Some thirty million Americans are thought to be descended from the Pilgrims of the Mayflower; about 6.8 million Americans claim Native American ancestry. A much smaller number used to gather in Plymouth, Massachusetts each year to claim a Day of Mourning on behalf of the Indians. What gives?
Doug Phillips from Vision Forum witnessed the change to the marker at Cole’s Hill, the Pilgrim’s burial place above Plymouth. He describes how the new marker installed in 1999 radically reinterpreted the facts and significance of the settlement, claiming the refugees from England and Holland were somehow responsible for the “genocide” of native Americans. But it’s curious that attention would focus on the quiet and devout Separatists of Plymouth rather than the more contentious settlers of the same generation, elsewhere.
There were several features of the Pilgrim experience, after all, which should ring a chord with the best liberal traditions, even the counter-cultural left. The Separatist movement had a long history of non-violent civil disobedience against government and religious establishment (which amounted to the same thing in 17th C. England). For matters of individual conscience, they had refused orders to conform to the established religion. Some had eventually crossed the Channel to a more liberal country, Holland, so they could practice and live according to their convictions. They gave up home and friends, and in some cases successful businesses, to live a life in the American wilderness that was communal in nature, sharing labor and reward regardless of class and background.
And in a time when contemporaries (and some for centuries to come) debated whether people of color even had souls, the Pilgrims believed they not only had souls but minds, and treated them with the same integrity and respect they expected for themselves. They not only accepted the advice and help of the Wampanoag tribe, but took up arms together as allies against the aggression of other tribes whether directed at the Wampanoag or at the Pilgrims. This is a far cry from the behavior of later settlers and those who eventually rose to power in Washington.
So why would the settlers of Plymouth draw such disdain?
Could it be the distinct and pervasive influence of Christian belief on the policy and practice of the settlement? When liberal commentators are grinding their teeth over the largely Republican evangelical vote, and liberal entertainers suggest secession (Michael Moore), disenfranchisement (had Garrison Keillor made the same crack about the Democratic-leaning black or Jewish vote, would he still be on public radio the following week? Probably not, and rightly so), or simply dismiss evangelicals as “ignorant” and unsophisticated (Andy Rooney) — one has to consider.
After all, the Pilgrims had the boldness to consider that the God who created them had a claim on their entire lives, including their form of government and the legislation thereof. There was no comfortable compartmentalization for them; teaching on Sunday was applied to the rest of the week. The Bible that instructed them to treat the Indians with honor and respect also motivated them to share the religion which had comforted the Pilgrims through fire and sword, starvation and plague. And the relative peace and eventual success of the Plymouth settlement and their cousins in the later Massachusetts Bay Colony, while more secular and mercenary settlements at Roanoke Island and Jamestown foundered or disappeared, are not the fruit of genocide and theft but of humility and faith. They were bold in their beliefs, because they were first humble enough to acknowledge a Higher Authority than themselves, or their king.
Their early exercise of self-government based on Biblical principles — which incidentally recognized property rights and personal freedom along with admonition to look to the needs of the poor, the community as a whole, and to the strangers among them — was foundational for American culture as a whole.
So what’s wrong with that?
Must be that evangelical thing again.
Thank Whom or what you will this Thursday, but as for me and my house, we will remember Plymouth and thank Plymouth’s God. I hope yours is blessed.