President Joe Biden omitted any reference to Almighty God or Divine Providence Thursday in his annual proclamation of the quintessentially American feast of Thanksgiving.
In his own 1863 presidential proclamation instituting Thanksgiving as a national holiday, Abraham Lincoln urged his fellow Americans to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”
Even in the midst of the civil war, Lincoln recalled the many blessings and bounties bestowed on the nation, attributing them all to the Almighty.
“No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things,” Lincoln declared. “They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”
In this way, he enjoined his fellow citizens to offer up “the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings.”
And in case anyone forgets to thank Almighty God for these gifts, Lincoln also issued a warning, noting that these bounties “are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come.”
Fast forward 160 years, and it would seem that the “devoutly Catholic” President Joe Biden has done just that, insisting in his own 2023 proclamation of Thanksgiving that Lincoln had established this national holiday “to honor the blessings of our country,” rather than to praise and thank God.
While remembering firefighters, police officers, first responders, doctors, nurses, scientists, public servants, union workers, teachers, mothers, fathers, and caregivers, Biden conspicuously fails to acknowledge the Source from whom all blessings flow.
To be fair, however, Biden is not the first American president in recent memory to have refrained from thanking God in his Thanksgiving Proclamation. In 2016, then-President Barack Obama famously chose to give God the cold shoulder by similarly writing Him out of the feast.
Thus, while Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump all explicitly recognized Almighty God in every yearly Thanksgiving Proclamation, Biden has now joined Obama in the infamy of secularizing the country’s most religious homegrown holiday.