Manifest Destiny and Christian Nationalism
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Manifest Destiny and Christian Nationalism
Manifest Destiny was a nineteenth-century ideology that presented the territorial expansion of the United States across North America as natural, historically necessary, politically beneficial, and, for many advocates, sanctioned by divine Providence. Although economic interests, security concerns, partisan politics, land hunger, slavery, diplomacy, and population growth all contributed to American expansion, religious ideas frequently supplied a language through which expansion could be interpreted as part of a larger national mission.
The relationship between Manifest Destiny and Christian nationalism is therefore significant but complex. Manifest Destiny was not simply a religious doctrine, nor did all American Christians support territorial expansion. Nevertheless, some influential advocates combined Protestant theology, providential interpretations of history, republican political ideals, racial assumptions, and beliefs about the special destiny of the United States. Historian John D. Wilsey has specifically interpreted John L. O'Sullivan's formulation of Manifest Destiny as a form of antebellum Christian nationalism.
The ideology also had consequences extending far beyond religious rhetoric. Expansion contributed to war with Mexico, the acquisition of enormous territories, Indigenous dispossession, conflicts over slavery, migration to the West, and changing relationships among Protestantism, Catholicism, race, citizenship, and national identity.
Religious and Ideological Roots
Ideas associated with Manifest Destiny developed from several older traditions. Colonial and early national Americans had long used biblical and providential language to interpret their communities and the development of the United States. Puritan imagery such as the idea of a society with a special historical purpose later became part of broader narratives about American exceptionalism and national mission.
During the early nineteenth century, evangelical revivalism and voluntary religious organizations expanded alongside settlement. Churches, missionary societies, schools, colleges, Bible organizations, and reform movements followed settlers into western territories. For many Protestants, the future religious character of the West appeared inseparable from the future of the nation itself.
Lyman Beecher's A Plea for the West illustrates this connection. Beecher argued that Protestant institutions in the rapidly developing West were essential to the religious and political future of the United States. His concerns included education, missionary activity, republican government, immigration, and competition between Protestantism and Catholicism.
Such arguments did not yet constitute the complete ideology later called Manifest Destiny, but they provided part of the religious environment in which expansion could be interpreted as a national and providential project.
John L. O'Sullivan and the Language of Destiny
Journalist and editor John L. O'Sullivan became one of the most important voices associated with Manifest Destiny. In his 1839 essay The Great Nation of Futurity, O'Sullivan portrayed the United States as a society whose historical mission was connected with democracy, equality, progress, liberty, and Providence.
In 1845, while discussing the annexation of Texas, O'Sullivan employed the expression "manifest destiny" in arguing for American continental expansion. His writings presented the United States as possessing an exceptional historical role and portrayed republican institutions as part of a larger movement of human progress.
O'Sullivan's formulation combined religious and secular ideas. Providence appeared alongside Enlightenment ideas about progress, democratic government, nationalism, and nineteenth-century theories of historical development. Rather than representing conventional Christian theology alone, the resulting ideology blended religious concepts with a political interpretation of national destiny.
This combination is one reason some historians describe O'Sullivan's Manifest Destiny as a form of Christian nationalism. In this interpretation, religious concepts such as providence, chosenness, mission, and historical purpose became closely identified with the destiny of the American nation.
Protestantism and the American West
Westward expansion was accompanied by extensive Protestant missionary and educational activity. Ministers, missionaries, churches, schools, and voluntary societies attempted to establish religious institutions throughout new settlements.
For some Protestants, the West represented both an opportunity and a challenge. They feared that rapidly expanding communities without churches and schools could develop outside the religious and cultural institutions they considered essential to republican society.
Missionary activity also brought Protestant settlers into sustained contact and conflict with Indigenous nations. Sites such as the Whitman Mission illustrate the complicated relationship among missionary ambitions, Native communities, migration, federal policy, and territorial expansion.
Religious motivations should not be treated as identical with federal expansionist policy. Missionaries sometimes supported settlement, but religious leaders and organizations could also criticize removal, warfare, slavery, or other government policies. Protestant Americans themselves disagreed about the morality and meaning of expansion.
Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War
The Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 became one of the most consequential expressions of the expansionist era. President James K. Polk's administration pursued territorial objectives involving Texas, California, Oregon, and the Southwest at a time when Manifest Destiny had become a prominent part of American political discourse.
Religion contributed to how some Americans understood the conflict. The overwhelmingly Protestant identity claimed by many Americans contrasted with perceptions of Catholic Mexico. Scholarship on the war documents the interaction of Protestantism, anti-Catholicism, republicanism, Anglo-Saxon racial ideas, and Manifest Destiny rhetoric.
Recruiters and expansionist writers sometimes depicted American institutions as superior to those of Mexico and presented territorial expansion as the extension of republican government, civilization, and, in some accounts, Protestant Christianity.
These ideas were contested. Abraham Lincoln challenged President Polk's justification for the war. Henry David Thoreau condemned both the conflict and the government's support for slavery. Abolitionists, pacifists, religious figures, and political opponents debated whether territorial expansion represented national progress or aggression.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war in 1848 and transferred an enormous area from Mexico to the United States. The acquisition intensified disputes about slavery, citizenship, race, political power, and the future organization of the western territories.
Indigenous Peoples and Dispossession
Manifest Destiny had profound consequences for Indigenous peoples. American territorial expansion involved treaties, warfare, forced removal, land cessions, military campaigns, migration, and settlement across lands already occupied and governed by Native nations.
The ideology often portrayed western lands as available for American settlement while minimizing or rejecting Indigenous sovereignty. Claims of civilization, progress, Christianity, and national destiny could be used alongside racial assumptions to justify the transformation of Indigenous territories.
These processes had begun before O'Sullivan coined the phrase Manifest Destiny. The Indian Removal policies of the 1830s and earlier expansionist practices already demonstrated the connection between territorial growth and Native dispossession.
Some Protestant missionaries opposed removal or criticized federal policies toward Native nations, demonstrating that Christianity did not produce a single position on expansion. Nevertheless, missionary activity, settlement, military expansion, and federal Indian policy became intertwined in many regions of the West.
The consequences included displacement, loss of land, military conflict, disruption of traditional economies, destruction of resources, cultural pressures, and major changes in Native communities.
Race, Anglo-Saxonism, and Nativism
Manifest Destiny also developed within nineteenth-century ideas about race and civilization. Some expansionists portrayed white Americans, particularly Anglo-Saxon Protestants, as uniquely suited to spread republican institutions across the continent.
Such ideas overlapped with racial theories that ranked peoples and cultures hierarchically. Indigenous peoples and Mexicans could consequently be described as obstacles to progress or as populations destined to give way before American settlement.
Anti-Catholicism was another important element in portions of American expansionist thought. Large-scale Catholic immigration and conflict with predominantly Catholic Mexico strengthened arguments by some Protestants that American national identity depended upon maintaining Protestant cultural dominance.
These ideas were neither universal nor uncontested. Catholics, abolitionists, Indigenous peoples, Mexicans, political opponents of the war, and other Americans challenged different aspects of the expansionist program.
Slavery and Sectional Conflict
Territorial expansion also intensified the national struggle over slavery. Every major acquisition raised the question of whether slavery would be permitted in new territories and future states.
Consequently, Manifest Destiny contained an important contradiction. Advocates frequently described expansion as spreading liberty and republican government, while territorial growth simultaneously opened new political struggles over the possible expansion of human slavery.
The Mexican Cession contributed directly to escalating sectional disputes during the 1840s and 1850s. Arguments concerning the status of slavery in the territories helped destabilize national political institutions and contributed to the political crisis preceding the Civil War.
Westward expansion therefore cannot be understood only as a story of national growth. It also reshaped the balance of political power and intensified unresolved conflicts over race, citizenship, freedom, and slavery.
Mormonism and Continental Expansion
Mormon migration represents another complicated intersection between religion and western expansion. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved west after experiencing persecution and conflict in eastern and midwestern states.
