Growing Hostility Toward Christianity in the USA: Tell Your Kids of Thanksgiving Before It's Too Late

Archbishop Bashar Warda, a Chaldean Catholic bishop living in Erbil, Iraq, delivered a chilling message this week to the fifth annual New York-based conference on international religious liberty sponsored by the Anglosphere Society.

Bishop Warda's warning came in his talk entitled Act in Time: Protecting Imperiled Christians in Ancient and Other Lands. He told the assembly of his fear as he watches the growing hostility toward the Christian religion - in the United States. Here is a man living in an area squeezed by radical Muslims and his greatest fear is for the people of the United States.

It's time for us to do something about the persecution of Christianity in our own country before it's too late.  

Let's start with the United States holiday called Thanksgiving.

400 years ago, in September 1620, the Pilgrims came to America. Next year (2021) will be the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving Day celebration in America.

The Pilgrims were Christian people. After purchasing land from the Native Americans and building friendships with them, the Pilgrims welcomed their new friends to a banquet in November 1621 where they gave thanks to Jesus Christ for His provision and protection. 

The Pilgrims undoubtedly prayed at the 1621 harvest feast, now called the First Thanksgiving. However, their Thanksgiving prayers were spontaneous and the exact words were not recorded. A typical prayer might be:

"O Lord our God and heavenly Father, which of Thy unspeakable mercy towards us, hast provided meate and drinke for the nourishment of our weake bodies. Grant us peace to use them reverently, as from Thy hands, with thankful hearts: let Thy blessing rest upon these Thy good creatures, to our comfort and sustentation: and grant we humbly beseech Thee, good Lord, that as we doe hunger and thirst for this food of our bodies, so our soules may earnestly long after the food of eternal life, through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, Amen.

During the Revolutionary War, in tribute to those first Pilgrims, Samuel Adams and the Continental Congress voted into law the following one-sentence, 360-word Thanksgiving proclamation, expressing the sentiments of an entire nation:

“Forasmuch as it is the indispensable duty of all men to adore the superintending providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with gratitude their obligation to him for benefits received…together with penitent confession of their sins, whereby they had forfeited every favor; and their humble and earnest supplications that it may please God through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance…it is therefore recommended…to set apart Thursday the eighteenth day of December next, for solemn thanksgiving and praise, that with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feeling of their hearts and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine Benefactor…acknowledging with gratitude their obligations to Him for benefits received….To prosper the means of religion, for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth ‘in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost’.”

The Continental Congress law passed the above mandate exactly 183 years after the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving Day. Our Founding Fathers officially recognized the day by proclamation of the Constitutional government. 

Thanksgiving Day became a national November holiday during the height of the Civil War in the year 1863. President Abraham Lincoln asked in November 1863 that Americans pray to God and request Him to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” and to “heal the wounds of the nation.” President Lincoln signed a bill proclaiming Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday to be celebrated the last Thursday of November.

Americans have celebrated this special Christian holiday in November ever since, except for a brief two-year interlude when President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving  Day up a week in 1939 in an attempt to spur retail sales during the Great Depression. There's always trouble in a culture when a desire for money supersedes moral principles. Americans derided Roosevelt for moving America's sacred holiday by calling it Franksgiving, so in 1941 President Roosevelt reluctantly signed a bill making permanent the Thanksgiving Day holiday the fourth Thursday in November.

Now there are members of the United States Congress, including Minnesota's Muslim US Representative Ilhan Omar and New York's Marxist US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who wish to do away with Thanksgiving and punish anyone who dares to honor the Judeo-Christian heritage of America. 

These people are not American patriots, and they wish to destroy our country by canceling culture. lhan Omar, a devout Muslim, recently mocked  Arkansas U.S. Senator Tom Cotton. Senator Cotton gave an incredible speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, paying respect and honor to the 400th Anniversary of the Pilgrims landing in America and to America's Thanksgiving Holiday, and to the Christian faith. 

Muslim Representative Ilhan Omar went public in her criticism of Senator Cotton's moving tribute to Christianity's roots in America by tweeting this:

The persecution of Christianity is coming from positions of power in government. It's time citizens of the United States intervene before it is too late. 

I will be doing my part throughout the next year to cause Americans to realize that American exceptionalism is due to the Judeo-Christian heritage that some wish to erase.

We do not want to be the generation that American history books later record as the generation that lost the Republic to socialism, marxism, and humanism because we refused to heed Bishop Warda's warning of protecting the Christian faith from those who seek to destroy it.