Christians should “Resist or subvert Thanksgiving”
ATHOLIC ANARCHY urges us to Resist or subvert Thanksgiving, pointing out that the holiday is an idolatrous pagan feast of the sort our ancestors avoided (or died trying to avoid):
Thanksgiving and other civil “holi-days” (holy days) are indeed not “secular” at all, but are intrinsically religious. More than that, they are idolatrous and pagan in that they give heavy theological significance to the nation-state of the u.s.a.
Huw blogged this on November 26th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Tags: christianity, thanksgiving | Category: AnarXPistos
Discussion: You came too late to this party
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Tags: christianity, thanksgiving | Category: AnarXPistos
Discussion: You came too late to this party
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I was excited when I got your Tweet about this although I did not know the direction it would go. I am pretty down on Thanksgiving these days. I used to think it was a nice , non-commercial alternative to the aptly titled consumptionmas (consumptionmass?) but it really is for most part and parcel of the same- it is an excuse for gluttony.
not sure what subverting consists of, but I’m unwilling to let the choices be ‘do it this way’ or ‘don’t do it at all.’ We had turkey sandwiches and a kettle of veggie soup with my in-laws. Shared laughter, tears, gratitude and lots of hugs with family we don’t see often and who are fading rather quickly. The ‘givens’ of turkey and pumpkin pie gives enough structure that people can deal with the messed up schedule in a pretty constrained world. Take the challenge of finding what’s meaningful and what feeds, what you can give and what you want to receive, and then let the rest go with thanks. Perhaps that’s subversive, but it isn’t intentionally so, or really in outcome….
The day that changed T’giving for me was the year I attended a joint liturgy of the Episcopal, Catholic & Reform Jewish congregations in Alexandria. The Rabbi read the actual T’giving proclamation made by RR — with her prayer voice, and she HATED RR — but to call our country to a day of prayer and gratitude, of celebration and refocusing. Starting there, it’s an easy step into the Kingdom.
Subversion: At supper the other night, we tried to explain to a 9 year old – who was learning the very standard mythology in school – why it is that American Thanksgiving happens so long after the harvest. We had to do this without letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak: it’s not up to us to explain (absent the boy’s parents) that there is “no santa clause” in this case, or no warm, fuzzy feast day with whites and reds sharing a turkey and some pumpkin pie. That, it dawns on me, is the subversion we speak of.
There is a thanksgiving episode of Northern Exposure where the local native people (of various Alaskan tribes) throw rotten tomatoes at all the white folks. Joel Fleischman spends the first half of the episode asking “WTF?” and then learns why it is that that aboriginal peoples hate this holiday. I seem to remember there is even a parade… *that* is the subversive part: weaving that story into a traditional “Holiday Episode” of a popular American TV show.
How do you weave the *real* story of Thanksgiving into our culture, countering our huge case of denial? The idea of simply “turning off” the holiday is not the real subversion (although for some of us, including me in most years) that might be all we can achieve: providing “Turning off” includes not shopping on Black Friday, too. Real subversion would seem to go beyond avoiding consumption and, instead, using that consumption to attack the very system that it intends to prop up.
Imagine a “seder” sort of Thanksgiving, presented as art, wherein we knowingly commemorate the destruction and oppression of native peoples (in North and South America, in the “banana republics”, in Asia) that makes our consumption possible. That seder would also include commemoration of the out-class Africans, Asians, Hispanics and lower-class Whites who have been and who continue to be responsible for the building and maintenance of our food sources and subcultures. And that seder would *celebrate* the liberty we win by virtue of their hard work. We would “give thanks” to our own ability to oppress others, our governments actions to that end, our own complicity. The room could be decorated in very realistic and gory photos show us how we eat on their backs… That’s what the secular “holiday” is really about.
Imagine an “operation rescue”, keeping shoppers from spending money at the mall on Friday by showing pictures of sweatshop labour and martial oppression in “developing” countries… Or that same “rescue” operation could be deployed at grocery stores the weeks prior to the feast. Not a facile vegan protest over “animal rights” but rather comments about actual humans destroyed in our food consumption, actual lives damaged by globalism, cultures killed off by deforestation, industrial farming.
Overturning the tables in our modern temples would result in a very speedy legal backlash: and that, in turn, would show the truth of the claims.
Subversion…