During the Mexican-American War, the Mormon Battalion entered United States military service and participated in the broader movement of American forces and settlers toward the Pacific. Mormon migration consequently intersected with territorial acquisition even though the religious community's relationship with the United States government was frequently tense and sometimes openly hostile.
The Mormon experience demonstrates why the relationship between religion and Manifest Destiny cannot be reduced to a single Protestant expansionist movement. Different religious communities participated in western migration for different reasons and maintained very different relationships with American nationalism and federal power.
Visual Culture and the Sacred West
Manifest Destiny was expressed not only through political speeches and religious arguments but also through art, photography, monuments, literature, and popular imagery.
The famous image American Progress portrayed westward expansion as the advance of settlement, communication, agriculture, transportation, education, and technology while Indigenous peoples and wildlife receded before it. Such imagery helped transform territorial conquest into a visual narrative of national progress.
Other landscapes acquired religious meanings. Photographs of the Mountain of the Holy Cross, for example, encouraged some observers to interpret western geography through providential or Christian symbolism.
Later monuments to pioneers similarly helped create cultural memories in which white settlement, Christianity, family life, and national development became interconnected.
Modern scholarship and art increasingly examine these images from multiple perspectives, including those of Indigenous peoples, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and communities whose experiences were marginalized in older triumphalist narratives of western expansion.
American Exceptionalism and National Mission
Manifest Destiny became part of the broader history of American exceptionalism—the belief that the United States occupies a distinctive position in history or possesses a special political or moral mission.
Exceptionalism has taken many forms and should not automatically be equated with Christian nationalism. Some versions emphasize constitutional government, republican institutions, economic opportunity, or democratic ideals rather than religion.
Other versions, however, have incorporated biblical language, providence, chosen-nation imagery, or claims about divine purpose. In these forms, the boundary between religious identity and national identity can become blurred.
Manifest Destiny provides an important nineteenth-century example of this process because advocates could simultaneously describe continental expansion as the spread of democracy, liberty, civilization, Protestantism, and Providence.
Expansion and American Empire
The language of Manifest Destiny did not disappear when continental expansion reached the Pacific. Similar concepts of national mission, civilization, providence, and exceptionalism appeared during later debates over overseas expansion.
By the Spanish-American War and the emergence of a larger American overseas presence, some political and religious rhetoric transferred older concepts associated with continental expansion to new international settings.
Scholars have therefore examined connections between Manifest Destiny and later American empire, missionary activity, military intervention, foreign policy, and presidential rhetoric.
The continuity should not be overstated. Different periods involved different political circumstances, institutions, religious movements, and strategic interests. Nevertheless, the recurring language of national mission demonstrates the lasting influence of nineteenth-century ideas about exceptionalism and providential destiny.
Historical Debate and Interpretation
Historians distinguish between Manifest Destiny as a specific nineteenth-century expansionist ideology and broader traditions of American mission or exceptionalism. Frederick Merk, for example, argued against treating expansionism as an inevitable or universally accepted feature of American history.
Modern scholarship similarly emphasizes that American expansion was contested. Native nations resisted dispossession. Mexicans opposed invasion and territorial loss. Abolitionists feared the expansion of slavery. Political opponents criticized presidential power. Religious groups disagreed about war, missions, Native policy, Catholicism, and the morality of territorial conquest.
The term "Christian nationalism" also requires careful historical use. Not every religious argument for expansion represented the same political theology, and not every Protestant or Christian supported Manifest Destiny. Rather, the historical connection becomes most visible when national identity, divine purpose, Protestant assumptions, political institutions, and territorial expansion were explicitly combined.
Studying Manifest Destiny in this way helps distinguish ordinary religious participation in public life from more specific claims that the American nation itself possesses a divinely ordained identity or historical mission.
Legacy
Manifest Destiny helped shape the territorial boundaries, political conflicts, racial ideologies, religious debates, and national mythology of the United States. Its legacy remains visible in discussions of American exceptionalism, western settlement, Indigenous sovereignty, immigration, religion, race, empire, and national identity.
