Pilgrims, Persecution, And Thanksgiving

Persecution, closed doors, and shipboard vows—our journey starts where power tried to silence conscience and ends with a small band drafting a covenant that rewired how authority works. We sit down with Bill Federer to map the Pilgrims’ path from England’s star chamber to the rocky shore where consent became the basis for order. Along the way, we explore how the Reformation, censorship laws, and the flight to Holland set the stage for a bold experiment that would echo through New England town meetings and, eventually, into the American idea.

What unfolds is a grounded, vivid look at the Mayflower Compact as more than a paragraph in a textbook. It was a civic translation of church covenant—neighbors choosing obligation, accountability, and shared rule. We unpack why Romans 13 reads differently under a king than under a republic, and why citizens must see themselves as co-sovereigns with duties as real as their rights. We also take on Thanksgiving myths with the fuller story of Squanto—kidnapped to Europe, freed by monks, fluent in English—whose help, along with Massasoit’s alliance, anchored a decades-long peace. The first Thanksgiving looks less like legend and more like gratitude under pressure, with prayer, games, and shared meat binding two communities.

We go deeper into Bradford’s pivot from failing communal rules to private property, the leap in harvests that followed, and the way pastors helped found cities where worship and civic life overlapped. There’s drama too: trade seized by corsairs, risky diplomacy, and marriages that put Pilgrim leaders at odds with crown law. Through it all runs a clear theme—freedom of conscience, consent of the governed, and the steady work of self-government. If you care about the real roots of Thanksgiving, religious liberty, and how citizens become the “kings” in a republic, this conversation will sharpen your view and strengthen your gratitude.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with your favorite insight so more listeners can find it.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage For Thanksgiving
• 1:02 Europe’s Turmoil And The Pilgrim Flight
• 3:30 Persecution, Holland, And A Risky Escape
• 6:40 No Kings And The Case For Freedom
• 9:15 From Bible To Republic: Romans 13 Rethought
• 12:50 Mayflower Compact And Self-Government
• 16:40 Pastors Found Cities And Civic Duty
• 20:10 Conscience, Scripture, And Civil Limits
• 23:10 Squanto’s Story And First Thanksgiving

Transcript

Tim Barton [00:00:07] Welcome to the WallBuilders Show. I am joined today by a good friend, a hero in some of the truth-telling of American history movement, our friend Bill Federer. Bill, thanks for being on with us today. 

Bill Federer [00:00:21] Hey Tim, great to be with you. 

Tim Barton [00:00:23] Okay, now one of the things we want to talk about, we're coming into Thanksgiving. So obviously the pilgrims, but you have a book, The Treacherous World of the 16th Century and How the Pilgrims Escaped It, the prequel to America's Freedom. And obviously, as you are getting into the details of the Pilgrims and explaining so much, we thought, man, Bill, we would love to have you on. Obviously, promote your book a little bit, but tell us some of the stories. What should people know about the pilgrims as we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving this week? What is some of the background? What should we know? What should we be thinking about coming into the Thanksgiving? 

