Some interesting excepts from an article on Thanksgiving a reader helped me find (thanks to DG): By having Lincoln as its midwife, Thanksgiving also celebrated the blessings of American nationhood as well as its domestic ideals. Thanksgiving was – and is – a holiday of American civil religion, that is, religious belief in the national purpose and destiny. The nation, it was believed, was blessed by God and given a special purpose in the world.(14) (The distinction between Thanksgiving and Christmas in this regard is a matter of degree rather than of kind, since some Victorian Christmas trees in America … Continue reading “The language of civil religion…”