The Religious Roots of American Imperialism

Abstract

Those outside America, and many within, would criticize the "idea of America" as being ideological. "Americanism", which people might call this ideology, is a total worldview, a lens which colors everything you look at through it. But it is more or less invisible to those who wear such spectacles. It simply describes "the way things are" -- they could not be any different. Except of course they could, as is plain to anybody who is not American. Those who have investigated this territory, whether under the heading of Americanism or the related idea of American Exceptionalism, have sooner or later confronted the fact that a significant component of this ideology is not secular but religious. Although religion has been mixed with many other components since, uncovering it and giving it its true weight in American history and American identity can illuminate the "problem of America" in an original and helpful way.

Those outside America, and many within, would criticise the "idea of America" as being ideological. "Americanism", which we might call this ideology, is a total worldview, a lens which colours everything you look at through it. But it is more or less invisible to those who wear such spectacles. It simply describes "the way things are" - they could not be any different. Except of course they could, as is plain to anybody who is not American.

Religion and American Identity

Those who have investigated this territory, whether under the heading of Americanism or the related idea of American Exceptionalism, have sooner or later confronted the fact that a significant component of this ideology is not secular but religious.

This is the more obvious the further you go back into American origins. That the American Revolutionary War was sometimes conducted with religious fervour is not merely a metaphor for a fanaticism which we now find distastefully extreme - and which we, with our modern susceptibilities, hope was the exception rather than the rule.

For instance, before the Battle of King's Mountain in South Carolina in 1780, the local patriots, a mainly Presbyterian force ranged against the British, were rallied before battle with a sermon from the local minister which climaxed with the old Cromwellian battle cry, "The sword of the lord and of Gideon", which the congregation shouted back in a frenzy. Needless to say, they won. It marked the beginning of the end for the pro-British Americans or Loyalists.

As was usual with Protestant typology,1 once a biblical archetype had been identified, God could be assumed to want events to be acted out the same way and could be called upon to help. And no doubt those who knew God was on their side wielded their swords and bayonets with that much greater fury - just as Cromwell's Ironsides had done at Marston Moor in response to the same biblical rallying cry more than a century before.

The end of the Battle of King's Mountain was one of the most savage episodes of a savage war. One Loyalist survivor told a colleague how,

as the mountaineers passed over him he would play possum; but he could plainly observe their faces and eyes; and to him those bold, brave riflemen appeared like so many devils from the infernal regions, so full of excitement were they as they darted like enraged lions up the mountain.2

The Loyalists eventually surrendered but many were killed despite that, in revenge for a British massacre earlier in the campaign. The battlefield lay littered with the British dead and wounded many of whom died of neglect or ill treatment, and nine Loyalists were hung. Many of the seven hundred prisoners died as they were later marched north.

It is no coincidence that the more historically aware of the rising breed of American patriots regarded Cromwell's rebellion against the king very much as a precedent for their own. The example they followed was based not just on his actions, but also his grounds for them. The Puritan Roundhead's argument that a Christian people had the right to free itself from the oppression of a tyrant was firmly rooted in biblical, especially Old Testament, principles. The leading example of this was the flight of the Hebrew Chosen People from bondage in Egypt under Moses, who became a popular typological prefigurement of George Washington. It was the theme of thousands of pre-Revolutionary sermons across the thirteen colonies.

Indeed the English Civil War and subsequent Glorious Revolution - whereby both Charles I and his son James II were overthrown, the former by execution and the latter by exile - became an almost universal model for European and American revolutionaries. As Bridget Hill notes in The Republican Virago, her study of the life of Catharine Macaulay, the favourite British historian of Thomas Jefferson and other American Founding Fathers,

It was not only English radicals that drew analogies - whether or not mistakenly - between present politics and those of the pre-Civil War period. As the crisis in relations with the American colonies worsened many Sons of Liberty were interpreting government policy towards the colonists in terms of the 17th century English experience.3

Although religion has been mixed with many other components since, uncovering it and giving it its true weight in American history and American identity can illuminate the "problem of America" in an original and helpful way. Thus, if it is asked whether America is programmed by its ideology to follow the Roman Empire, of classical times, or the British Empire, of more recent memory, into the construction of an empire of its own, it may help us towards an answer if we ask what the religious component in American identity and American history has to say about it. Does that component make America "for" empire or "against" it?

