Thanks a Lot, Puritans

America began as a bad group project. The Puritans showed up, called this continent “virgin land,” acted like God was Zeus zapping down a custom Eden just for them, and decided their job was to work hard, suffer visibly, and call it salvation. Psst—don’t tell anyone, but it was always just a metaphor.

And yet here we are, 2025, still living inside their story. We burn the candle at both ends. We wear exhaustion like a badge of honor. We measure our worth in pieces of paper, plastic cards, and how many hours we can devote to a game we made up. The Puritans didn’t just build churches; they built the operating system of American life. Thanks a lot, Puritans.

The Puritan Inheritance

Here’s the deal: Puritan theology equated work with proof of salvation. Labor wasn’t just about survival, it was about showing you were one of God’s chosen. The phrase “idle hands are the devil’s workshop”? That’s them.

And that work-for-worth formula seeped into the soil. It became the Protestant work ethic, the justification for capitalism, the reason why Americans brag about not taking vacation days. It’s why your boss thinks you should answer emails at midnight. It’s why people on LinkedIn humblebrag about “grinding.” It’s why you, right now, feel guilty when you rest.

Separation of church and state? Cute idea, but let’s be honest: we’ve been lying about that from the beginning. The first step we made as a country was literally in the name of God. The Puritans claimed land, authority, and morality with divine backing. That tension—God talk and government power intertwined—is still humming beneath everything from the Supreme Court to school boards.

So when we wonder why Americans collapse into burnout, maybe we should blame the founding myth: salvation-through-suffering.

Thanksgiving as Myth and Mirror

The Puritans left us Thanksgiving, too. The official story: Pilgrims and Indigenous people sat down, shared a meal, and everyone got along for a day. The sanitized, pie-and-turkey version leaves out the violence, disease, and dispossession that came before and after.

But here’s the thing: Thanksgiving still works as a ritual. It’s one of the last communal American holidays where most people, across lines of religion and politics, do roughly the same thing at the same time. We cook, we gather, we eat too much. No presents, no sermons, no pressure to perform beyond showing up with a dish.

Post-COVID, though, we’re clunky. We came back outside and crashed into each other like bumper cars—hurt, messy, half-ready for closeness, half-scared of it. Thanksgiving mirrors that. Families gather, old tensions resurface, someone brings up politics, someone else pours another glass of wine. It’s awkward, imperfect, and human.

Maybe that’s exactly why it matters.

The Possibility

Here’s my left-leaning take: what if we leaned into honesty around Thanksgiving? Instead of keeping the Norman Rockwell illusion, we admit what it is: a patchwork myth layered over a brutal history, stapled to a national holiday that somehow survived anyway.

And maybe that’s the lesson. We don’t have to erase the Puritans, but we don’t have to worship them either. Barely anyone alive today has a Puritan ancestor, so we can roast them freely: Thanks for the burnout, folks. Thanks for tying our value to labor. Thanks for giving us the blueprint for capitalism, colonialism, and hustle culture.

But we also get to rewrite the script. Instead of work = worth, what if we said honesty = worth? Instead of Thanksgiving as pretend-gratitude, what if it became a day to pause, tell the truth, and reconnect? Imagine if we treated it as a yearly national check-in: How are we doing, really? Where are we hurting? Where do we find joy?

That’s not nostalgia. That’s a covenant we could actually use.

The Toast

We are a clunky folk. We bump into each other. We get it wrong. And yet we keep sitting down at the table together, year after year. That’s worth celebrating.

Thanksgiving is refreshingly religion-free—sorry, Christmas, but you’re not my favorite thing right now. Maybe that’s why it still works. No theology, no consumer frenzy, just a table, some food, and the fragile attempt to find each other again.

So this November, when the turkey hits the table, let’s raise a glass and say it plainly: Thanks a lot, Puritans. You gave us burnout, but you also gave us a reason to gather. And maybe—just maybe—that’s enough to start finding each other again.