A secular life of thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is coming. Every year, this quintessential American holiday fades into greater cultural insignificance, dwarfed by the candy and costume apocalypse of Halloween and the commercial tsunami of Christmas.

Some Christians complain that people have come to say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.” But the greater secular shift has been to ignore Thanksgiving, merging it with the “holiday season.” There used to be regular church services around Thanksgiving and public school programs about the Pilgrims. Not so much anymore.

A November cartoon by Jeff Keane—The Family Circus—shows the family walking toward a store with all its Christmas displays and advertising. One of the children asks, “Aren’t they goin’ to have Thanksgiving this year, Mommy?”

Secularists should reject this cultural judgment of irrelevance. We should rethink the holiday to create a new and positive secularism of thanksgiving.

Capitalist indifference and colonialist embarrassment

In a purely behavioral sense, Thanksgiving has not gone away. Families still gather from afar for a festive meal. In 2024, the Sunday after Thanksgiving was the busiest air travel day of the year. A record-setting 82 million people are expected to travel 50 miles or more from home during the Thanksgiving holiday this year, according to the American Automobile Association. And there are still sporting events and parades to watch.

The cultural disappearance of Thanksgiving is about something else. The holiday has been undone by capitalist indifference, colonialist embarrassment and the decline of religion.

In terms of capitalism, business has no interest in Thanksgiving, as the cartoon illustrates. Money is going to spent by consumers—on food and travel—but that spending sustains itself without the need for stimulation by advertising. Nor can that spending be significantly increased. You cannot really advertise that this year people should buy two turkeys.

The key to making money on Thanksgiving is actually to shrink the holiday. Black Friday sales started that process years ago. Then business tried to make more money by holding Thanksgiving Day sales. Thankfully, there was cultural pushback. For now, the actual day of Thanksgiving is pretty much still a no-spending day.

Our embarrassment about colonialism has to do with how the history of Thanksgiving played out. The myth of Thanksgiving is that Europeans arrived in the Americas and faced starvation in their first winter. Indigenous people took pity on them and helped them survive. This led to a feast of thanks and shared friendship.

But more and more people are aware that this lovely episode is a myth. In fact, the real history ended with genocide by Europeans perpetrated against the native population of North America. Growing up, I always thought the Indians would have been smarter to let the Pilgrims starve in 1621.

Even with President Donald Trump in the White House, honoring white dominance, we are hardly going to celebrate that history.

Finding secular reasons for gratitude

Of the three reasons for Thanksgiving’s eclipse, the main problem with the holiday is that it was always about thanking God. Thanksgiving was an important part of the quasi-Protestant Civil Religion that dominated America from its founding until sometime in the 1970s. An increasingly secular America has had little interest in such a religious tradition.

But here, secularists make a mistake. We are missing an opportunity to deepen and renew secular life. Why can’t there be a secularism infused with thanksgiving—not just once a year, but constantly?

I can give a concrete example of what I mean. Last week, I was going to the airport with my wife for a family funeral in Florida—my brother had died. The cab was to pick us up at 7:30 in the morning. But first, I had to drop the dogs off at the boarder, which opens at 6:30. I had just enough time to go there, drop off the dogs and get back home for the cab.

But, when I got in the car, I realized what a stupid plan this had been. You can’t miss a plane to a funeral. What if the car had not started? What if I had an accident? Or a flat tire? Or there was traffic? Obviously, I should have dropped the dogs off the day before.

Fortunately, everything went fine. But, on my way back to the house, a strange thing happened. A blessing came to me—“Praise be to Hashem for the regularity of the world.”

I have to explain the background of this experience. I was raised in Cheder, which is orthodox Judaism’s form of elementary school. I was taught to see the beneficence of God in all things and to offer praise and thanks all the time. Even when going to the bathroom. I was to thank God for the orifices of my body, without which I could not live.

The word Hashem means “the name.” Praise Hashem is a respectful way of invoking God without using his name.

As many kids would, I grooved to all this. It was part of the magic of Jewish life for a young child. As I got older I left all that behind. I grew up. Eventually, I left Judaism altogether.

But, as my experience that day on the road showed, I never really left behind that practice of childhood blessing.

It occurs to me now, why not renew that practice of giving thanks? The fact that my stupid plan with the dogs did not result in a problem really was a grace from the universe. And it did remind me of all the other aspects of life that I take for granted but are constant gifts to me. From the tire that remains inflated, to the oxygen I breathe, to the love of my wife and family, to the very fact of life itself, which my brother’s funeral had brought home to me.

Why can’t there be a secularism of constant thanksgiving? The fact that Judaism does not name God ushers in the possibility of sharing this practice of praise and blessing with a secular world. We could thank the universe for all of its gifts. Those gifts are real, after all. I have done nothing to deserve them. Why should I not be constantly grateful?

Secular and humanist groups have begun doing good deeds, like many churches do. In Pittsburgh, for example, the Freethought Community often does things like cleaning the sides of roads or fundraising for charities. We secularists have discovered that these kinds of activities, which religious people always have engaged in, are healthy for people.

However, we have not yet extended this line of thinking to the effect of religion and ritual on character and personal development. We should. A life of constant thanksgiving would also be good for people.

Of course, the problem is that monotheistic religion has someone to thank—God. It is a little awkward to just be thankful, without anyone to be the object and subject of our thanksgiving. We will have to create new liturgical forms to solve that problem, but it does not seem insurmountable.

The fact is, the universe is a very beneficent place for us. We should always be happy to acknowledge that. We should always be grateful. We can take the first step in that direction by creating and living a genuine Thanksgiving practice, starting right now, this very year.