Thanksgiving 2024: Grateful to be a Christian and an American

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. As a child, I preferred it even over Christmas. As I approach my 78th Thanksgiving, I am full of gratitude that I have so much to be thankful for as a Christian and as an American.

It is appropriate that Thanksgiving appears on the calendar in such close proximity to Advent on the Christian calendar. Advent signals the four Sundays preceding Christmas as Christians the world over celebrate the birth of our Savior and Lord, the greatest gift ever given. As the Apostle John reminds us, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

Nothing can exceed or surpass the Gospel “good news” that God has provided a way to rescue us from our guilt and sin and provide us with eternal life if we will believe in Him and accept Jesus as our Savior. I cannot comprehend our Heavenly Father’s love for each of us, but I am grateful beyond measure that it is so and I embrace it with alacrity!

I am thankful beyond measure that Jesus is my Savior and Lord and that my eternal destiny is safely in His hands.

I am thankful that God has called me into His ministry to preach and share the Gospel of salvation with the world. It has been an indescribable joy to preach and teach the "good news" of the Gospel.

I am further grateful that in the providence and plan of God, I was born in America to parents who were Christians and raised me in a Christian home. Of all the places in the world one could be born, I cannot imagine a better place than the United States, especially if you are not part of a privileged class. There is no other country in the world where the “average” man or woman has the opportunity through hard work to flourish to the fullest extent of their abilities.

When I hear people criticizing America as racist and sexist, I wonder why such critics never ask themselves why it is so many people want to immigrate here, most of them people of color. Why do they come? Because they have the opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their families here that they would never have in their countries of origin.

I am grateful that America is a country of laws where the people have rights which are guaranteed, rather than granted by the government.

As I have pondered the results of the 2024 elections, I have been encouraged by the apparent extent to which rank-and-file American voters have rejected the insidiousness of critical race theory and “wokeness.” It appears the vast majority of Americans of various ethnicities perceive themselves first and foremost as Americans rather than as Hispanics, Asians, Blacks, Native Americans, or Anglos.

When I was a Princeton undergraduate back in 1968, I had a very engaging and gifted sociology professor named Marvin Bressler. As a consequence of his influence, I applied to, and was accepted, into a special honors program in “American Civilization” that studied American culture from the various disciplines of economics, history, literature, politics, psychology and sociology.

It was truly a privilege to have been chosen to participate in this remarkable program. As a consequence of having experienced this course of study, I believe I came to a deeper understanding of the “uniqueness” of our country than I otherwise could have achieved.

One day in class, Dr. Bressler said, “Gentlemen, the political future of the United States will ultimately be determined by whether Hispanics behave like Italians or Jews.”

Dr. Bressler, who was Jewish, pointed out that demographic evidence revealed that Jews continued to vote overwhelmingly liberal no matter how many generations they had been in America, whereas Italian-Americans tended to vote more conservatively the more generations they had resided in America.

It appears that increasingly Hispanics are indeed behaving like Italian-Americans, politically, the longer they have resided in America.

One dramatic indication that ethnicity in dominant ethnic groups is receding as a determinative factor in voting patterns is, “According to NBC news, since 2012 there has been a 15-point shift toward Republicans among black voters, a 32-point shift among Asians, and a 38-point shift among Latinos,” according to The Wall Street Journal.   

At an even more elemental level, a recent Pew Research Center study revealed that “among people who married in 2022, 32% of Asian Americans married outside their ethnic group, as did 30% of Hispanics, 23% of black people and 15% of white people,” writes David Brooks in the Times.

I pray that these are indications that we are edging ever closer to Dr. King’s dream of a country where people “are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”