The ideology demonstrates how religious concepts can move beyond churches and theology into political culture. Providence, chosenness, mission, and historical destiny became intertwined with democracy, territorial ambitions, racial assumptions, economic interests, and state power.
At the same time, the historical record shows that these ideas were never uncontested. Religious and secular critics challenged expansion, war, slavery, removal, racism, and assertions of national chosenness.
Conclusion
Manifest Destiny emerged from a mixture of nationalism, democratic idealism, territorial ambition, racial assumptions, economic interests, and religious ideas. For influential figures such as John L. O'Sullivan, Providence and national destiny formed important parts of the argument that the United States possessed a special historical mission.
This religious dimension makes Manifest Destiny relevant to the history of Christian nationalism, particularly where Protestant identity and concepts of divine purpose became closely associated with the American nation. At the same time, Manifest Destiny should not be reduced exclusively to Christian nationalism. Expansion resulted from numerous political, economic, diplomatic, racial, and strategic forces, and Christians themselves disagreed sharply about its morality.
Its consequences were substantial. The ideology accompanied continental expansion, the Mexican-American War, Indigenous dispossession, territorial acquisition, intensified conflict over slavery, and changing definitions of race and citizenship. It also contributed to later narratives of American exceptionalism and national mission.
Understanding Manifest Destiny therefore requires examining both the ideals proclaimed by its advocates and the experiences of those affected by expansion. Doing so reveals a central tension in American history: the coexistence of claims about liberty, democracy, Providence, and progress with conquest, displacement, racial hierarchy, war, and competing visions of what the United States should become.
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Manifest Destiny and Christian Nationalism: Core Sources
Traces connections among Puritan “city upon a hill” imagery, Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, and later ideas of divinely sanctioned national mission, while distinguishing the different historical contexts in which these concepts developed.
Examines John L. O’Sullivan’s formulation of Manifest Destiny as a form of antebellum Christian nationalism combining Protestant theology, nationalism, providential ideas, democratic expansion, and the belief that the United States possessed a distinctive historical mission.
Explains how Manifest Destiny framed westward expansion as divinely ordained and tied territorial growth to Protestant institutions, republican government, economic development, and claims about the civilization of Indigenous peoples.
Presents O’Sullivan’s early vision of the United States as a nation with a distinctive destiny to advance human liberty, equality, democratic government, and moral progress—ideas that anticipated his later formulation of Manifest Destiny.
Presents Beecher’s argument that the religious and political destiny of the United States depended on establishing Protestant institutions throughout the West, illustrating an important religious precursor to Manifest Destiny.
Explores Manifest Destiny in the context of U.S. expansion into Mexican and Indigenous territories, emphasizing its combination of republicanism, Protestant assumptions, racial hierarchy, providential language, territorial acquisition, and concepts of civilization.
Describes Manifest Destiny as a contested expansionist ideology that combined democracy, agrarian republicanism, religion, culture, national mission, racial assumptions, and territorial ambitions during the antebellum period.
Religious and Ideological Roots of Manifest Destiny
Explains how many nineteenth-century Americans interpreted continental expansion as a God-given national right and connects that belief to war, treaties, Native-settler conflict, Texas annexation, and expansion to the Pacific.
Provides an overview of Manifest Destiny and explains how advocates understood continental expansion as sanctioned by God while connecting the ideology to Native displacement, territorial acquisition, slavery, and the Mexican-American War.
Surveys the religious, racial, economic, political, and cultural components of Manifest Destiny and places the ideology within a longer history of American providentialism and national exceptionalism.
Digitizes Townsend’s “Manifest Destiny from a Religious Point of View,” a primary source demonstrating how explicitly religious interpretations of American expansion and national destiny continued into the age of overseas imperialism.
Documents Protestant efforts to extend churches, ministers, schools, missionary societies, and religious institutions into western settlements, showing how national expansion and evangelical expansion frequently proceeded together.
Introduces Manifest Destiny as the belief that white Americans were divinely ordained to occupy the continent and examines its relationship to Native dispossession, territorial expansion, slavery, and national politics.