Bill Federer [00:01:01] Yeah, well, big picture. The Muslims are invading Europe and conquered Constantinople in 1453, and that's why Columbus set sail in 1492 to look for a land route to India and China. And then 1517, Martin Luther starts the Reformation, and you have in England the King Henry VIII breaks away, but he establishes the Anglican Church as the official church, and so you have Presbyterians and Quakers and Baptists that are not following the Anglican church and so they're called dissenters and the king didn't like that. And so, there was this star chamber. This is where they would arrest the Baptist, Thomas Hellwise, John Merton, John Smith, these different ones, bring them in and starve them to death. And then bring 'em out and would cut off their ears and brand them on the face as a heretic. And my wife says, don't talk about that kind of stuff. Anyway, and so some of these separatists decide they're gonna flee to Holland. Holland was one of the seven provinces of the Netherlands. It was an eighty-year war of independence for the Netherlands to break away from Spain. And so, but the seven provinces didn't always believe the same thing, but they had a little give and take. So it was the most tolerant place in Europe. So, the pilgrims fled there 1609 they're there for matter of fact, the bunch of 'em sold their property. And got a passage on a ship, but before the ship took off, the captain robbed him, turned over the police, they were thrown in jail. Another group of these pilgrim separatists arranged for a Dutch ship to s sail up to shore, and they would be meeting him in rowboats and sail away, but the pilgrims showed up a day early. And they were in the waves, and ladies and the kids get sick, and they said, okay, wait on the shore, the men will stow the stuff. Well, the British come over the hill and capture the women and children. And the Dutch captain says, I don't have an army with me, and he sails away with the men. You can just picture these women and children watching that boat getting smaller and smaller, disappearing over the horizon. For two years they passed these women and children from one court in England to another. Finally, a judge said, you didn't do anything wrong, go home. They go, duh, we sold our homes. So just to get them out of their air, they put them on a boat, send them over to Holland. They ask around for English speaking people, find their husbands, and they settle in Leiden. But Spain's threatening to attack again, so the pilgrims decide to flee. They were gonna go to Guyana in South America. They heard of the perpetual spring, but then they heard of Jacksonville, Florida. Back then it was called Fort Caroline. In 1565, you had a bunch of French Protestants called Huguenots make a settlement there, but the Spanish found out about it and killed them, and then the Spanish founded St. Augustine, Florida. So the pilgrims said we don't want to go anywhere near Spain, let's go to Jamestown, 1607 it was started, and they get blown off course and they land in Massachusetts. 

Tim Barton [00:03:49] Hey, Bill, if I can, interject for just a second, it sounds like what you're describing under the kings is just a lot of persecution, not a lot of freedom, not a lot of benefit for people under the king. And I'm saying that only with some levels of irony in my own mind, if people have protested recently, right? The last couple of weeks, these no kings’ protests and rallies. We don't want kings, which it seems like America was founded by people escaping kings. It's the reason we have elections; we don't have kings in America. But when you look at what kings did, there's a lot more persecution than I think a lot of Americans realize that was the foundation for the pilgrims even coming to the new world. It wasn't just that they go to Holland for a couple of years and come to the new world. The dissenters, that the kind of the background of the pilgrims, there's a long history of religious persecution that is the foundation of them to want to leave where they are to find religious freedom, which ultimately, they find in the new world. And I'm saying that kind of as a comment, but also maybe as a question, if you want to add some clarity to that, that religious persecution was going on for a long time. So, this wasn't just a whim decision for the pilgrims. This was something that for generations people were trying to find freedom, religious freedom specifically, and ultimately, they have to come to America before they can find that. 

