152. American Crusades

Summary

This The Rest Is History conversation with Andrew Preston traces religious influences on American war, expansion, reform, and imperial self-understanding from Puritan New England through the annexation of the Philippines. Its central synthesis joins Religious Moral Framing of U.S. Foreign Policy, Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, and American Imperial Self-Denial: Christian language could authorize conquest and Protestant uplift, but it also supplied pacifist, abolitionist, humanitarian, and anti-imperial criticism.

The episode rejects religion as either a complete cause or a cynical cover. Land, settlement, slavery, strategy, markets, and power remained consequential, yet religious belief could shape how actors understood their choices; William McKinley’s prayerful account of taking the Philippines is the episode’s clearest case for treating professed faith as historically relevant without accepting it as sufficient justification.

Key Claims

• Puritan “city on a hill” language became a reusable vocabulary of watched, exemplary national purpose rather than a continuous policy blueprint.
• Colonial violence against Indigenous peoples joined scriptural legitimation to land hunger, settlement, inherited European conflict, and Indigenous warfare; religion intensified rather than exhaustively caused the violence.
• American Christianity contained aggressive and reformist branches: expansion, conversion, and civilizational hierarchy coexisted with Quaker pacifism, abolitionism, universalism, and fear that power would corrupt the nation.
• Manifest Destiny fused territorial expansion with a claimed duty to spread civilization, allowing conquest to be narrated as moral responsibility.
• The American Civil War became, in Preston’s interpretation, an early American humanitarian war when Union preservation was joined to emancipation and later supplied a model for righteous intervention.
• Abraham Lincoln’s wartime speeches show how biblical cadence and providential interpretation could structure public civil religion without resolving his private orthodoxy.
• Nineteenth-century American public culture remained Protestant-dominant, requiring Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and other groups to negotiate a Protestant norm.
• McKinley’s annexation of the Philippines joined strategy and empire to a specifically Protestant uplift narrative; “Christianize” meant remaking an already Catholic population according to Protestant assumptions.
• Open imperial debate in 1899-1900 and the violent suppression of Filipino resistance qualify later claims that the United States was not an empire.
• Later opposition to Nazi, Japanese, and Soviet empires strengthened an anti-imperial self-image that could obscure America’s own territorial rule.

Key Quotes

No verbatim transcript is supplied. The source summary retains “city on a hill,” “Manifest Destiny,” and McKinley’s reported sequence “educate, uplift, civilize, and Christianize” as episode-attributed formulations rather than independently checked quotations.

Connections

• Andrew Preston, Religious Moral Framing of U.S. Foreign Policy, and American Exceptionalism - guest and interpretive framework for religion as a durable but internally divided source of national purpose.
• Manifest Destiny, Quakers, and American Civil War - expansion, pacifist-reformist tension, and the later humanitarian-war interpretation.
• Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley - presidential cases connecting religious language to emancipation and empire.
• Philippines and American Imperial Self-Denial - territorial rule, Filipino resistance, and the later forgetting or disavowal of American empire.

Contradictions

• No settled contradiction was adopted. The episode complements 153. God and the American Empire by supplying the colonial and nineteenth-century prehistory of the later presidential and Cold War cases.
• Calling the Civil War a humanitarian intervention captures the emancipation turn but can obscure slavery as the conflict’s prior cause, enslaved people’s agency, Union-first motives, and the war’s domestic constitutional character.
• McKinley’s private reasoning, the exact causal weight of religion in annexation, denominational generalizations, casualty figures, Roosevelt’s reported description of Protestant dominance, and the degree to which Americans forgot rather than suppressed imperial memory remain source-scoped or interpretive.