Learning Lessons from the Pilgrims

In November, 2020 we will be celebrating the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Harbor in what is now Massachusetts.  But why did the Pilgrims embark on this daring voyage from England via Holland to another continent?  As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving this week, and then the quadricentennial anniversary in 2020, I wanted to be sure that I have the “Pilgrim story” correct. (See “Further Reading” below.)

Historians record that the Pilgrims left England for Holland in 1607 in pursuit of religious freedom from the Church of England.  Also known as separatists, the Pilgrims correctly believed that “the Church” had strayed from biblical Christianity in the years following the Protestant Reformation.  While religious freedom was their chief motive for leaving England, this does not explain why the Pilgrims left from Holland on the Mayflower, in 1620.  Robert Tracy McKenzie, professor of history and chair of the history department at Wheaton College, finds in the writings of William Bradford who later became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony what I will consider to be three reasons the Pilgrims left Holland for North America.

First, the Pilgrim’s placed high priority on establishing godly families and a community patterned according to their understanding of biblical principles.  Hoping to accomplish this goal in Holland, they instead encountered a morally permissive Dutch culture that made it difficult for Pilgrim parents to raise their children with “due correction without reproof or reproach from their neighbors.”

Second, over half of the separatists that came to Holland had to become textile factory workers.  According to McKenzie, in place of the seasonal rhythms of farm life they had known in England, the Pilgrims faced the work of carding, spinning, or weaving in their own homes from dawn to dusk, six days a week, merely to keep body and soul together. Hunger and want had become their taskmaster.

Perhaps the Pilgrims might have tolerated the moral laxity and harsh economic conditions, were it not for what they saw as a third, more fundamental reason for leaving Holland.  They came to understand that the first two factors were becoming a threat to maintaining a vibrant Christian faith.  To these separatists, their daily walk of faith depended upon a cohesive faith community centered around strong families and church.  Therefore, we should call these committed Christians “Pilgrims” and “separatists” not because they separated geographically and sailed to an alien land.  Instead, the two names fit because their faith in God and His Word had led them to view themselves as “Pilgrims” and “separatists” from a world whose secular values were in opposition to their beliefs. 

Having left England for religious freedom, the Pilgrims found themselves in a Dutch culture that threatened to smother their lives of faith with the worries of this life, the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things (Mark 4: 19).  Maybe their “second separation,” a separation that led them to cut their moorings from a permissive, materialistic culture of Holland and set sale on the Mayflower, was a greater challenge than separating from the Church of England.  Whatever the case, the Pilgrim story provides Americans today with a choice of two Thanksgiving narratives—and more broadly, two American narratives.

Professor McKenzie challenges Christians today not to seize on the first narrative as simply “ammunition for the culture wars” against an unbelieving culture that undervalues or despises “religious liberty.”  While I do not deny that Christ-followers have an important role in standing against threats to religious liberty, the institutions of marriage and family, and other freedoms under the U.S. Constitution, we must not ignore the second Pilgrim/American narrative.  As Christ-followers, we must not forget that we too are called in the power of the Holy Spirit to be “pilgrims in a foreign land” and as such to remember another battlefront—one within our own souls, as the Apostle Peter reminds early believers (emphasis mine):

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that you may proclaim the excellence of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light: who in time past were no people, but now are God's people, who had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.  Beloved, I beg you as foreigners and pilgrims, to abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; having good behavior among the nations, so in that of which they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they see, glorify God in the day of visitation (1 Peter 2: 9-12).

Providentially, the Cape Cod coastline provided safe harbor.

Here, I must admit that as I write, I am “preaching to myself.”  I find it much easier to be my own political and cultural warrior against materialism and moral laxness than to focus regularly on battling the thorns and thistles that tend to grow and thrive within my soul.  So easily, they can crowd out my priority of seeking the peace of God and the fellowship with His Holy Spirit through daily time in prayer and the Word of God.   John Winthrop who led 700 Puritan immigrants to New England and was instrumental in founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1630, preached a sermon entitled, “A Model of Christian Charity (Love)” in which he emphasized the spiritual disciplines that promote inner virtues and war against our fleshly selfishness:

Whatsoever we did, or ought to have done, when we lived in England, the same must we do, and more also, where we go. That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with a pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren. 

After challenging his Puritan listeners, Winthrop gives instruction and his vision for righteous living in community of Massachusetts Bay.  His message also challenges me to discipline my inner life so my words and actions will showcase Christ’s love in my marriage, family, church, and government (emphasis mine):

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

In summary, may I apply Winthrop’s challenge to all of us who choose to regard this year’s Thanksgiving as a holiday, or “holy day?”  In true “holy-day” spirit, we must direct our “thankfulness” to God, the only object worthy of our thanks—not to ourselves or our accomplishments, not to America or her cropland, forests, fisheries, mines; or great leaders and past heroes, as much as we ought to be thankful for all of these.  Our ultimate thanksgiving must be uplifted to the only Worthy Object of our thanks: Almighty God.

In giving our thanks to God, may we remember the “Pilgrim Fathers” and their costly commitments to separate not only from a church that was ruled by false doctrine, but from a materialistic and morally drifting culture that threatened the integrity of their marriages, families, and church.  But, most important of all is the lesson for us is in how Pilgrims believed and behaved.  They understood that their primary role was to be witnesses of Jesus Christ and not simply critics of politics and culture. 

In conclusion, Tracy McKinzie challenges us not to ignore the aspects of [the Pilgrim] story that might cast a light into our own hearts. They struggled with fundamental questions still relevant to us today: What is the true cost of discipleship? What must we sacrifice in pursuit of the kingdom? How can we “shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15) and keep ourselves “unspotted from the world” (James 1:27)? What sort of obligation do we owe our local churches, and how do we balance that duty with family commitments and individual desires? What does it look like to “seek first the kingdom of God” and can we really trust God to provide for all our other needs?  As Christians, these are crucial questions we need to revisit regularly. We might even consider discussing them with our families [during] our Thanksgiving celebrations.

Further Reading:
The following articles and two books are recommended as Thanksgiving readings:
Thanksgiving and Black Friday: Invitations to Develop Contentment (2011)
Remembering the “Yearning to Breathe Free” (2013, and edited recently for corrections)
Thanksgiving in a Watching World (2014)
How Do You P-R-A-Y This Thanksgiving? (2015)
McKenzie, Robert Tracy. 2013.  The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us…
Metaxas, Eric.  2012.  Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving.  Thomas Nelson.