Chosen People, Promised Land

The British Empire was built by people who undoubtedly had or thought they had (which may be the same thing), a religious motivation for what they did. We need to analyse this in two parts. What has been called the "first" British Empire was that planted by British settlers- - mainly but not wholly English - in the New World of North America. Those who settled in Massachusetts were known as the Pilgrim Fathers, so strongly did they understand what they were doing as a religious duty. John Winthrop, the leader of that Puritan colony, saw their task as to construct a "city on a hill". Biblical scholars will recognise this expression as a reference to the duty of the first apostles to be "a light unto the world ... to glorify your Father which is in heaven" set forth by Jesus Christ in his Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, the biblical typology used by the Puritans saw New England as a type of New Israel, a Promised Land given by God to a Chosen People, for their use and to his greater glory.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the ethic of the Old Testament was strongly emphasised and the Mosaic law binding the ancient Hebrews was adapted and applied by the settlers to themselves and each other. They gave themselves biblical names. The principle of Exodus 22:18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live", bore fruit in the famous Salem witchcraft trials in 1692. The more extreme of these regulations of human conduct passed away, but the belief that Providence rewards hard work and honest endeavour with prosperity became one of the foundation planks of the American way of life. Few can doubt that it lies behind the American distaste for the notion of a welfare state, British- or European-style, which rewards the indigent as well as the thrifty. Given also that it was the Yankee north where the industrial revolution took off in America in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is not hard to see the extent to which early American capitalism was rooted in the religious spirit of the Founding Fathers - that God helps those who help themselves. (To this day, Europeans are usually astonished to find that time allowed on vacation in America rarely exceeds a total of two weeks per year, and even that can often only be earned by years of faithful service.)

Equally, it is not hard to see the Protestant spirit which tamed the wilderness of New England applying itself, a century or two later, to taming the West. Those families which set out in their wagons, Bible-fearing to a man or woman, to expand the frontiers of America into and beyond the Mississippi Basin were in a sense colonists in that they went to settle. But they would not have recognised themselves under that description, largely because their ideology told them the West was empty wilderness, not an already occupied livingspace and homeland for millions of indigenous peoples. The model was the occupation and possession of the land of Canaan described in the Bible after the Exodus from Egypt. The Canaanites, not being among God's chosen, were not destined to share in his privileges. Their practices were a temptation, certainly, not least because their religious rituals had a strong element of sexuality. But the Canaanites had no right to be there, and could be pushed aside. The Indians (native Americans) were regarded as being of the same type as the Canaanites, either invisible or standing in the way of another Chosen People occupying its own God-given Promised Land.

Freedom, Puritan-Style

Although the pioneers' origins were in colonialism, furthermore, the core experience in the formation of American identity was a war "for freedom" against a colonial occupier, Great Britain. The very term "freedom" has played a crucial part in American values from the start. Despite being regularly described as Christian or biblical in American rhetoric, freedom is not a concept the Bible is familiar with (and the biblical warrant for democracy is even smaller). In the formation of American ideology, freedom was given a very narrow and specific meaning. The Pilgrim Fathers themselves claimed to be fleeing from oppression in the motherland an oppression orchestrated by the Crown and the state church. They were not free, in other words, to worship as they felt the Bible dictated they should.