Bill Federer [00:05:16] Yeah, it is so rare. Nebuchadnezzar said, okay, I'm gonna be over your government and I'm gonna make you worship my statue. You had, I talked to na Anglican priest, Calvin Robinson, big tall black guy, brilliant. You can watch YouTube debates of him and debating at Oxford and he moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. And he says, I cannot go back to England. I'm like, What? He goes, Yeah, they'll arrest me. I said, What? He goes; they have censorship laws. He says sixteen thousand people are in prison in England right now, some for as little as liking a post or forwarding a post, some for just viewing a post. He says they've let murderers and rapists out of jail so they can put people in jail for liking a post. And then we're in South Korea with Charlie Kirk four days before he was shot. And a pastor got a million Koreans to protest the trans bill. And the current president raided his house, seizes phones, filed 22 lawfare charges against him, and arrested him and put him in prison. He's in prison right now. And so, the freedoms we have in America are rare. They're under threat, and we need to realize the foundations of America so that we can preserve them. And so that's what we look back at the pilgrims. That if you didn't believe the way the government told you to believe, you were canceled. They would brand you, they'd cut off your ear, and so that they fled to America. And they were not Anglican, and so they had a congregational form of church government that they got from ancient Israel, the first 400 years out of Egypt before they got a king. It's called the Hebrew Republic. And so that's why they taught Hebrew, Yale, and Harvard. And so, Romans 13 says what? Let every man, let every person be subject to the governing authority. Who's the governing authority in a monarchy? Well, it's the king. Who's the governing authority in a republic? Well, it's the citizens. The politicians are your servants, you hire them, you fire them. So, Romans 13 is understood differently in a monarchy versus a republic. In a monarchy, you submit to the king. In a republic, you are the king. The word citizen means co-king, co-ruler, co-sovereign. But they got this form of government from the pilgrims. So, the pilgrims were going to go to Jamestown. It was a king run colony, Royal Crown Colony. And first it was a company colony, then a royal crown colony. And the pilgrims get blown off course. They're in Massachusetts. And before they get off the boat, they say, well, we can't be lawless. Everybody do what we want. We have to have some kind of government. They take their little congregational covenant church government and they make it their civil government. We in the presence of God covenant ourselves together into a civil body politic. A church group covenanting itself into a civil body politic group. In the one with the Mayflowers conceived the child of self-government. It was a polarity change in the flow of power on planet Earth, set a top-down rule by pharaohs and Caesars and Sultans, it's ruled by just 102 of us. And so this became the model for the other New England colonies. And then back in England, you had Charles I, the son of James, and he does this the great Puritan migration. Twenty thousand Puritans flood into New England, and you have a unique situation. Pastors and churches founding cities. So, Pastor John Lothrop and his church founded a city, Barnstable, Massachusetts. A pastor Roger Williams in his first Baptist Church in America founded a city, Providence, Rhode Island. A pastor Thomas Hooker at his church founded Hartford, Connecticut. This is unique on the planet. Pastors and churches founding cities. Everybody's involved in church. Everybody's involved in city government 'cause it's the church founding the city. And I was thinking the Bible's perfect, but you preach different parts of it to people who are in different situations. So, if a man is single, you preach from the Bible abstinence. But if he gets married, you preach from the Bible faithfulness to your spouse. It would be silly preaching to a married man abstinence, right? That wouldn't make sense. If somebody's living in a monarchy, you preach, okay, you gotta submit to the king. But if a country changes into a republic, you should preach something different out of the Bible. Participation, you are the king. So, you know, the missionaries in the eighteen hundreds would go into monarchies around the world and they wouldn't get involved in politics because they would be submitted to the king and the king would let them in because they were no threat. But after World War One, a lot of those countries changed from monarchies to republics. Well, the parts of the Bible that are being preached should change as well. Instead of submit to the king, it's you are the king. You need to participate; you need to take responsibility. 

Tim Barton [00:10:02] Well, and Bill, one of the things too that was definitely understood for some of the earlier generations, the doctrines of lesser magistrates, that ultimately the King of Kings is Jesus, right? God is the one above everything else. And so, if the king under him, whether it be a monarch, whoever else, if they're calling you to do something that's not biblical, you actually are supposed to submit to what God says. This is the Daniel, right, ultimately getting thrown in the lion's den. This is the shattered, Meshach, and Abednego that don't bow down, they get thrown in the fiery furnace. There's consequences for not submitting to the earthly king. But we've been called to a higher kingdom. And I say that because this was something the pilgrims understood that we're gonna do it God's way, and they underwent persecution, which there was lots of persecution in Europe. But they came to America to find freedom. And what they set up, this Republican form of government, that they're going to elect officials, that they have yearly elections, and every year they're electing governor. And you know, Governor Bradford is governor for I think what thirty terms or something like that. Thirty years he's the governor there in Massachusetts, but it's because they understood that we the people are now the charge. We are the sovereigns, we are the kings. And this was a very different thought and idea than a lot of what was happening in Europe, but it was a biblical idea, and the pilgrims are people of the Bible. What they were setting up was influenced more by the Bible than by anything else. And as you point out, there's different parts of the Bible that are more relevant for different times in our life and different seasons. And the pilgrims were such good students that they were able to find and apply the Bible in so many ways that what they established in America was a biblical foundation. Ultimately, I would argue that America has been more influenced by the pilgrims than by any other group. Right. More than what happened to Jamestown. The influence of the pilgrims was more influential because of the foundation they laid, the precedent they set, the biblical reliance they had. And this set them in a different place. And so again, backing up to your thought of this idea of kings and who's really the king, and we the people are the king of America, so to speak, which I feel like you have another book covering that a little bit too, talking about kings. But this is something that certainly is part of that foundation of America from a biblical perspective. 

