Part I
A Lame-Duck President, Two Pardoned Turkeys, and a Whole Lot More: Animal Rights Activist Reveals Worldview on the Pages of The New York Times
Well, if the American Automobile Association is telling us the truth, about 80 million Americans are in transit right about now. That’s 80 million Americans headed somewhere to be with family in order to celebrate Thanksgiving together tomorrow. And you look at that and you recognize, that is a massive movement of humanity and we take this kind of thing for granted. But I also want to say it is wonderful to be with family. As you think about the Thanksgiving holidays, it’s wonderful to be with extended family. And so, that’s actually a statistic I see as good news rather than bad news. At least 80 million Americans by this account are going to extraordinary difficulty in order to be with someone they love for the Thanksgiving celebration. And that in itself has to be a good thing.
But this just underlines the fact that Thanksgiving is actually, among secular celebrations, and it is these days mostly for most people, sadly, a rather secular occasion, it does at least represent a biblical virtue, which is to say gratitude. And by the way, for Christians, that is not only a virtue, it is a command. More on that in just a moment. It is important that we recognize that there is something natural in us about Thanksgiving and there’s something natural in us about gathering together for a feast. Just look at the Old Testament. Look at how many of the great occasions for Israel were recurring days of feast and festival, because God made us creatures who, after all, need food. We need that caloric intake, we need that nutrition, but we also are given the fact that God made us as social creatures and nothing is quite so social as a meal. And there’s something healthy about that.
So, the idea that we commemorate important moments of our lives and important moral imperatives in our lives, the fact that we commemorate these with a meal is something that we didn’t come up with. It was actually a part of God’s command, even embedded in the law given to ancient Israel. But it’s also clear that our Thanksgiving celebration comes with an awful lot of nonsense, but the nonsense is part of the story. So let’s just think about it for a moment. Among the nonsense is the fact that the President of the United States, Joe Biden, ceremoniously pardoned two very big turkeys who were presented to him in a White House ceremony. Now, this ceremony may have roots going all the way back to the Lincoln administration when a turkey may have been presented to President Abraham Lincoln.
But we definitely know in its modern sequence, it began in the Truman administration when President Harry S. Truman was presented with a turkey. When later John F. Kennedy is President of the United States was presented a turkey, he made clear he didn’t want to eat it. He simply said, “Let’s keep him going,” speaking of the turkey presented to him. That was interpreted by the press in a humorous vein as a presidential pardon. The turkey did indeed, for at least some time in Turkey terms, keep going. But all of this has become something of a ritual and nations live by these kinds of rituals at times, they’re not incidental to America’s public life. And so, the presentation of turkeys to the President of the United States has become a White House custom, as has been the presidential pardon to the turkeys thus presented. Two very big, very American turkeys were presented to President Biden, who pardoned them.
And even as that’s just pretty much a part of the national nonsense that does make some sense, the ceremony that’s not deep, but it is nonetheless non-threatening, it became an item of contention for animal rights activists. USA Today ran an article with the headline, “Biden to Pardon Turkeys, But Critics Call it Wretched, a Wretched Tradition.” Subhead, “Animal Rights Group Says Ceremony Should End.” Michael Collins is the reporter and he tells us, “People for the ethical treatment of animals is urging President Joe Biden to end the annual Thanksgiving Turkey pardon, citing what it calls the dirty business of Turkey factory farming.” The two turkeys by the way, presented to President Biden weighed respectively 40 and 41 pounds. Those are very big turkeys. We are then told, “They were hatched on July 18 in Northfield, Minnesota and raised on a farm by John Zimmerman, Chairman of the National Turkey Federation, yes, there is one, and his 9-year-old son Grant.”