But it was much more than that too. They saw God's will as being the imposition of a political and religious order which corresponded to their tenets. (The Puritans were the ideological force behind the Parliamentary armies which vanquished Charles I.) Those ideas which were incompatible with these tenets generally went by the name, "popery". Popery, almost by definition, was an obsessive enemy of Protestant freedom. Episcopacy was certainly such. Monarchy was doubtful (the ancient Hebrews had had kings, but came to regret the experiment). The Puritan settlers rejected social privilege, such as was sanctioned by the English class system based on the Crown at the head of a pyramid of merit, power and status. They rejected worldly display likewise. They were not tolerant of religious ideas different from their own: "freedom", to them, did not mean freedom to depart from the strict principles of biblical teaching. (Early Quakers were persecuted by the early Puritans, and no love was lost between Presbyterians and Congregationalists. Catholics, of course, were beyond the pale.) Freedom meant, above all, freedom from the English church-state nexus which was, to them, a left-over and watered-down version of the corrupt and cruel Roman Catholicism (as they thought it) of the Middle Ages.

While constructing an English empire in the New World its sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury explorers were caught up in the general antipathy to the continental powers, especially Spain, which were also expanding their possessions in the New World. Spain itself represented a militant branch of popery (though the militancy was often more in Protestant eyes than present on the ground), so special favour with God could be gained by frustrating the Spanish whenever possible. After the overthrow of James II (for popery) in 1688, the popish enemy of Great Britain became France rather than Spain, which was still feared especially across the Atlantic. France was the home base of the Jacobites, supporters of James II and his heirs, who were said to be, on not much evidence, determined to reimpose Catholicism by force.

Manifest Destiny

Belief in America's "manifest destiny" after the breach with Britain was in essence a colonialist creed suggesting that America was the rightful owner of whatever land it needed to complete the American national project. Manifest destiny is fairly transparently a religious or at least supernaturalist idea, for "destiny" itself implies a guiding principle leading towards a certain destination. It is hard to imagine a notion of national destiny without some idea of Providence, and Providence loomed large in American self-awareness from the revolution onwards. The success of the revolution was itself providential, as virtually every American leader of the time was wont to declare as often as anyone would listen. Manifest destiny and being a "Chosen People" are closely related concepts. A Chosen People has to have a destiny.

There is a contradiction between the freedom-loving and anti-colonial rhetoric of American history seen from the perspective of the American Revolution, and the expansion of Americans into land not hitherto belonging to them. But this was largely handled by modifying history, or by finding some reasoning, usually theological, why those in possession of the land could not claim to hold it by divine or natural right: for example, they were "papists", as in Spanish possessions such as Mexico, Florida or California, or they were "Canaanites", as in the vast American interior. Thus, displacement of the Indians or expulsion of the Spanish was not "really" colonialist, any more than the continuation of black slavery was contrary to American ideals, for the Bible specifically allowed the enslavement by the Chosen People of those who were not of its ilk.

Or in so far as American expansion was colonialist, the benefits to those being colonised were overwhelmingly greater than anything they could hope to achieve by remaining uncolonised. So they were lucky. Being incorporated into America was a privilege, not a burden, even if those benefiting from it were not immediately grateful.

Punishment, Prophecy, Renewal

The British second empire, essentially in Africa and in the Indian subcontinent, had a curious religious relationship to the first. Here also parallels with more recent American experience can be instructive. The British, despite American claims to the contrary, were convinced of their own chosenness, a status they had earned at the time of the English Reformation under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. They certainly felt the hand of destiny, providentially guiding them towards being the leading Protestant nation in the world and the leading foe of Catholic nations like France and Spain. England was commonly identified as the New Israel, or (a slight variation) the site of a New Jerusalem. Indeed, Cromwell's defeat of Charles I was for a time seen as the onset of the Millennium promised in the Book of Revelation, when "Christ would reign for a thousand years".

