Manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, and the city on a hill seen through Winthrop, O'Sullivan, and Bush: Opportunities for religious peacebuilding

In: Sociology compass, Volume 15, Issue 12

Abstract

AbstractA dominant theme in the story of the American, city‐on‐a‐hill experience is manifest destiny, a term literally expressing a sense of a rightful, westward expansion across the continent in the late 19th century, but more broadly expressing a general entitlement granted, it is often understood, divinely to an exceptional United States of America. The origins, the political‐versus‐religious undergirding, and the implications of manifest destiny are widely discussed in the literature. Here I focus on three primary texts by John Winthrop, John O'Sullivan, and George W. Bush to argue that, even though Winthrop's and his fellow Puritan immigrants' understanding of their role in the new land was a far cry from that of O'Sullivan—who coined the term "manifest destiny" – the seeds of manifest destiny were brought with these first immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, later sprouting and blossoming in O'Sullivan's coining, and eventually bearing some of its many fruits Bush's foreign policy. Finally, I will discuss the sociological and other implications of the divine endorsement of such ideas.