Uses political documents, treaties, paintings, and competing perspectives to examine the nationalist assumptions behind Manifest Destiny and the effects of expansion on Native peoples, Mexico, settlers, and the United States.
Describes Manifest Destiny as a philosophy asserting a divine American right to become a transcontinental nation and examines the military expeditions that accompanied expanding settlement and territorial claims.
Explores expansion into the Far West and the belief that Americans possessed a God-given right to spread political liberty, economic development, settlement, and Christian civilization across the continent.
American Exceptionalism, Civil Religion, and Chosen-Nation Ideas
Surveys the development of American exceptionalism from colonial religious ideas through Manifest Destiny and into modern debates about Christianity, nationalism, American identity, and national purpose.
Provides a scholarly teaching resource examining how religion, secularism, empire, race, capitalism, colonialism, and Manifest Destiny have intersected throughout the history of United States expansion.
Examines the religious dimensions of American frontier language and national-space rhetoric, showing how older ideas of Manifest Destiny and providential expansion were adapted to later technological and geopolitical frontiers.
Examines religious and American exceptionalism within Mormon traditions and places Latter-day Saint ideas about chosen lands and peoples within the broader nineteenth-century culture of providential destiny and continental expansion.
Reviews scholarship on the relationship between religion, warfare, American national identity, Manifest Destiny, civil religion, and the recurring belief that military action could serve a larger moral or providential mission.
Analyzes American religious foundational myths, Puritanism, Manifest Destiny, national identity, foreign policy, and exceptionalism, emphasizing the recurring idea that the United States possesses a distinctive providential role.
Examines American religious exceptionalism and the historical diffusion of Protestant religious concepts into national identity, public culture, institutions, social movements, and ideas about the distinctive character of the United States.
Examines connections between American civil religion and exceptionalism, including the transformation of religious millennial expectations into political narratives of national mission, Manifest Destiny, and historical progress.
Discusses Manifest Destiny within the broader history of American exceptionalism, including John O’Sullivan’s language of Providence and claims that republican institutions gave the United States a distinctive historical mission.
Places nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny within a longer history of covenant theology, chosen-nation imagery, American moral mission, Protestant culture, territorial expansion, and the development of the United States as a world power.
Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War
Reviews the causes and consequences of the Mexican-American War and explains the importance of Manifest Destiny to President James K. Polk’s territorial ambitions and public arguments for continental expansion.
Reviews the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the territorial transformation produced by the Mexican-American War while placing Polk’s expansionism within the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
Examines the Mexican-American War 175 years later and describes how supporters of expansion associated Manifest Destiny with spreading democracy, Christianity, capitalism, and American political institutions across North America.
Presents Thoreau’s famous critique of government authority, slavery, and the Mexican-American War, illustrating moral and political opposition to policies associated with territorial expansion.
Presents congressional debates over whether President Polk had constitutionally initiated the Mexican-American War and illuminates contemporary disagreement over expansion, executive power, territorial ambition, and the legitimacy of the conflict.
Presents Lincoln’s criticism of Polk’s case for war and provides a useful counterpoint to expansionist arguments, showing that Manifest Destiny and territorial war were contested within the United States.
Presents Polk’s message requesting recognition of war with Mexico, an essential primary source for examining the political and territorial context in which Manifest Destiny translated from ideology into military expansion.
Describes the Mexican-American War as the climax of American territorial ambitions in the 1840s and explains that supporters viewed the conflict as fulfillment of a divine right to expand from coast to coast.
Explains the Texas boundary dispute, Polk’s expansionist program, and the role of Manifest Destiny in public support for annexation and the subsequent conflict between the United States and Mexico.
Places Texas independence and annexation within the origins of the Mexican-American War and discusses Polk’s determination to extend United States territory toward California and the Pacific.
Native Nations, Removal, and the Doctrine of Discovery
Collects primary documents surrounding Indian removal and explains the important role of Protestant missionaries and reformers who opposed removal despite the broader expansion of white settlement.
Presents Jackson’s defense of Indian removal, providing a major primary source for understanding the territorial policies that preceded the formal language of Manifest Destiny.