The father and son presented the turkeys 40 and 41 pounds. USA today then tells us, “Post pardon, the birds will go back to Minnesota where they will live at Farm America and Agricultural Interpretive Center.” There we are told, “They’ll serve as ambassadors for the ag industry and admirers will be able to visit them.” So if you want to see the turkeys, now you know where to go. But where I want to go is the argument. And the argument was also made clear in an article that appeared in The New York Times by Peter Singer, Professor Emeritus of Bioethics at Princeton University. He has written a book by the way, entitled “Consider the Turkey.” The title of his article was Let’s End This Turkey Pardoning Nonsense. Peter Singer, who has long been an activist against factory farming, but actually may well be an activist against far more as we shall see. He went on to write this article in The New York Times, which he said that basically this presidential tradition has to come to an end.
But I just want to tell you that there are huge, very urgent, massive worldview issues invoked in this. And they become clear, first of all if you know the name Peter Singer. But they also become clear later in the article. Listen to this, “There are good reasons some people choose not to eat Turkey.” Singer’s writing this, “The turkeys eaten by Americans today are nothing like wild turkeys supposedly eaten by the early European settlers in Massachusetts at the original Thanksgiving.” Singer goes on, “More than 99% of the roughly 250 million turkeys produced in the United States each year are raised on factory farms according to the Sentience Institute, crowded indoors all their lives in large sheds that almost always contain thousands of birds.” He continues, “Today’s turkeys are not treated by Turkey producers as individual birds capable of enjoying their lives, but as machines that convert cheap crops, which are also often subsidized,” he says, “To something that can be sold at a higher price.”
All right, he goes on, by the way to say that the 46 million turkeys which are killed and eaten at Thanksgiving are almost all, “Broad breasted whites selectively bred to have abnormally large breasts because that is the part most people prefer to eat.” By the way, there is a certain logic to at least that part of what Peter Singer’s writing about, American’s preference for very large turkeys with a lot of white meat has led to the fact that many of these turkeys when full-grown, can’t stand on their own two feet or at least can’t do so for long. And that tells you perhaps less about the Turkey than it does about those who will consume the Turkey. But I want to argue that embedded in this statement, in this article by Peter Singer is something that tells you a lot about his worldview and why it is so deadly.
Not so much when it comes to Thanksgiving, but when it comes to understanding human beings and human dignity. Peter Singer is a prominent animal rights activist. Indeed, he is perhaps the singular intellectual, most responsible in the last several decades for the influence of the animal rights movement. He taught for years in Australia before being brought to Princeton University as professor of bioethics, which is something that should never have happened. It should be a scandal to Princeton University that someone like Peter Singer ever taught on that faculty. Peter Singer has in print made the argument that a two-year-old child has less dignity and should have less protection of life than some animal life that has more intelligence. Clearly the very logic of Peter Singer is a logic that isn’t so much directed towards a Turkey farm, as it is towards concentration camps in Germany. And I want to make that issue abundantly clear.
I also want to point out that he says that dignity should be related to sentience. That is to brain activity, to self-consciousness. And I want to draw your attention to the fact that he used that kind of language in a sentence that I read and I wonder if you caught it. Here’s the sentence again, “Today’s turkeys are not treated by Turkey producers as individual birds capable of enjoying their lives, but as machines that convert cheap crops” and it goes on to something that can be sold at a higher price. That means transforming the grain eaten by the turkeys into a product which is the Turkey meat. The point is he described the turkeys as, “Individual birds capable of enjoying their lives.” Now, does a Turkey enjoy being a Turkey? I don’t know, but I can tell you this. A Turkey doesn’t know he or she is a Turkey. Sentience in this sense is given only to human beings.
Other animals may have some kind of intelligence, but they do not have what human beings have because human beings alone are made in God’s image. And so, what you have here is a projection. It is a projection of a kind of sentient self-consciousness onto a Turkey by a professor emeritus of bioethics at Princeton University who as I said, has made horrifying arguments that would lead to exactly what has taken place in concentration camps around the world. Now, he would argue that that isn’t the case, but the idea that there is life and then there is life more worthy of life is exactly the kind of argument that led to the atrocities of the Third Reich, Lebensunwertes Leben, life unworthy of life. When you make that determination about human beings, you have crossed a line and there is some kind of genocide at the other end of that line.
