In these pages last Thanksgiving we had gratuitously visited upon us dogma of The Ayn Rand Institute: "as you sit down to dinner, celebrate the spiritual significance of the holiday by raising a toast to the virtue of your own productive ability" Writer Gary Hull complained bitterly that "many Americans make Thanksgiving into a religious festival" and "ascribe our material abundance to God’s efforts, not man’s.

Monday, November 20, 2000

In these pages last Thanksgiving we had gratuitously visited upon us dogma of The Ayn Rand Institute: "as you sit down to dinner, celebrate the spiritual significance of the holiday by raising a toast to the virtue of your own productive ability" Writer Gary Hull complained bitterly that "many Americans make Thanksgiving into a religious festival" and "ascribe our material abundance to God’s efforts, not man’s." This distortion of American history and torturous characterization of American religion itself characterizes this monstrously secular organization and movement. Thanksgiving is a time humbly to thank God for creating humans capable of material production, guiding and blessing us as we work this earth humanly, and giving us spirit to enjoy and understand the world God created.

The Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) became traumatized by witnessing Bolsheviks stripping people of property and massacring them, and came to America perceiving it as the "country of the individual." She became a screen writer and self-styled philosopher. After a couple of unsuccessful novels, she made her mark with The Fountainhead (1943) and "Atlas Shrugged" (1957). Working people who despaired both of management and unions and felt they we left to "pull themselves up by their own boot straps" found her ideas appealing, but she also found response from right-wing ideological intellectuals who favored her monetarism and hegemony. Turning to a quasi-academic career theorizing about the supremacy of rationalism, individualism, and entrepreneurial capitalism, she wrote the powerful "The Virtue of Selfishness" in 1965. That has become the bible of a philosophy now known as Objectivism. One of her more radical disciples, Nathaniel Brandon, funded the Institute dedicated to an almost evangelistic campaign to glorify self-assertion and competition.

Gary Hull, then, is a spokesman for the Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. Although this radical perspective could be redeemed in another context as a corrective to pathological and irresponsible pietism, I am at a loss to explain why the diatribe should appear here while we were attempting to celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. It was iconoclastic and was meant to be by at least its writer.

How could Hull think of the Pilgrims who had fled Europe and come to America to practice religious freedom and who then took a day to thank God whom they worshiped for his blessings upon their responsible efforts and then complain that some of us try to make Thanksgiving a religious festival? He seriously misses the teaching of both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible to say we "ascribe our material abundance to God’s efforts, not man’s."

Neither Ayn Rand nor the Bible said "God helps those who help themselves." This foolish thinking and careless language unsuccessfully attempts to say that there is God-help and there is self-help and both must be operative for human to succeed. God never fails, but many humans have abused human freedom to fail in their responsibility. So, too, do others arrogate to themselves credit for what God did.

The Thanksgiving message of both Judaism and Christianity is that God faithfully and perfectly does what only God can do and never leaves it to man to do God’s work. He created man capable of working God’s creation and a free moral agent who can choose to abdicate human responsibility or abuse human ability. God requires man to do what God enables man to do and does not do what humans could do but refuse to do.

Thanksgiving is a time of enjoying spiritually our material possessions. As you sit down to dinner, humbly give thanks to God for doing perfectly what you could never do and thank him further for enabling you to do, however imperfectly, what he has given you to do.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays