Rethinking 'Manifest Destiny'

In the earlier centuries of US history, Manifest Destiny was the idea, held as self-evident truth, that the North American continent was virgin land just waiting for the white European to conquer, "civilize," and inhabit.

The notion was a complex mix of Baconian Cartesianism (that nature is there to be conquered), English utilitarianism (that nature is there to generate economic wealth), early Greek ideals of "democracy" (in which the autonomy of the individual exists in civilized tension with self-governing community) and all of this ...

... intermixed with a particular understanding of the Biblical wording "have dominion over the earth."

It is this last ingredient that stirs no small amount of wrath among academic commentators today. Here is one, Leo Marx:

"The utilitarian bias was buttressed by the strong Protestant sense of the natural world as lawless, unredeemed, or satanic. The seventeenth century New England Puritans, who were bent on building a model Christian community, a city on a hill for all the world to see, took seriously the biblical injunction to subdue the earth and exercise dominion over all its creatures..."

Somehow the Christian good news doesn't come off too good here.

And I would say for good reason.

This morning, my friend Len and I were talking about what the white man did to the North American tribal peoples. Some tribes were relocated hundreds of miles for no apparent reason -- other than that they did not fit into the European agenda of expansion, settlement, and "civilizing" the land.

And we know relocation was not the worst of it by far.

In the Scriptures, the first Adam was indeed called upon to rule over the earth, to replenish it, to have dominion over it. But he was unable to follow through with this.

The only clues we have as to how biblical dominion can be -- and will be -- accomplished is by looking at the actions of the second Adam, Christ:

He stilled the sea and brought calm. He brought forth food for all when there were only supplies for some. He opened the eyes of the blind because that was the way they should be naturally. He helped the lame to walk. He gave life to the dead -- because death is unnatural.

He healed, and he heals, the brokenhearted.

That is dominion. There is nothing about displacing peoples. Christ is not an industrialist; he is not a capitalist; (nor is he a socialist!). He is not Cartesian. He is not Lockian. He is not Weberian. He's not even Platonic.

He's just the Artist who created it all.

Dominion on His terms is simply about bringing everybody home to the beautiful earth we were meant to inhabit, and to tend.

Logos2Go

Genesis 1.28: And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Mark 4.39 And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith? And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?

John 14.2 In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

Leo Marx, "The American Ideology of Space" in Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in the 20th Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 64.