Now, I also want to be clear, I’m not saying that there could be no legitimate moral issues about certain practices in farming as well as certain practices in medicine, certain practices in banking, the moral dimensions are there because human beings, wherever we are, are moral creatures and that means morally accountable. But I am saying that this is the kind of worldview reflected in this kind of article that is written by someone who is quite happy to have unborn babies destroyed in the womb, but wants to protect turkeys from being factory produced on a farm in the Midwest. This was a news story that began with the presentation of two turkeys and a ceremony to the President of the United States. And the next thing you know, you have an opinion piece in The New York Times, which is supposedly about defending Turkey life that ends up being about a whole lot more.
Part II
The Flourishing of America and Thanksgiving: Americans Have Unique Ground for Thankfulness
But next I want to step back for a moment and just speak about the importance of Christians not only being thankful, but being thankful in an honest way. So let’s think about what that honesty would require of us at Thanksgiving. It means that we have to be very thankful for the fact that we live in this massive transcontinental nation, speaking to Americans because this is the Thanksgiving traditionally celebrated in the United States here in the month of November. Even as we celebrate this day, we are in a nation which is a transcontinental nation. It means we have oceans to the east and oceans to the west, and we should be thankful for friendly nations to the north and to the south. But you also understand that we live in one of the very few land masses of this size that can have hundreds of millions of persons living upon it and still feed those citizens.
And that’s because as the song America the Beautiful reminds us God has shed and shown his grace on the United States. In the fact that we have this vast Midwest, which is just made for the growing of grains. And because we also have these vast plains that were just made for the raising of herds and God has given us this enormous ability. And when the average American family sits down to eat a meal, this festival meal on Thanksgiving Day, they will be eating, we will be eating food that may have been grown thousands of miles away and frankly requires any number of what previous generations would have considered something like miracles to take place in order for us just to have what we now take for granted as a meal sitting around a table. We have the Turkey, first of all, which requires a massive Turkey industry to produce on this scale.
And we also have other items on the table that have required cranberry farmers traditionally in the American Northeast all the way going down to all the vegetables and side dishes and all the rest. We expect to be able to walk into a modern supermarket and just get these things off the shelf. And yes, the November 5th election proved that Americans are quite sensitive to price pressure and we understand that, but it is still an amazing wonder that we can walk into a store and then push out carts filled of foods that have been drawn from not only all over our nation, but frankly these days all over the world. And it is one of those ironies we sense that we have a festival day of Thanksgiving in which we fill ourselves quite parabolically to the full and we express Thanksgiving, or at least that is the purpose of the holiday.
But that points to what is an even deeper wonder when you think about the Thanksgiving holiday and that is the haunting question. To whom are most Americans thankful? That’s a huge question. Are we thankful to the grocery store? Well, to some extent I’m thankful for them. Are we thankful to the farmers? You bet. I’m thankful for them and glad to express my thankfulness to them as I can. We should be very thankful for the land. We should be very thankful for the air, thankful for the sun, thankful for the moisture that is required by the crops and by the herds, by the flocks and all the rest. We should be thankful for all the people by the multiple millions involved in this process, all the way from selling the seed or providing the livestock all the way down to raising them, and tending them, all the way up to the distribution, all the way up to the packaging, all the way up to the transportation that gets it to the store near you. It is an amazing achievement and one we should not take lightly.
Part III
Thanksgiving and the Honor of God: The Inescapably Theological Act of Thanksgiving
But ultimately our Thanksgiving isn’t addressed to any of these people, not ultimately or to any of these forces, economic and agricultural or commercial in our lives. Ultimately, Thanksgiving only makes sense if there is a creator, God of the universe to whom we are addressing this thanks. Thanksgiving makes no sense if it is addressed in some vague spirit to some vague recipient, that makes no sense at all, that is not true gratitude. When you see a secular person say they are struck, say, standing on a mountain, looking at a sunset, they’re struck by wonder and awe. Wonder and awe are not the same thing as gratitude and Thanksgiving. They are two very different things. Wonder and awe are properly also aspects of our response to the Creator who is also in Jesus Christ, our Lord, the Redeemer.
