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“My Brother's Keeper”: Civil Religion, Messianic

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CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by ETD - Electronic Theses & Dissertations “MY BROTHER’S KEEPER”: CIVIL RELIGION, MESSIANIC INTERVENTIONISM, AND THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR OF 1898 By Matthew McCullough Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Religion May, 2011 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor James Byrd Professor Kathleen Flake Professor James Hudnut-Beumler Professor Dennis Dickerson Professor Gary Gerstle For Lindsey ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It was my adviser, James Byrd, who first showed me the importance of America’s wars--and the Spanish-American War in particular--for exploring my questions about the history of American Christianity. I am grateful to him for that nudge, and for his steady guidance as a mentor and friend throughout my graduate career. I am also thankful to the others who served on my dissertation committee--Kathleen Flake, James Hudnut-Beumler, Dennis Dickerson, and Gary Gerstle--who through years of coursework and many patient and engaging conversations also laid the foundation for this work. Beyond my committee, many other friends and colleagues helped shape this project either through conversation or through comment on early drafts. I am especially grateful to Paul Lim, Ken Minkema, Miles Mullin, Andrew Smith, and Greg Wills. And my research itself was made possible in part by the generous funding and helpful staffs of the Presbyterian Historical Society, the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, and the Congregational Library. The dissertation process has been an intellectual and emotional marathon only possible for me because of the deep personal investment made by many friends and family members. I am especially grateful to Marshall Albritton, David Atchison, Bill Heerman, Dave Hunt, Mike and Debbie Leys, Jamie Mosley, Scott Patty, and Drew Raines. Finally, special thanks are due to my mother, my first and best teacher, and my father, who taught me to love learning, to love both history and the church, and who in that foundational sense taught me everything I know. And most of all, I am grateful to my wife Lindsey, my truest love and best friend. The importance of this degree process to our life goals was a vision she shared. She bore the burden along with me, and never doubted that the pain was a worthy price for the end result. This was our work, and it is dedicated to her. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I: “THE CROSS OF WAR”: JUSTIFYING A NEW KIND OF SACRIFICE, DEFINING A NEW KIND OF WAR.............................................................................................1 The Battle to Define the War.......................................................................................................3 God’s New Israel?: New Biblical Models for American Identity .............................................27 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................40 CHAPTER II: CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: SPAIN AS ENEMY AND THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF AMERICAN MESSIANISM ............................................................42 Spain v. America: “Barbarism” and the “Light of the Twentieth Century”..............................46 Patriots All?: Protestants, Catholics, and the Spanish/American Divide ..................................56 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................75 CHAPTER III: “THE HAND OF GOD IN THE NATION’S VICTORY”: PROVIDENCE, AMERICAN SUCCESS, AND THE MEANING OF NATIONAL HISTORY ..........................78 Providence in American Theology and Culture ........................................................................79 “The Stars in Their Courses”: Providence and the American Naval Victories .........................84 Providence, the War, and the Trajectory of American History .................................................95 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................109 CHAPTER IV: TO ANGLO-SAXONIZE THE WORLD: RACIAL PROVIDENTIALISM AND THE AMERICAN MISSION ............................................................................................115 Josiah Strong and the Shape of Christian Anglo-Saxonism ....................................................116 A Race United: Anglo-Saxon Solidarity and the War with Spain...........................................122 “A New Commandment, a New Mission for the World”........................................................132 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................135 CHAPTER V: DUTY AND DESTINY: MESSIANIC INTERVENTIONISM AND THE IDEOLOGY OF AMERICAN EXPANSION.............................................................................140 Justifying Expansion: Early Themes Emerge in Wartime.......................................................146 Selling Expansion: William McKinley on Duty and Destiny .................................................166 Celebrating Expansion: Thanksgiving, 1898...........................................................................174 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................185 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................188 A Tragic Irony: Messianic Interventionism and the Filipino Insurgency................................191 Continuity and Change: Messianic Interventionism and the First World War .......................198 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................210 Manuscript Collections............................................................................................................210 Newspapers and Periodicals ....................................................................................................210 Denominational Records .........................................................................................................212 iv Published Primary Sources......................................................................................................213 Secondary Sources...................................................................................................................215 v INTRODUCTION When Abraham Lincoln rose to deliver the immortal words of the Gettysburg Address, as many as 51,000 men had just fallen in one of the most catastrophic battles of what was an indisputably catastrophic war. It fell to Lincoln to locate meaning in these events, a meaning worthy of such sacrifice. Judged under scrutiny of subsequent generations, the president did not disappoint. This war, in Lincoln’s formulation, was to test whether a nation such as America, “conceived in liberty” and dedicated to the equality of humankind, “can long endure.” The only fitting tribute to the sacrifice of the dead, he argued, was for the living to resolve that “this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”1 America, Lincoln had written to Congress a year earlier, was the world’s “last best hope.”2 Not sixty years later another American president, standing on the precipice of another catastrophic war, sent another rousing message to the Congress. Woodrow Wilson, in what became known as his “War Message,” called the nation to arms on battlefields thousands of miles away in a war that could make the world “safe for democracy.”3 Both presidents believed that America, in the providence of God, existed for the sake of the world and that their respective wars factored directly into the success or failure of its global purpose. But Lincoln’s war was a war of preservation, to protect the purity of the nation’s luminous example and to ensure that this example would survive intact. Wilson’s war, by 1 Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” in Selected Speeches and Writings: Abraham Lincoln, introduction by Gore Vidal (New York: Vintage, 1992), 405. 2 Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress,” in Selected Speeches, 364. 3 Woodrow Wilson, “For Declaration of War against Germany: Address Delivered at a Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress,” in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and Peace, vol. 1, ed. Ray Stannard Baker and William Edward Dodd (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), 14. contrast, was not primarily for the survival of America but for the survival of democracy abroad, America’s gift to the world. What had emerged during those intervening decades was a notion I shall call messianic interventionism; and it is the burden of this dissertation to show that its emergence had a great deal to do with an often forgotten little war with Spain in 1898. These conceptions of national purpose represent one
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