Thanksgiving holiday a remnant of religious freedom

Giving thanks for American Exceptionalism

By Michael Novak

From at least 1776 until 1828 (the publication of Webster’s Dictionary) “religion” was defined as “the duty we owe to the Creator and the manner of discharging it.” The Framers thought it a self-evident truth.

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One of the traits, the great Tocqueville writes, that makes the United States distinctive is that here religion and liberty are friends, not at enmity as in France. “Freedom sees religion as the companion of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its rights.” For this reason, Tocqueville called religion “the first of their political institutions.” Tocqueville wrote such things (and many more like them) both to observe a fact he saw acted out all around him and to offer profound reflections on them. After all, his aim was to grasp the differentiating traits of democracy so as to make it understandable in Continental Europe.

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