Manifest Destiny, Providence, and Christian Nationalism
Offers a theological examination of American exceptionalism and discusses Manifest Destiny among the historical expressions of claims that the United States possesses a distinctive national mission.
Discusses different forms of American Christian nationalism and identifies the Christian-inflected rhetoric of Manifest Destiny as one historical strand in the relationship between Christianity and American national identity.
Examines the convergence of Anglo-Saxonism, providential ideas, racial thought, and Manifest Destiny during nineteenth-century territorial expansion.
Provides a broad history of American exceptionalism, including Puritan chosenness, the Christian republic, Manifest Destiny, race, empire, and later national myths.
Places Manifest Destiny among several interconnected myths of American exceptionalism and examines their religious, political, and settler-colonial dimensions.
Analyzes O’Sullivan’s political theology and his portrayal of the United States as an agent of divine providence with a mission to spread republican government.
Explores how ideas of divine election, chosenness, covenant, and collective mission contributed to the development of modern nationalism.
John L. O’Sullivan and the Language of Destiny
Examines how ideas of special destiny and futurity became central features of American exceptionalist rhetoric and national identity.
Discusses O’Sullivan’s assertion that Providence had granted the continent to the United States and places his language within a longer history of expansion and American empire.
Traces American territorial expansion from the Revolution through the Civil War and discusses how expansion became connected with messianic nationalism and national mission.
Classic reinterpretation distinguishing Manifest Destiny from broader traditions of American mission and questioning assumptions that continental expansion was inevitable.
Examines the emergence of racial Anglo-Saxonism and the ways racial theories became intertwined with American expansion, national destiny, and ideas about civilization.
Full digitized text of Townsend’s religious defense of Manifest Destiny, useful for studying how territorial expansion was placed within a larger narrative of providential national history.
Contains O’Sullivan’s famous argument that the United States possessed a “manifest destiny” to expand across a continent allotted by Providence.
Presents O’Sullivan’s early vision of the United States as the “great nation of futurity,” emphasizing equality, progress, national mission, and a providential future.
Protestantism and the Christian West
Examines antislavery religious rhetoric, Christian-national language, and the evolution of competing ideas about what constituted a Christian nation.
Examines American nativism in relation to religious ideas of a chosen nation, promised land, divine origin, special destiny, and boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
Teaching resource examining Puritan roots, Providence, American exceptionalism, westward expansion, Native dispossession, and the religious dimensions of Manifest Destiny.
Reviews scholarship on sacred discourse in American nationality, including religious narratives of founding, Manifest Destiny, national mission, and exceptionalism.
Presents Beecher’s call for missionary and educational activity in the West and explains Protestant concerns about preserving a Protestant character for American society.
Complete digitized edition of A Plea for the West, a major primary source for studying Protestant nationalism, westward expansion, education, and anti-Catholicism.
Digitized version of Beecher’s influential appeal for Protestant educational and religious institutions in the rapidly expanding American West.
Traces ideas behind Manifest Destiny to Protestant and Puritan traditions and examines the belief that American expansion was part of a providential national mission.
Teaching guide identifying Protestant millennialism, “city upon a hill” imagery, revivalism, missionary impulses, and perceived duties toward western peoples as influences on Manifest Destiny.
Religion and the Mexican-American War
Provides primary documents and historical background concerning the Mexican-American War, Mexican Cession, and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Religious history of the Mexican-American War emphasizing Protestantism, anti-Catholicism, republicanism, race, Manifest Destiny, and competing American understandings of Mexico.
Examines how religion, race, anti-Catholicism, and territorial expansion came together during the debate over the annexation of Texas.
Explores the election of 1844 and the development of Manifest Destiny rhetoric in relation to Protestant perceptions of Catholic Mexico.
Examines how religious, Anglo-Saxonist, and anti-Catholic rhetoric appeared in recruitment for the Mexican-American War.
Explores religious politics during the Mexican-American War and the relationship between Manifest Destiny, anti-Catholicism, and American exceptionalism.
