God, Land, Blood, and Destiny :the bundling power of religious semantics

Abstract

This content analysis of historical texts documents the rhetorical strategies early American writers used to represent the United States as a sacred space and the American people as the inheritors of a racial "manifest destiny" Americans saw the historical expansion of the United States as a gradual and inevitable extension of sacred space. Inside the worldly borders of God's country, religion informed and invested all aspects of American life, both sacred and profane. Christianity, democracy, capitalism, race, and geography were au bundled together within an overarching religious narrative. Geographers of culture and religion have used concepts such as worldview, ideology, and civil religion to theorize conditions under which religious discourse includes reference to space and nation. Extending this work with constructs borrowed from Niklas Luhmann and Karl Mannheim, this paper draws a critical distinction between worldview and ideology and argues that manifest destiny represents an ideology that helps observers rationalize selective operations in otherwise very different contexts (economic, political, legal, and spatial) by referencing the same religious themes and programs within communication. Thus, manifest destiny demonstrates society's ability to use religion as an ideology that organizes alternatives and reduces the complexity of a worldview