On his final television show before Thanksgiving last week, Glenn Beck sat down with right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton to discuss the "real" origins of the holiday and the founding of America.
At one point, Beck marveled at the "divine providence" that guided Christopher Columbus in his discovery of America, saying that God allowed him to discover this land because he was humble, but then he became arrogant and so God never allowed him to return. The same thing happened with the settlement at Jamestown, Beck said, and ultimately "only the Pilgrims [did] well" because they were properly humble before God.
Barton, of course, agreed, insisting that God did not allow the successful establishment of colonies in the New World until the 1600s because Christians "had not worked out the Bible yet."
God waited over a 120 years from Columbus' discovery of America in 1492 until the arrival of the Pilgrims in the 1620s, Barton explained, because Christianity needed time to be properly reformed before He could lay the groundwork for the United States of America.
The Pilgrims were the only people to "finally have enough reformation, enough Bible in them to say, 'We're going to do what the Bible says,'" Barton claimed. "It's like God held us off for 120 years until we got kind of our thinking right on the Bible and government and freedom and liberty and conscience and then they come over and lo and behold. Why wait 120 years? The providence of God."