Bill Federer [00:12:16] Yeah, well, you're exactly right. You get it. That's why I am so thrilled with what you're doing with WallBuilders. It's just I the resources that you have at WallBuilders are the best there are. And so, I thank you for spending all the years, you and your dad putting those out there. You know, John Calvin is credited with being a pioneer in a covenant form of government. And he wrote in his institutes and I think it was fifteen thirty-six, he says, we are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against Him, let us not pay the least regard to it. It's sort of like Ephesians six, children obey your parents. But what if there's a bad parent and he tells the kid to sell themselves into prostitution and kill the neighbor? Is the child supposed to obey that parent? No. The child obeys the parent as long as the parents telling them to do something that lines up with God's word. You obey the government as long as the government's telling you to do something that lines up with God's word. Why would God tell you to do something in His word and then tell you to submit to a government that tells you not to do what He just got done telling you to do? No, so the it we need to understand the scriptures in context. But the pilgrims, you know, there's Squanto, the fascinating story of the Indian that was kidnapped, taken to Europe, and then he came back the winter before and spoke English and rescued the pilgrims. 

Tim Barton [00:13:36] Let me pause you right there. I need to take a break. When we come back, let's pick up with Squanto because this is some of my favorite part of the pilgrims. And as we get ready for Thanksgiving, there's a lot of things that we should look back and be grateful for, thankful for, things that we can celebrate of early American history. Squanto is one of those fun examples, but we need to take a quick break. So we'll be right back on the WallBuilders Show. 

Tim Barton [00:14:55] Welcome back to the WallBuilders show. This is Tim Barton, joined with a friend, special guest, Bill Federer. And Bill, we were talking about really kind of the buildup the pilgrims coming to America, getting into Thanksgiving. We're talking a little bit, maybe hoping hopefully making a plug for your book, The Treacherous World of the 16th Century and How the Pilgrims Escaped It, the prequel to America's Freedom, and that's on American Minute.com. Would encourage everybody, go get this, learn the background history, the story of the pilgrims, why they came to America, what they established in America, why they did it. And Bill, you do an incredible job unfolding that. Now, I want to jump in. We were just stopping. I had to interrupt to take a break. We were starting with the story of Squanto and part of his impact to pilgrims and all this. We're building into Thanksgiving. So Thanksgiving is. Very quickly around the corner for us. We're going to celebrate. And there is a reason as Americans we should be celebrating Thanksgiving. We should be thanking God for what he's done in this nation. Not the least of which is when He brought the special instrument of God, Squanto, to the pilgrim. So Bill, fill us in on the story of Squanto. 

Bill Federer [00:16:11] Yeah, so Columbus discovers the new world. You got some Spaniards that come over and enslave Native Americans. You have a Spanish priest, Bartolome de los Casas, who finally gets the King of Spain to outlaw the enslavement of Native Americans. And that's when the Spaniards start bringing over slaves from Africa. But some of them would route the coast of America and take Indians and take them back to Spain and sell them into slavery. And that's what happened to Squanto. He was an Indian lured onto a boat, and then some monks in Spain, Malaga, Spain, gave him his freedom. He hitchhikes his way across Europe, gets to England, and he's there for about a dozen years, learns the language, finds a fishing interest in Nova Scotia and gets a passage on a ship, and they drop him off there at Massachusetts, only to find his entire tribe was dead. William Bradford writes three years earlier. A French ship was shipwrecked at Cape Cod. The sailors got ashore, the Indians never left watching them and dogging them until they got the advantage, killed them all but three or four, whom they sent from one sachem to another, and making sport with them, using the mercy of slaves. Well, evidently, they had an illness that wiped out the entire tribe. And so, Squanto gets off the boat, his tribe said, he's living with a neighboring tribe. You can imagine how dejected he is. Well, the next spring, somebody comes into his teepee and says, Hey Squant, you wouldn't believe it. There's a bunch of English people trying to start a colony in your own old stomping ground. And he goes there and he sees these English people are so inept, they don't know how to do anything. And so he teaches them how to plant corn and catch fish and catch beaver and it takes forty years’ worth of beaver skins to pay off their boat ride. And so this Squanto helped them put them at peace where they got the chief Massasoit to come with matter of fact the first Thanksgiving, and you know the statistics better than I do. I think there were what twice as many Indians as there were pilgrims? 