Thesis examining how anti-Catholic rhetoric and ideas of American exceptionalism were used both to support and oppose territorial expansion into Latin America.
Examines Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the physical construction of the new U.S.-Mexico boundary.
Presents the treaty ending the Mexican-American War and transferring a vast portion of northern Mexico to the United States, with the complete primary-source text.
Catholicism, Nativism, and American Identity
Reviews recent scholarship on religion and U.S. empire, including providential expansion, missionary activity, Manifest Destiny, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines.
Provides background on distinctive American approaches to religion, religious freedom, federalism, and disestablishment useful for distinguishing institutional religious liberty from religious nationalism.
Examines secularism, empire, religious liberty, Anglo-Saxonism, and Manifest Destiny, including the ways ostensibly secular expansionist arguments retained Protestant cultural assumptions.
Reviews scholarship arguing that anti-Catholicism, Protestant identity, republicanism, race, and Divine Providence interacted in the development of Manifest Destiny.
Places American Manifest Destiny within the broader nineteenth-century relationship between evangelical Christianity, nationalism, missionary activity, and imperial expansion.
Discusses links between nineteenth-century religious revivalism, Protestant missionary aspirations, anti-Catholic concerns, national expansion, and Manifest Destiny.
Examines the interaction of religion, racial identity, and ideas of national destiny in the construction of white American identity.
Examines Latino religion within U.S. history and discusses how Latino religious experience challenges older assumptions associated with Manifest Destiny and assimilation.
Examines religion as a component of debates over American exceptionalism and provides broader context for religious claims about national distinctiveness.
Examines religious dimensions of American expansion into formerly Mexican territories and documents claims by some Protestants that Providence favored the spread of U.S. institutions and Protestant Christianity.
Indigenous Peoples, Missions, and Dispossession
Discusses Coast Miwok stewardship and later development while identifying Manifest Destiny as an ideology that encouraged western settlement and exploitation of western landscapes.
Examines conflict between Protestant missionary activity and Cayuse and Walla Walla communities while explicitly placing the Whitman Mission within the larger legacy of Manifest Destiny.
Catalog record for Puritans, Indians, and Manifest Destiny, a collection examining religion, land, missions, warfare, and Indigenous dispossession in colonial New England.
Describes the 1855 Walla Walla Council and the transfer of millions of acres of Indigenous land during a period when many white Americans viewed continental expansion as divinely sanctioned.
Examines American settlement of Oregon, Manifest Destiny, the Whitman Mission, conflict with Indigenous peoples, and federal expansion into the Pacific Northwest.
Explores missionary zeal, religious revivalism, Oregon migration, Protestant and Catholic missions, Native communities, and the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
Provides interpretive material on Oregon, California, Mormon, and other western trails, including missionaries, settlers, soldiers, Indigenous peoples, and Manifest Destiny.
Explains how westward settlement, the Mexican-American War, the frontier army, and federal Indian policy contributed to expansion understood by many contemporaries as Manifest Destiny.
Connects westward expansion with Indigenous dispossession and the extension of slavery, emphasizing how Manifest Destiny affected Native peoples, Mexicans, and African Americans.
Mormonism, Migration, and Continental Expansion
Includes discussion of the Mormon Battalion and illustrates how multiple religious traditions became entangled with the Mexican-American War and territorial expansion.
Catalog and summary of a history covering western migration, Mormonism, Oregon, Texas, Mexico, California, slavery, and sectional conflict during the expansionist 1840s.
Digitized nineteenth-century history containing contemporary narratives of western expansion, California, the Mexican-American War, and the Mormon Battalion.
Detailed timeline of the Mormon Battalion, connecting Mormon migration with the Mexican-American War, the conquest of California, and the settlement of the West.
Examines Mormon migration, the Mormon Battalion, western settlement, and the experiences of enslaved African Americans traveling with Mormon pioneer groups.
Describes the location where more than 500 Mormon volunteers mustered into the U.S. Army for service during the Mexican-American War.
Describes the role of discharged Mormon Battalion members in opening a wagon route through the Sierra Nevada following the Mexican-American War.