A feature of this Protestant typology in both England and America was the concept of "declension". It was seen from the Old Testament that the Jewish Chosen People had at times been unfaithful to their covenant with God. They flirted with pagan religious practices, including the worship of idols, and neglected the duty to care for widows and orphans imposed on them by scripture. God, in retaliation, allowed various chastisements to fall upon his Chosen People, mainly defeat in battle and occupation by an enemy, and in some instances, exile. The ways of God being explained to them by prophets among them, they realised that the way back to national prosperity was through repentance and a return to obethence to the covenants.

This pattern - decline, punishment, prophecy, renewal - was taken by both British and American Protestants (of all kinds, by no means just Puritans) as a clear warning of how God would deal with them if they, too, were unfaithful. It was thus that the British began to interpret the loss of their American colonies after the Revolutionary War: it had been a punishment for declension. What was the specific unfaithfulness, the besetting sin of the time? Various suspects were proposed, many of them concerning the mistreatment of the poor. But the overwhelming idea took hold that God's punishment was above all for Britain's leading role in the infamous slave trade with North America.

Thus, the Bishop of Durham, supporting the successful bill for the abolition of the slave trade in the House of Lords in 1807, declared: "We were a people more favoured by heaven than any other nation had been from the commencement of time, but we should beware how we forfeited the protection of Providence by continual injustice." Britain risked losing the assistance of God, which had secured it victories over the French fleet at the Nile and Trafalgar. If Britons fell below the standard of behaviour expected of them as the Chosen People, God would allow misfortune in war to fall upon them. And William Wilberforce, the member of Parliament and evangelical crusader who became one of the most influential churchmen of his generation, argued that the abolition of slavery would be a necessary act of atonement if Britain was to be redeemed and recover God's favour.

Empire's Evangelists

Wilberforce, together with his "Clapham sect" of influential and wealthy Evangelical Christians, played a crucial role not just in abolishing slavery but in the formation of a second British empire. It started with the British colony of Sierra Leone. As David Edwards observes,

In the end, the prestige acquired by these great moral victories helped Wilberforce and his Evangelical companions to open up Africa and India to Christian missionary work, understood as another kind of liberation. They had to concentrate first on Sierra Leone, which they founded in 1778 as a colony on the coast, to enable ex-slaves facing destitution or crime in England to settle in Africa as farmers and traders ... Gradually the conviction spread that whites owed something to the "dark continent" after all the horrors of the slave trade; and that the Christian Gospel was among the white man's blessings which he ought to share with Africans ... And this mission was planted on African soil during the great war against Napoleon.4

The persistence of high ideals behind the British colonial effort in Africa was illustrated by Dr David Livingstone, the greatest explorer and missionary of his day, who shared entirely the Evangelical disgust at slavery. He was one of the most famous men of his generation, explorer of the Nile, discoverer and namer of the Victoria Falls, a man who loved Africa and the Africans and was loved in return. He wanted to civilise Africa, but not to conquer it. He would not have wanted it to be exploited and despoiled, yet he was chiefly responsible for the fact that that was to be its fate. In an address at Cambridge University in 1857 he had declared: "I beg to direct your attention to Africa. I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country, which is now open. Do not let it be shut again! I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity, do you carry out the work which I have begun..."

Livingstone's journeys of exploration were motivated by - considering his strict Scottish Calvinist upbringing, "driven by" is probably nearer the mark - a passion for spreading the Gospel and for closing down the slave trade. He quickly discovered, notwithstanding the British abolition of slavery, that the practice was widespread, indeed endemic. He called it "the open sore of the world". Slavers were usually the Arabs and the Swahili, and they harvested their crop of slaves by the simple expethent of catching them.

Livingstone perceived that slavery was not just a curse upon the continent; it was also economically important as a source of wealth and revenue. Hence, extinction of the slave trade would require an alternative economy. He conceived his famous "three Cs" - Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation - as that alternative.

But he was not quite far-sighted enough to see that commerce meant exploration and trade, which sooner or later meant control. Control in turn meant conquest. In the end the only way to ensure the extinction of the slave trade was to make it illegal and enforce the law. And that meant colonisation.