Tim Barton [00:18:05] Yeah, according to the Plymouth Historic Society, there were 53 pilgrims, which included the men, women, children, the elderly. Chief Massasoit came with 90 male warriors. And the Plymouth Historic Society, I think they're the ones that identified of those 53 pilgrims that were there, only 22 of them were adult age male, between the ages of 13 and 60, that could have, in theory, been warriors had there been an issue arriving. Of course, there was no war, which, not to steal any of the story you want to tell, but we know that for three days they feasted. We know that the natives are the ones who actually brought the majority of the meat for the feast as they do races and wrestling competitions and shooting competitions. And I really do appreciate the fact that we can track our tradition of food and football to the pilgrims that they started food and sports. So this is totally historic. What we do on Thanksgiving, absolutely keeping in tradition, except maybe we should include a lot more of prayer and thanking God in that. But yeah, the first Thanksgiving, there's only 53 pilgrims, and Chief Massasoit comes with 90 male warriors. 

Bill Federer [00:19:11] Yeah, it's phenomenal. You know, one thing that's often overlooked is when you read William Bradford's History of the Plymouth Settlement, he says that a couple of years later, they were exploring around the bay and a freezing rain happened, and they put into Manamoic Bay, and he goes, Here Squanto fell ill of Indian fever, bleeding much at the nose, which the Indians take for a symptom of death. He bequeathed several of his belongings to his English friends, and then he begged Governor Bradford to pray for him that he would go to the Englishman's God in heaven. Right? Who are the pilgrims worshiping? Jesus. And so, I believe that he believed in Jesus, right? I believe that they prayed with him. And so, if you watch the Disney version of it, you would have thought that the pilgrims were gonna worship an Indian god. No, no, it's the other way around. He says, Look, I I've witnessed you and I've seen your faith, and I want what you got. 

Tim Barton [00:20:07] Yeah, it is a little sad that whether it's Pocahontas, whether it's Squanto, whatever Disney story they're telling, they tend to leave out a lot of the faith components. And oftentimes, like with the pilgrims, there's a movement now to say the pilgrims are really the bad guys. That there are actually towns, there are cities that are saying they don't want to celebrate Thanksgiving. Instead, they're gonna have a day of mourning because this is when the pilgrims stole land from the natives, et cetera. And so, Bill, what would you suggest? How would you think that as Christians, as Americans, we should learn the story and maybe what is the counterpoint? What's the pushback on this idea that the pilgrims were really bad? They stole land from the natives, etc. How would you suggest we respond to that narrative? 

