Thanksgiving is only a week away. And while we all appreciate the time off, it’s worth remembering how this holiday came to be and thinking together about whether of not it’s really a good idea.
I think that Presidents Washington and Lincoln were correct about the importance of proclamations of a national day of thanksgiving, to which they both attached their signatures, but wrong to include the phrase “to God”. Though to be fair to each of them, given the age in which they lived, it made perfect sense to do so. President Jackson may have been correct to refuse a national day of prayer, but both he and we should be heavy-hearted about that reality.

No society has cultivated long-term success without nurturing in its members the ability to reflect and meditate on the most important issues of the day. And no society has maintained its strength without cultivating its citizens’ capacity for gratitude. But God need not be a part of that for all Americans, even if it is for most of us. In fact, legislating that God should be, strikes me as an idea that is as wrong as creating national days of thanksgiving and prayer are right.
Perhaps we are not ready for a national day of prayer because we do not yet know how to pull that off without trampling on the rights of those who pray differently or do not consider their reflections to be prayer at all. But the fact that we are not able to accomplish something does not make it a bad idea. It means that we have more work to do as a nation – work on the definitions of prayer and thanksgiving, and work on our ability to respect each other’s forms of ethical or spiritual reflection.
This issue cuts to the heart of a needless dichotomy which weakens our public culture and degrades public conversation about the soul our nation.

Why do so many people presume that for prayer and thanksgiving to be meaningful, God must be invoked? And why for so many others, must the mere mention of prayer and thanksgiving cause an almost allergic reaction of unpleasantness?
In fact, the way out of this needless bickering lies in combining the wisdom of those who support the notion of such national days of prayer and thanksgiving with the legitimate concerns of those who oppose them. That could be accomplished by coming together over the value of thanksgiving and prayer WITHOUT God.
In Hebrew, the word for praying is a reflexive verb. It defines an internal conversation that one has with one’s self. To be sure, God has been a part of that conversation for most of those who pray. But the word itself proves that need not always be so.
Perhaps the permission granted by this ancient tradition could serve as a model for our nation as well. It would assure the freedom of conscience to which we are all entitled while cultivating the kind of heightened awareness from which we all could benefit.