It was indeed high-minded though the middle- and low-minded soon saw their chance to go in on the back of it too - diamonds, gold land glory, and eventually, settlement and farming. And markets for European goods. Almost until the death of Livingstone in 1873, Africa had remained a closed continent, the "dark continent", a place of nameless horrors and fabulous beasts. But then there began suddenly and mysteriously the so-called Scramble for Africa (a phrase apparently coined in 1884), when all the leading nations of Europe decided more or less simultaneously, that they had to have their share. None more than the British were so convinced of their divine mission. As Thomas Pakenham puts it,

In Britain, the Scramble was taken calmly - at first. Then there was growing resentment towards the intruders. Britain had pioneered the exploration and evangelisation of Central Africa, and she felt a proprietary right to most of the continent . . . And it was in Protestant Britain, where God and Mammon seemed made for each other, that Livingstone's words struck the deepest chord. The three Cs would redeem Africa.5

But Africa was not enough. The Evangelicals had long had their sights on India. Until late in the eighteenth century, it was assumed that the English were in India simply to make money (the English word "loot" comes from India). In terms of trade and political and military influence, the British presence in India had already had many moments of glory. But this changed not least when making money in the subcontinent grew harder. The English East India Company, which had been Britain's surrogate ruler, made losses, proved incompetent, and was widely suspected of corruption (which highminded Englishmen had thought until then was an activity exclusively reserved for foreigners.)

Towards the end of the eighteenth century - the trial took over a decade - the governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings, was impeached before Parliament for corruption, his chief adversary being Edmund Burke, the most famous parliamentarian of his day. The prosecution failed but in the course of it concern was whipped up in England about the standards of the British administration in India, which looked decidedly shoddy. Hence, by the turn of the century the British were in a mood to raise the moral tone of their presence and influence. Hastings's policy had been not to interfere in local customs and cultures, though he had provided access to English standards of justice for those who wanted it. The British administration in India, concentrating on commerce, was happy to tolerate such customs as suttee, the burning of widows.

This deliberate refusal to be high-minded in India was soon to be challenged by the Evangelicals, as David Edwards notes:

The belief that the English were in India to exercise a trusteeship mysteriously placed in their hands by Providence now began to prevail. It was much encouraged by the Evangelicals who penetrated India's new government. The most influential of these was Charles Grant, who had gone out to India in 1767 and had undergone an Evangelical conversion in the course of his grief over the deaths of two young daughters ... His well trained son Robert became Governor of Bombay, and the spirit in which Sir Robert Grant governed Indians is shown by his authorship of the hymn "O worship the King all glorious above".6

Historians of empire tend to overlook these ideological and frankly theological motivations. The idea that those engaged in imperialism were in any sense high-minded or morally driven is deeply unpopular. The nearest to recognising an ideological element to their motives is to attribute it to racism, interpreting it as the notion that white civilisation is better because it is white, not because it is better. This is not without truth, but ignores the additional factor of religion. Racist or not, there is no doubt the missionaries of Africa and India thought Christianity - and British Christianity in particular - vastly superior to any local varieties of religion.

The American Way

America's religious history has always sailed closer than Britain's to the biblical history of the Hebrews, who of course had no empire. The British were happy to combine a biblical notion of their own chosenness with pre-Christian models such as the Roman Empire (or indeed the Holy Roman Empire, another example of an imperial project founded to spread Christianity). But this was not the American way. America's avoidance of imperial ambitions, and indeed its isolationism, was summed up by George Washington, the first president, in his farewell address (1796). Just as the role of Israel in the affairs of nations was to be "a light unto the Gentiles", so America's influence was also to be spread not by conquest but by moral example. Washington urged the American people to

observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? ... Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue?

While eschewing the entanglements of foreign alliances, it was by trade that Washington recommended America to maintain contact with other nations. "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible." Such sentiments have undoubtedly shaped America's distaste for imperialism - of others, and of its own - ever since.

