The First Thanksgiving

I had a great Thanksgiving. How about you?

The turkey I ate was wonderful, just like what the Pilgrims ate….. or was it? Did they even have turkey to eat in 1621?

The study of American history is a tough thing to deal with for Christians. We are annoyed and quite accustomed to revisionists who want to exorcise Christianity out of America’s past. On the other hand, a lot of ideas about history that have been passed down to us over the generations do not always line up with the facts. Is there a responsible Christian way to approach our nation’s past?

Robert Tracy McKenzie, an historian at Wheaton College, has written a new book, The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History, that attempts to set the record straight (with a measure of humility with respect to the challenges to doing history) and still show us the Biblical and historical lessons that we can learn from our nation’s forebears.

Here is the book’s trailer and then a brief interview with the author addressing a question that many evangelical Christians merely assume to be true, “Were the Pilgrims just like us?”:

More discussion is available here at the Patheos Book Club.

Audio podcast with Al Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Society, interviewing McKenzie here.