Examines the attraction of the American West, Manifest Destiny, Mormon persecution and migration, and the broader movement of settlers across the continent.
Provides primary-source references and personnel records for Mormon Battalion Company B and its service during the Mexican-American War.
Visual Culture and the Sacred West
Examines Chicano artistic responses to the Mexican-American War and Manifest Destiny, providing perspectives that challenge traditional triumphalist narratives of western expansion.
Defines Manifest Destiny as expansionist rhetoric connected to an envisioned white Protestant “Empire of Liberty” extending across the continent.
Catalog entry for The West of the Imagination, including sections on Manifest Destiny, the boundaries of Christendom, western art, exploration, settlement, and Indigenous representation.
Discusses the Pioneer Woman monument, whose prominent Bible became part of a later commemoration of white Christian settlement and Manifest Destiny.
Catalog record for American Progress, the famous allegorical image portraying westward expansion through railroads, settlers, technology, and the displacement of Native Americans.
Examines Jackson’s photograph of the Mountain of the Holy Cross and notes how some Christians interpreted the natural cross as a providential sign encouraging settlement of the West.
Uses nineteenth-century western art to examine Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, territorial expansion, Indigenous peoples, and claims that expansion was divinely ordained.
Uses Emanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way to explore Manifest Destiny and the position of Native Americans and African Americans within expansionist narratives.
Provides classroom resources for interpreting visual representations of Manifest Destiny, westward expansion, race, and national identity.
Provides an institutional history of continental expansion and explains how Manifest Destiny accommodated numerous political agendas and competing visions of national development.
Expansion, War, Slavery, and National Development
Collection guide covering federal records on western exploration, territorial growth, the Mexican-American War, Indian wars, land policy, and settlement.
Teaching materials surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s “Spot Resolutions” and opposition to the Polk administration’s justification for the Mexican-American War.
Summarizes Texas annexation, the Mexican-American War, the Oregon settlement, and the large territorial expansion overseen by President James K. Polk.
Examines U.S.-British competition over Oregon, migration along the Oregon Trail, the 1846 treaty, and the role of Manifest Destiny in Polk-era diplomacy.
Overview of American diplomacy and western expansion from 1830–1860, identifying Manifest Destiny as a central expansionist ideology of the period.
Examines Asa Whitney’s proposals for a transcontinental railroad and the relationship between transportation, settlement, economic development, and Manifest Destiny.
Examines the railroad as an instrument of continental integration while documenting consequences for Native nations, buffalo populations, land use, and western settlement.
Teaching resource connecting the California Gold Rush to contemporary perceptions that national expansion to the Pacific represented divine approval of Manifest Destiny.
Overview describing Manifest Destiny as a belief in divinely sanctioned continental expansion and examining its connections with Native displacement, slavery, and sectional conflict.
Empire, Civil Religion, and the Legacy of Manifest Destiny
Examines Christian ideas surrounding western resource extraction and discusses the legacy of divinely ordained Manifest Destiny in the settlement and development of western lands.
Examines Cold War “New Frontier” rhetoric and the revival of themes of religious freedom, exceptionalism, pioneering, and Manifest Destiny in American spaceflight culture.
Examines religious language and ideas of American mission during the Spanish-American War as continental Manifest Destiny evolved into overseas expansion.
Examines continental colonization and how arguments associated with exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny were used to frame territorial acquisition.
Examines the conjunction of divine election, Manifest Destiny, Anglo-Saxon racial ideology, continental conquest, and nineteenth-century American nationalism.
Traces transformations of Manifest Destiny after the continental frontier into arguments supporting overseas expansion and American empire.
Catalog entry for Hellfire Nation, a history of moral and religious politics that includes American chosenness, racial conflict, reform movements, and later forms of Manifest Destiny.
Examines how themes of divine mission and national destiny associated with Manifest Destiny continued to appear in twentieth-century presidential war rhetoric.
Explores connections among American millennialism, religious interpretations of the Revolution, national exceptionalism, and later nineteenth-century beliefs in Manifest Destiny.
