The first Thanksgiving, 1621, Pilgrims and natives gather to share a meal, oil painting by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris, 1932/Shutterstock
The settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not escaping religious persecution, writes Jane Borden in The Nation. The Pilgrims and Puritans "left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas," she says, and effectively were part of what is today known as a doomsday cult.
"The Pilgrims and Puritans were high-control radical Protestant doomsday groups. If they were around today, most Americans would identify them as cults," Borden says.
Despite their differences, she says, they were all “Hot Protestants ... as such radicals were known in England. They believed the end of the world as prophesied in the New Testament book of Revelation was imminent."
Religious figures in the colonies were doomsday preppers who predicted different dates for the big day.
“The Day of Doom,” writes Borden, "a long-form poem published in 1662 about the return of a vengeful Jesus, was so popular in New England it’s known as America’s first bestseller."
"The radical Protestants believed, as apocalyptic thinkers always have, that the world contained good and evil forces, eradication was the only goal of both, and each supernatural side had pursued it since the beginning of time," she explains.
These early doomsdayers, she explains, "wanted to hasten the apocalypse by blotting out everything that didn’t fit their ever-shrinking view of righteousness."
UCLA historian Carla Gardina Pestana says that Pilgrim governor William Bradford “thought anyone hostile to Plymouth itself risked God’s anger.”
And contrary to what is taught in most American elementary schools, Borden refutes the fact that these groups came to the New World seeking religious freedom.
"The Pilgrims, in particular, already had religious freedom in Holland, where they lived for 12 years after fleeing England," she explains.
"Along with economic motivations, they came to America because they didn’t want to raise their children in a liberal society. They wanted theocracy. They wanted to be able to expel nonconformists and exert total control over culture," she adds.
The Puritans, she explains, wanted much of the same and executed it — quite literally — in a more violent fashion.
"The Puritans wanted the same — this is why they hanged Quakers, banished dissidents, and, eventually, ended the practice of questions and comments following sermons, because, as Cotton Mather wrote, it was “an occasion of much contention, vexation and folly.” Church attendance was mandatory. They made it illegal to disagree with ministers," she says.
Punishment was a source of humiliation and entertainment for The Puritans, she says.
"Punishment for transgressions was extreme and designed to humiliate, just as it is in cults. Punishment was also a source of entertainment," Borden explains, noting how taverns opened early on trial days so the crowd could pregame the brutality.
Much was taboo, however, including "gossiping, flirting, swearing, smoking, playing ball sports and doing almost anything on the Sabbath were crimes," Borden says.
"Skipping church or criticizing the pastor were also punishable. Residents were encouraged to inform on one another. It was even a crime to interrupt the preacher. Blasphemy called for the death sentence," she notes.
Freedom in the New World seemed a foreign concept, in fact, she explains.
"In Pilgrim and Puritan communities, there was not just a culture of punishment; there was a culture of conformity. These were high-control groups, meaning the groups’ leaders used community pressure and threats of punishment, ostracism, and damnation to regulate residents’ behavior, thoughts, and information intake," she writes.
Children had it particularly bad, Borden says.
"Cults and high-control groups are typically most destructive to the children raised in them. In addition to uncertainty of their status among the saved, New England children were subject to fear-based indoctrination and extreme discipline," she writes, adding that parents eschewed affection out of fear it would "spoil them into wickedness."
"Scholars who’ve pored over diaries kept by the Puritans found that the second and third generations exhibited during adolescence significant increases in melancholy, pathological abnormalities, nervous breakdowns, suicide and insanity," she notes.
Despite all of this, Pilgrims and The Puritans became the poster-children for America's founding, she explains.
"Nevertheless, in the mid-to-late 1800s, the Pilgrims and Puritans became the avatars of America’s founding — in part because of associations with the new Thanksgiving holiday, and in part, as some scholars have argued, because the nation was struggling to define its identity and to separate its origins from the slave trade," she says.
Their radical ideology never went away, Borden writes. In fact, it has become the foundation of American culture.
"From these remarkably successful colonies, we inherited our knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, obsession with self-investigation, tendency to worship the wealthy and desire for a strong man to rescue us from crisis," she writes.
"Americans today often wonder “how we got here” as a nation. My answer: the Mayflower and Arabella," Borden says.
"This Thanksgiving is as good a time as any to begin coming to terms with the country’s radical cultish origins. The consequences are ongoing, and we’re all in this together. There’s no going back. The Mayflower and Arabella aren’t offering return tickets."