The British Empire was marked above all by settlement. Whether with God in their eyes, inspired by Wilberforce or Livingstone, or for baser motives, the British were always willing to be "hands-on" colonialists. They exported their ideas, but they also exported themselves (as indeed they had done from the start in North America). Americans were equally willing to export their ideas, but largely remained at home while doing so. In place of themselves, they sent trade and commerce, rather as Washington had anticipated.

The further difference in style is represented by the two different answers the two countries might have given to the question, "If you are chosen, then chosen for whose benefit?" The ideology behind the British Empire, self-deluded though it may have been, was that British imperial expansion was a benefit to the world, particularly to those nations within the imperial embrace.

As with Rome, empire was for the greater glory of the mother country. But as with Rome, there was perceived to be a fair balance between benefit by way of prestige to the imperial power, and benefit to the locals. For instance, as with Rome, birth under the British Crown was sufficient to establish that an individual was a "subject ofthe Crown", the technical legal term for British citizenship. This greatly diluted the "specialness" of being British, as well as equipping millions of imperial (and often non- white) citizens with legal rights, including the right of entry to Britain (notwithstanding that the pressure of immigration to the home country eventually led to restrictions on the right of entry in the name of good community relations). American citizenship has not been similarly diluted, but remains a status which confers select privileges, indeed something like a baptismal character, on its holders.

In America's case, being closer to the model of ancient Israel, the benefit of "chosen" specialness was purely for home consumption. If others were attracted by the example, that was a matter for them. The light of which the Gospel speaks had been shone upon them; they had seen and admired the city on the hill for the virtues it embodied. If others benefited, that was because trade and commerce (meaning the presence and influence of American capitalism) brought benefits to those engaged in them by virtue of an "invisible guiding hand", to quote Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was arguing that the pursuit of self-interest was an adequate motive for engaging in business and commerce, indeed, the only adequate motive. But by the wealth-spreading mechanism of the market, self-interest in due course benefited the generality. Smith, too, was putting his faith in Providence, which worked in this case, as in so many others, by harnessing nature's laws for God's purposes.

Imperial Hubris

In both the British and the American case, imperialists implacably believed they were doing good, fulfilling God's will, even when they were actually doing harm. It is surely true that both British and American influence must be regarded as having done some good, even if on balance it is less than the associated harm.

In the American case, however, the survival of notions of chosenness has produced a fundamental identification between God's purposes and America's purposes. (The same could be said of the British Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but this identification did not long survive the carnage of 1914-18.) The result is that those who stand in America's way are seen as guilty, at some deep and hidden level, of also standing in God's way. President George W. Bush concluded his inaugural address in January 2001 by implicitly accepting that America was part of God's project for mankind, indeed, the primary part of it:

After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Virginia statesman John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson: "We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?"

Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate. But the themes of this day he would know: our nation's grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity. We are not this story's author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose. Yet his purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another . . . This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm. God bless you all, and God bless America.

We have been warned.

Nations who believe they are "chosen" are a potential threat to others. Yet they will feel intensely righteous, convinced that the moral justification of their actions lies in their unique status. Nor will they allow others to call them to account. The effects of a powerful nation convinced it has God on its side are not self-limiting. It can often act, rightly or wrongly, with impunity. Indeed, in the extreme case, the Chosen People status can grow into a condition of zealous religious nationalism that is potentially fascistic.

Footnote

1. In Protestantism, typology is the practice of seeing personages and events in the Old Testament as symbolic precursors of those in the New Testament and in the later history of Christian peoples.

Footnote

2. Quoted in Robert Harvey, A Few Bloody Noses: The American War of Independence (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 374.

3. Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay - Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 50.

Footnote

4. David Edwards, Christian England (London: Collins, 1984), vol. 3, p. 90.

Footnote

5. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), p. xxv.

Footnote

6. Edwards, Christian England, vol. 3, p. 91.