How Protestant Ideals Became American Nationalism

Stephanson’s Manifest Destiny is an interesting text because it not only looks at what happened in history, but it argues specific motivations behind the actions of the United States as a whole throughout its history. Stephanson is not trying to explain why specific people took specific actions that shaped the history of the United States, though he does a little of that, but he is presenting a theory on how the United States as a nation justified its actions to itself and to the world. What this text showed me were some of the ideals that went into American nationalism, how that nationalism was different from nationalism in other countries around the world and how the ideas that make up American nationalism have affected policies and decision making throughout the history of the United States.

People in the United States needed something under which to band together. Part of what makes up nationalism is what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities.” This is when people are able to think of themselves as part of a community that is made up of more than just the people they know. American University, for example, is an imagined community because we all consider ourselves to be a part of the group of people that make up American University, but I’m fairly certain that none of us know every single other person who considers her/himself to be a part of American University as well. When the United States fought for independence from Britain, they were banding together under a common oppression by the British government, but they were also banding together under the common ideals of the protestant religions. Many of the colonials had left Europe to escape religious persecution, and despite the differences among the different branches of Protestantism, they did have several ideals in common. Freedom of religion means a society free from religious persecution, not a society free from religion, and many of the men who instigated the American Revolution and worked in the formation of the United States were Protestant. Once they had won the war, Protestant ideals became and even greater part of the commonalities among the people, and thus became the basis for American nationalism.

As the United States continued to develop, the religious ideals became more ingrained into American society, until the phrase "American" came to represent those religious ideals under a secular name. This is why the Biblical argument that came up time and again throughout Stephanson's book went largely unchallenged through American history, and why manifest destiny has constantly emerged in our nation's past.