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.

That Good Old Frontier Spirit

I went into Manifest Destiny with one significant goal: learning why on earth we're reading it in a course about science fiction. Don't get me wrong -- I'm a great fan of American history (although I was very disappointed at the exclusion of my favorite president, the exemplary Chester A. Arthur), but I struggled to fit this book into my conception of science fiction.

To figure it out, I thought about the context in which we read the book. We read it as part of our two weeks of "Space as the Final Frontier," sandwiched between our viewing of "nervous liberals in space" in Star Trek: TNG. Then I saw that Bradbury's Martian Chronicles was under the recommended reading for this week, and its theme of transplanting behaviors (and ecology!) from a terrestrial to a Martian setting helped things start to click. Heinlein was frontier libertarians, and Star Trek is frontier psychiatrists. Manifest Destiny pulls it together by pointing out that no matter how you treat the frontier, it doesn't last forever. Our basic instinct when we see uninhabited space is to explore it, tear it from our imaginations and nail it down to lines on a map. Star Trek sort of sidesteps this problem by exploring an inexhaustibly huge galaxy (or sector, or quadrant, or whatever), so that its frontier can't really be used up in the show. The shadow of it remains, however, especially in episodes like First Contact, which demonstrates the sad truth that innocence once lost can never be regained; you can't civilize the frontier and expect it to hang on to "that good old frontier spirit."

Basically, I saw it as another explanation for why we read sci-fi at all. America has come a long way from its thirteen original colonies. Many of the obstacles to expansion seemed insurmountable, but one way or another pioneers found their ways across the continent in pursuit of their fortunes and the unstoppable American dream. Similarly, humanity won't be able to resist the vast, untapped resources space offers for long. It appears to me, then, that this is a matter of inevitability; we read and write sci-fi to gather and offer some sort of guidance on how the process should go when the time finally arrives for us to reach out and explore the stars. Humanity may spread and spread, and the idea of humanity extending from one edge of the universe to the other is an appealing one. The last point I want to make, then, is that Star Trek may be a fun trip, but eventually you run out of final frontiers. What do you do with yourselves when there's nowhere else to go? Are empires that cease to expand doomed to stagnation and eventual collapse? Either way, we're all headed to the same endpoint, as explored by Asimov in his short story The Last Question. That's why I argue that, cinematic deviance aside, the Star Wars universe represents an extraordinarily important exploration of galactic civilization; if all goes well, humanity's time on Earth represents only a short birthing phase in our overall history as a species. Just as a spaghetti Western can't give you much good advice on how to live in the American Southwest today, books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress can't advise you on how to live and act in a truly established interstellar setting.