Last of the Mohicans Is a Thanksgiving Movie, and the David French and Indian War

The Garrett Ashley Mullet Show

Carl Trueman, in his response to David French's recent call for compromise with the Left on The Respect for Marriage Act, and his subsequent further explanation of why his position on gay marriage has evolved like Barrack Obama's, shares an especially astute observation:

"It is now clear that orthodox Protestants, specifically evangelicals, do not own the country. Whether they ever did is a matter for debate; that they thought they did is indisputable."

Yet setting aside, for the moment, what is or is not debatable or disputed, on Thanksgiving Day, in the year of our Lord, 2022, I watched Last of the Mohicans with my wife and kids for the first time.

And, by the way, according to respondents among my family and friends on Facebook, Last of the Mohicans is indeed a Thanksgiving movie. And I think the reason for that has a lot to do with the period in which the story is set, 1757, one generation prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the founding of the United States of America.

In a story of the French and Indian War, we see the War for Independence coming down the pike. As American colonials grow once-and-for-all tired of being treated as disposable pawns in the wars of Old World monarchs and their empires, what is most important to the American colonists is a very simple thing: the ability to protect and provide for their own wives and children.

British Colonel George Munro, as a stand-in for King George II, is loathe to release the militiamen, even when reports come back to their fort that farms and cabins are being attacked, and families are being murdered by the indigenous allies of France. The most important thing to Munro is protecting the interests of the British crown in America. He can't spare the men, he says.

But then the fort falls anyway. So what was the point?

Some contemporaries will say the point was all just sinful man killing and being killed, and there's no sense to any of it. I beg to differ.

So also, I dissent with an establishment figure like French who, well connected and established as a commentator the way he is, concludes the fears of what would come from Obergefell v. Hodges have proven unfounded. Religious liberty has won several victories at the Supreme Court. Therefore, we should content ourselves to only that, and no more, and leave behind forever talk of disrupting gay marriages and homosexual families. To do otherwise would upset our non-Christian neighbors, and they might further encroach on our religious liberty, and not like us very much.

Yet French seems to me as detached and distant from the practical realities of frontier life as many of the aristocrats in mid-18th century Europe were to what was being unleashed on American colonists. This or that course may eat into the crown's holdings, or what income is gotten from indentured servants on rental properties in the New World.

French's concern is far from existential for him or his friends in a timely peace which preserves the suitably profitable status quo. An ongoing struggle, though? Anything might happen.

Trueman is right, then, that orthodox Protestants clearly do not own America. Yet one can't help but feel, when reading the likes of David French, as though his kind of Protestant does lay claim to America in a way they also don't believe men like me ever should. But if that is the case, it's just as well, I suppose. Turnabout is fair play, and the feeling is mutual.

Men like me don't think men like French should hold our forts in the New World.

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