromised. The words were uttered by some history professor, probably another left winger wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. You know the type. But it jarred me because he was right. Oh, I have long revered our nation’s Founders, the Pilgrims. I have been to the coastal town of Plymouth, England and seen where they shoved off Old Blighty headed for the New World. But as a modern American fattened by affluence and ease of life, I realize to my shame the professor was probably right. It makes us worldlings uncomfortable to be around people so committed to their God that they sacrifice everything for Him.
But as I study what they faced in 17th century England, I can’t help but wonder if we may have the opportunity to “circle back,” as Jen Psaki used to say, and have the “opportunity” to demonstrate their faith in suffering again.
The Pilgrims were non-conformists. They had been influenced by the Reformation and John Calvin and Martin Luther, but mostly by the Bible, now in abundance thanks to the printing press. And they believed that the existing churches, the Roman Catholic and then, closer to home, the Church of England, were too far gone for them to join. And that made them outcasts in their society.
The Pilgrims had hoped that King James might reform the Church of England when he took the throne in 1603. He had been shaped by the Reformation. But instead, he cruelly repressed them. Some were jailed. Others lost their jobs. To put it modern terms, the Pilgrims were cancelled.
They were unwilling to change their beliefs to please the spirit of their age. Does any of that sound familiar? Are you willing to say that God made us male and female? Are you willing to say that homosexuality is a sin? Are you willing to say that COVID started in a Chinese lab? That masking doesn’t stop viruses? That the COVID virus has harmful side effects for many? Having un-approved beliefs comes with a cost.
Our Pilgrim fathers signed the Mayflower Compact before they waded ashore in November 1620. It’s one of the foundational documents of American history. It paved the way for the Constitution and the civic liberties we enjoy. But it was all dreamy supposition unless the Pilgrims had been willing to DO something with their principles. They had to suffer to make their principles come to life in a new land and nation.
The Wall Street Journal publishes every Thanksgiving since 1961 a powerful reflection on what the Pilgrims suffered. It’s based on the diary of Pilgrim leader William Bradford. It vividly describes what they suffered to make freedom real when they arrived in the New World:
Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.
Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.
If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.
Through suffering, the Pilgrims birthed this great land we call America. By God’s grace it has been a beacon of hope to the world, a city shining on a hill, as Bradford said, quoting Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. But like all human endeavors, it wanes and rots over time without an outside infusion of God’s grace. It’s to the point now that Christians, who founded this nation, are now outsiders, non-conformists, once again. To believe in God, in Jesus, in the Bible, in Biblical sexuality, is to set yourself at odds with the ruling regime in media and government. The nation that was founded by Christians now cancels them. We don’t know how this all will end. We do know that the Pilgrims could go to a New World, at great cost. We have no such place to escape. I am not sure where we will go. But we will not go alone. Happy Thanksgiving.
