For your progressive friends and family, Thanksgiving is much too target rich an environment for them to remain civil. With all that talk of God and gratitude and Pilgrims in the air, they have no choice but to lecture you on your shortcomings as a citizen of the planet.
To silence them, you might do well to tell them how much they remind you of our Puritan forebears. Let me explain.
In his classic 1850 novel, "The Scarlet Letter," Nathaniel Hawthorne described his 17th century ancestors as "a people among whom religion and law were almost identical." This was a reality the novel's protagonist, Hester Prynne, learns through hard experience.
As the plot unfolded, the birth of Hester's child while her husband is still in England alerts civic officials to her adultery. As punishment, Hester is made to stand on a scaffold in the Boston town square for three hours and forever thereafter wear an embroidered Scarlet A – for adultery – on her chest.
This tale will horrify your woke kin. At this point, instruct them that in their mercilessness and mingling of law and morality, they mimic the Puritanism of America's founders. Do this gently, of course.
In her HBO documentary "Fall to Grace," Alexandra Pelosi – yes, Nancy's daughter – revealed, without intending to, how easily the failure to follow the shifting multicultural creed could become a "sin."
The documentary tracks the career of former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, the self-dubbed "gay-American" disgraced in a sex and security scandal.
In one passing scene, McGreevey enters an Episcopal Church ostensibly more welcoming than the hidebound Catholic Church of his childhood.
The message board on the church front reads, "Lord help us overcome the sins of racism, sexism, classism and homophobia." Had the message board been bigger, the good pastor might have added xenophobia, Islamophobia and climate change denial.
Although there are many other ways an individual can go wrong, these stand for the moment as the seven new deadly sins.
The rubric "multicultural" does not really capture the spirit of this mutated progressive faith. It is too benign a term. In truth, the faithful have less interest in celebrating the many colors of their rainbow than they do in condemning those who resist the celebration.
That resistance, they insist, is born out of hatred – hatred of blacks, of gays, of immigrants, of Muslims, of women, of poor people, even, yes, of Mother Earth.
"Hate" is the umbrella sin for all dissenters. Indeed, if there is one shared ritual among the progressive subcults, it is the imputation of "hate" to others.
Hawthorne described his ancestors as "being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived," but his Puritans were the picture of tolerance compared to the progressive Neo-Puritans who would flourish four centuries later.
Among the many contradictions of Neo-Puritanism is its seeming aversion to passing judgment. If its adherents did not create the word "judgmentalism," they popularized it and raised it to the level of sin.
With the possible exception of Islam, an unlikely ally in the rainbow coalition, progressive multiculturalism may well be the most judgmental, vengeful, unforgiving quasi-religious sect in the Western world today.
There is a good reason why, and it is implicit in the very word "progressive." At the risk of tautology, progressives, by definition, progress.
Unlike old-school liberals who could content themselves with a status quo, progressives move forward. They refuse to rest, refuse to reflect.
That much said, few among them have any clue as to what their ultimate destination might be. Like their 17th century New England namesakes, they exist in a perpetual state of anxiety.
For the original Puritans, the anxiety derived from a Calvinist theology that spared only the "elect" from eternal damnation. The problem was that no amount of good works could assure one's "elect" status.
Only faith could do that, but even the faithful could not be certain that their faith would suffice. This uncertainty led many a Puritan to proclaim his own worthiness and contest the worthiness of others.
For Neo-Puritans the anxiety derives from never quite knowing what the boundaries of thought and language on a given subject at a given moment might be.
Like their spiritual forebears, progressives cope with this anxiety by aggressively asserting their rightful place among the elect. Shelby Steele coined the phrase "zone of decency" to describe the sacred preserve in which progressives imagine themselves clustering.
To distinguish themselves from lesser mortals, argued Steele, they are quick to "decertify" those who do not embrace the values du jour and to dispatch the condemned to Hester Prynne's "magic circle of ignominy." And again like their namesakes, Steele argued, Neo-Puritans need "only the display of social justice to win moral authority."
The Puritans, at least, could turn to a fixed source of authority in the Bible. When the Puritans "decertified" one of their own, the individual almost always understood why. Hester acknowledged she committed adultery and did not protest the scarlet "A" with which she was branded. Her sin was willful and conscious.
Those subject to Neo-Puritan rule have no such assurance. If the charges against Prynne were legitimate, the charges against contemporary letter wearers rarely ever are.
"Even when you have no idea you're committing a hate crime, chances are you still are," writer Mark Steyn wryly opined after Canadian Neo-Puritans dragged him before that nation's official inquisitors.
Neo-Puritans exaggerate the sins of the targeted or concoct them out of whole cloth. In either case, like Hawthorne's Puritans, they publicly brand the sinner to render him or her, in Hawthorne's words, "the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point."
"If there is no God," said Jean Paul Sartre in his famous paraphrase of Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, "everything is permitted." Given this latitude, the Neo-Puritan clerisy add new sins regularly and new sinners daily.
An awkward phrase, a misunderstood joke, a manufactured quote, a frank look at data, a persistent belief in a revered tradition could earn a sinner any one of many scarlet letters as ablaze with "awe and horrible repugnance" as Hester's own scarlet A.
By the way, wait until dinner is over before sharing these friendly thoughts with your friends and family. Or maybe even after dessert.