On Thanksgiving the far-left Nation published an argument recasting the Pilgrims and Puritans in a deliberately hostile light, calling them “radical Protestant doomsday groups” with a “cultish” ideology that “became the foundation of American culture,” and urging readers to treat the holiday “as good a time as any to begin coming to terms with the country’s radical cultish origins.” This piece pushes a narrow political reading of history that turns a national day of gratitude into a culture war prop, and it’s worth unpacking both the claim and the motives behind it. The debate matters because how we tell our national story shapes civic identity and what we pass on to the next generation.
The Nation’s framing leans hard into character assassination by putting those exact words front and center, and that choice matters because language shapes perception; to call the Pilgrims “radical Protestant doomsday groups” and their beliefs “cultish” is to erase the context of seventeenth-century survival, conviction, and community-building. Those early settlers did have intense religious views, yes, but intense belief and cultish behavior are not the same thing, and the quick leap to moral condemnation collapses nuance for the sake of a headline. If you concede every historical actor to modern caricature, you end up with no one left to defend the messy roots of American freedom.
From a conservative perspective, Thanksgiving is not a blind celebration of every action in our past but a recognition that gratitude, self-reliance, and a willingness to form voluntary communities played a practical role in making this country work. The Pilgrims and Puritans contributed things worth remembering: experiments in self-governance, a stress on literacy and law, and a moral vocabulary that informed later calls for liberty and responsibility. To reduce those contributions to a single pejorative label is to do a disservice to citizens who want to teach children both pride and an honest accounting of faults.
There is a pattern emerging when cultural critics single out founding-era groups and demand their erasure or constant apology; it’s not about deeper historical accuracy so much as cultural control, deciding which stories get to survive in public life. Recasting Thanksgiving as a moment to “come to terms with the country’s radical cultish origins” turns civic education into endless contrition exercises, which do less to build character than to cultivate cynicism about national institutions. People can learn complexity without being told that every tradition is inherently poisonous and must be purged.
This isn’t a defense of every practice in early America; Puritan discipline could be harsh, and theocratic impulses did surface in certain places and moments, and those facts deserve straightforward teaching. But clarity means distinguishing between doctrinal rigor and the kind of closed, manipulative cult behavior the Nation attributes to those communities, and it also means recognizing the positive strands—religious commitment that motivated charity, schooling that expanded literacy, and local governance that seeded republican ideas. Conservatives can hold historical fault and historical value in the same hand without folding to the left’s insistence that complexity is a condemnation.
If Thanksgiving becomes another battleground where public memory is rewritten through the lens of present‑day ideology, we risk turning a holiday that brings families together into a ritual of political indoctrination. There is room for sober study of our imperfect past alongside the simple act of giving thanks and gathering with loved ones, and Americans should reject efforts to reduce national heritage to a scorecard of sins. The question for readers isn’t whether history is tidy or comfortable, but who gets to decide the stories that shape our children’s sense of belonging and purpose, and Republicans should be loud and clear in defending a balanced, patriotic approach to that task.