But we understand that it is not merely awe and wonder, it is gratitude and Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for the gift of life, Thanksgiving for giving us all that we have in this life. Thanksgiving all the way down as the Lord himself taught us to pray for our daily bread. It is a reminder that daily provision is one of God’s gifts to us and we must take not a single day for granted. Paul writes in Romans chapter 1 beginning in verse 20, “For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made, so that they,” that means we, speaking of all humanity here, “Are without excuse.”
Paul continues, “For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
Let’s face fully and honestly what the apostle Paul is telling us. He’s telling us that at the very heart of sin is refusal to give thanks to God the Creator, to acknowledge him. That is to say, to honor him as God, Paul’s language or give thanks. Isn’t it interesting that in that phrase, both of those are put together as if they are absolutely inseparable. And that is to give honor to God and to give thanks. Well, you know thanksgiving here is put in a different context. We have to know to whom we are thankful. And for an incredibly sad percentage of Americans that whom turns out to be, say, the one who prepared the meal, yes, thankfulness should be assigned to that. It’s a natural response. Yes to those who delivered it or those who had a part in transporting it, those who had a part in cultivating it and in growing it and in raising it.
Yes, all of that. Thanks for all of that. But ultimately, our thanks has to be properly assigned to the Lord God of the universe who spoke and said “let there be” and there was. And that explains the entire cosmos and all within it. And it certainly explains human beings, the one creature made in the Creator’s image who is able to know him and to honor him and to give thanks.
Part IV
Every Good and Perfect Gift is From Above: The Proper Response to God’s Grace is to Give Thanks
So I’m just going to urge us all that we make certain we know to whom we are thankful this Thanksgiving. And it would be an aspect of our Christian witness that we make as clear as possible to all those around us, that our thanks is not to each other. Our thanks is not even just to the farmer. Our thanks is certainly not to the bird. Our Thanksgiving is to the Creator who said, let there be life. And there was life.
Everything we have received, the scripture makes clear, biblical theology specifies, everything that we have received have received by the Lord’s hand. The proper response of the creature to the Creator in all things, and let’s just underline that the Scripture says, in all things, is to give thanks. The right thing to do in all things is to give thanks. The right posture every single day is to give thanks. But it is not wrong to set aside a day in which we remember most importantly that Thanksgiving, but it’s not a thankfulness addressed to Thanksgiving. It’s a thankfulness addressed to God. And this is where as we look at this, we look at the experience of Israel assigned these feasts and festival days and included in those feasts and festival days was Thanksgiving to God.
We understand that one of the ways we thank God for all he has given us, is to enjoy what he has given us. To celebrate the fact that we have this, to take the first fruits and to take the goods that have come to us, the cherished dishes that have been handed down from mother to daughter, generation by generation, the traditions that have been handed down of which we are the recipients. Family, that despite all the atomization of our modern secular culture still calls out, that we gather together around a table, and that table filled with provisions just to remind us of the fact that our life is all from beginning to end, a gift, every bit of it, just as every bite of it.
And so I wish for all listeners to The Briefing and for all the families represented that you have a wonderful God-honoring Thanksgiving. That you do indeed get to gather around a table and celebrate all that God has given us in the course of just say the last year. Not to mention the last few seconds. The gift first of all of family and the gift of the love that is shared around tables. The gift of the fact that there are those we love who nonetheless cannot be with us, but the very fact that they are absent from a meal is a reminder of just how much we love them and how much we treasure them. And I pray and hope for every family represented here and every person listening to the briefing, I pray that you will have safe travel. If you’re among the 80 million on the road or in the air or on the rails during this holiday season, I pray that it will be uncomplicated and that you will arrive back at your home safely.
But more than anything else, let’s pray that the church of the Lord, Jesus Christ, if alone in this on earth, knows not only to be thankful, but to whom we are thankful. Most importantly, for the gift which is salvation through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
And so, to you and to yours, Happy Thanksgiving.
Lord willing, I’ll meet you again next Monday. Thanks for listening to The Briefing.
For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on Twitter or X by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.