Bill Federer [00:20:56] Yeah, I think they're mixing up the Spaniards with the pilgrims. The Spaniards did, but not the pilgrims. When you look at it, when the Pautex tribe got that illness and wiped out, the pilgrims landed on the one spot on the eastern seaboard that was uninhabited. The other tribes refused to take that land. They said, well, some great spirit had killed everyone. And so, the pilgrims didn't steal the land, nobody was claiming it. And they got along. So Chief Massasoit got ill. And Edward Winslow helped doctor him up and he recovered, and they made a 50-year peace. Now, fine print. If you doctor an Indian chief and he dies, the custom is that you died too. So, Edward Winslow was putting it all on the line. Edward Winslow would go back and forth to England for supplies, brought the first cattle. When half of them died the first winter, and the widows married the widowers. Edward Winslow performed some of the weddings. Well, he gets back to England and under Charles the First, he's arrested and he's put in jail for 17 weeks for performing an un illegal marriages, right? And this is he was put in these different prisons and so forth. He gets out, they you know, when they chop off Charles the First's head, Oliver Cromwell becomes the king, and Edward Winslow is the only pilgrim who had his portrait painted. He's going with Oliver well with William Penn Sr. Under Oliver Cromwell's term as leading the country, William Penn Sr. to capture Jamaica. And so, William Penn Sr. Captures it, but unfortunately Edward Winslow died of yellow fever and was buried at sea. But just fascinating stories of the pilgrims. And one thing that people forget is they didn't have any money, so they borrowed money from the London Company, and the company had bylaws that said everything would be owned in common. And they tried it and almost starved to death. And William Bradford scraps it and says, everybody get your own plot of land. And he says, this made all hands more industrious. Even the women went willingly into the field while to have compel before compelled them, they would have thought it great oppression. And so, the women would take their little children and say, come on, kid, we're gonna plant corn 'cause it's ours. Right. And so, we celebrate Thanksgiving, but one of the reasons they had an abundant harvest was because of private property. It was not socialism. 

Tim Barton [00:23:30] And Bill, I would also point out, and in the midst of all the details you're giving right now, I'm looking. There's so much more in your book. There's other chapters that include the Age of Discovery, Reformation. You get into King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, which is a very important background. The role of the printing press, which we didn't get into. There's some really fascinating things with William Brewster, the main beam that breaks on the Mayflower on the way over. And Governor Bradford in his of Plymouth Plantation says that one of their members had brought a big jack press with them, which is largely thought to have been maybe William Brewster's printing press. So some of that background, you get into the Protestant Ripple effect, the role of different leaders involved, which include some of the Muslim leaders, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Riley. I mean, just so much you get into in this. And so for people that are wanting to know hey, what is what is some of the context? What is the background? One of the things. We talk about a lot at WallBuilders. Bill, I know you do such a good job of this as well. It's oftentimes as important to learn the surrounding context as it is specific details of the story, because the context helps you understand those details of the story. And there was a lot of context that led to the pilgrims leaving Europe, coming to the new world. There's a lot of context that led to the fact they land in an area that is uninhabited because a disease had come and wiped out the tribe. And the only guy who's a surviving member of the tribe, he had been enslaved, taken over in Europe, but he's freed by a group of monks, these religious leaders. He learns English. He comes back, I mean, there's so many details to this that when historians used to look back, they recognize God's hand in the midst of this. And today, a lot of people, the way we are taught history, we don't see how God is moving so many pieces. But Bill, you do such a good job of helping reconnect some of those providential dots in the story. 

Bill Federer [00:25:26] Well, one quick piece. In 1625 they saved up eight hundred pounds of beaver skins to send back to England for trade, and a Turkish man of war, a Muslim pirate ship, captures them in the English Channel, takes the crew to Morocco and sells them into slavery. The Sultan Morocco was Moulay's Mall. He had twenty-five thousand Europeans that he had captured with his pirate ships, and he had a thousand forty-two children. He had like, you know, five hundred wives, some record number of kids. But here the pilgrims had to deal with Islamic terrorism even way back then. 

Tim Barton [00:26:02] Okay, well, so everybody listening that this is the reason you need to get Bill's book, The Treacherous World of the Sixteenth Century and How the Pilgrims Escaped It. You'll find it on AmericanMinute dot com. Bill, thank you for taking time to be with us today, but thank you in general for all of your work. We love you from WallBuilders. We respect you so much, and we are so grateful that God's allowed us to become friends over the years. So, as we get ready for Thanksgiving, I just want you to know, Bill, I'm very thankful for you and thank you for being with us today. 

Bill Federer [00:26:32] Well I'm thankful for you, Tim and Gabby, and for David and Cheryl. 

Tim Barton [00:26:38] Well, for everybody listening, we are thankful for you too, and we hope you'll tune in with us tomorrow on the WallBuilders Show.