Far‑Left Nation Mag Trashes Thanksgiving: Says Pilgrims Were ‘Doomsday Cultists’ -- ‘Time to Reckon America’s Radical Origins’
The far-left Nation used the Thanksgiving holiday to recast the Pilgrims and Puritans as “radical Protestant doomsday groups” whose “cultish” ideology, it argues, “became the foundation of American culture,” urging Americans to treat the day as “as good a time as any to begin coming to terms with the country’s radical cultish origins.”
In a feature titled “The Pilgrims Were Doomsday Cultists,” author Amanda Montell contends the settlers who arrived in Plymouth were “not escaping religious persecution” at all but instead “left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas,” insisting they “were no doubt eager to continue building their patriarchal theocracy in the hope that Jesus would soon return.”
“The Pilgrims and Puritans were high-control radical Protestant doomsday groups,” Montell asserts, adding that “if they were around today, most Americans would identify them as cults.”
She labels them “Hot Protestants” who believed the apocalypse was imminent and points to early ministers John Cotton and Increase Mather, whom she portrays as anticipating specific end-times dates. According to Montell, this apocalyptic worldview drove the colonists to “blot out everything that didn’t fit their ever-shrinking view of righteousness,” defining their approach to power and society.
Montell insists the settlers did not value religious liberty, arguing that “the Pilgrims, in particular, already had religious freedom in Holland,” and instead came to America because “they didn’t want to raise their children in a liberal society” and wanted the power to expel dissenters and “exert total control over culture.”
She depicts early New England as a “high-control” environment where leaders allegedly regulated “behavior, thoughts, and information intake” through community pressure, punishment, and threats of damnation, recounting lurid descriptions of public brandings, ear-clipping, and whippings for infractions including gossiping, flirting, or skipping church.
Montell maintains the psychological toll fell heavily on children, citing unnamed scholars who argue second- and third-generation Puritans exhibited “melancholy, pathological abnormalities, nervous breakdowns, suicide, and insanity.”
She goes on to argue that the Pilgrims and Puritans only later “became the avatars of America’s founding” in the 1800s, when the young United States supposedly needed an origin story “separate” from the slave trade and adopted the Thanksgiving narrative to fill that void.
Montell says she aims to offer an “accurate portrait” of the Pilgrims — a phrase she uses while promoting her recent book on American “cults” — before asserting that their worldview shaped everything from modern political rhetoric to the criminal-justice system. “Their radical doomsday ideology didn’t go away. It became the foundation of American culture,” she writes.
She claims Americans inherited “knee-jerk anti-intellectualism,” an “obsession with self-investigation,” a “tendency to worship the wealthy,” and a craving for a “strong man to rescue us from crisis,” arguing these traits help explain why the United States has “one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.”
“This latent influence has also made us a nation of credulous marks for con artists, cult leaders, and demagogues,” Montell declares, blaming this alleged inheritance for the “division and extremism” she says is “currently rampant” in the country.
Summing up her thesis, Montell writes that “Americans today often wonder ‘how we got here’ as a nation,” answering bluntly: “My answer: the Mayflower and Arabella.”
Montell then broadens her argument into a wider indictment of American culture, asserting that “cult-like thinking is not unique to the United States, but it is more prevalent in the United States for three reasons.”
She lists them as the country’s supposed ideological inheritance from the Pilgrims and Puritans; the First and Second Great Awakenings, which she says “shattered church hierarchy and allowed anyone to gain a charismatic following”; and the First Amendment, which she argues “effectively protects a certain number of scam artists, a necessary evil in exchange for religious freedom.”
“People in crisis, such as broke and desperate Americans, turn to cultlike thinking,” she writes. “We have been and will continue to be easily manipulated.”
To prevent what she calls “our national flirtation with autocracy and the extremism ravaging America,” Montell says the country must dramatically expand government guarantees by ensuring “healthcare, shelter, food, and social security—for all Americans.”
She concludes by urging readers to use Thanksgiving not as a celebration but as a political reckoning. “And we must turn toward instead of away from one another,” she writes. “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 Nation also published a second Thanksgiving-day essay titled “Make Thanksgiving Radical Again,” claiming the modern narrative is “a myth” and insisting the holiday’s “real roots” lie not in the 1621 celebration but in abolitionist activism tied to “anti-racism, liberation, and resistance.”
That feature urges readers to “reconnect” Thanksgiving to an explicitly ideological framework, effectively recasting the holiday as a political project rather than a unifying national tradition.
The outlet has taken similar shots at the holiday before. Last year it ran essays debating whether the United States should “abolish” or “decolonize” Thanksgiving — including one suggesting “Americans can give thanks by giving land back.”
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
