The Cross of War: Christian Nationalism and U.S. Expansion in the Spanish-American War

Notes

143 Notes Intro­ duc­ tion 1. Abra­ ham Lin­ coln, “Ad­ dress at Get­ tys­ burg, Penn­ syl­ va­ nia,” in Se­ lected ­ Speeches and Writ­ ings: Abra­ ham Lin­ coln, intro­ duc­ tion by Gore Vidal (New York: Vin­ tage, 1992), 405. 2. Abra­ ham Lin­ coln, “An­ nual Mes­ sage to Con­ gress,” in Se­ lected ­ Speeches, 364. 3. Woo­ drow Wil­ son, “For Dec­ lar­ a­ tion of War ­ against Ger­ many: Ad­ dress De­ livered at a Joint Ses­ sion of the Two ­ Houses of Con­ gress,” in The Pub­ lic ­ Papers of Woo­ drow Wil­ son: War and Peace, vol. 1, ed. Ray Stan­ nard Baker and ­ William Ed­ ward Dodd (New York:­ Harper and Broth­ ers, 1927), 14. 4. Liah Green­ feld, Na­ tion­ al­ ism: Five Roads to Mod­ er­ nity (Cam­ bridge, MA: Har­ vard Uni­ ver­ sity Press, 1992), 3. 5. I am most in­ debted here to Clif­ ford ­ Geertz, “Ideol­ ogy as a Cul­ tural ­ System,” in The Inter­ pre­ ta­ tion of Cul­ tures: Se­ lected Es­ says (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 193–233. 6. ­ Greenfeld’s il­ lu­ mi­ nat­ ing com­ par­ a­ tive study high­ lights this dis­ tinct fea­ ture of the ­ American ex­ pe­ ri­ ence. She ob­ serves that “in Amer­ ica, at the out­ set, ideol­ ogy, the firm con­ vic­ tion that the ­ American so­ ci­ ety (every ob­ jec­ tive at­ trib­ ute of which—ter­ ri­ tory, re­ sources, in­ sti­ tu­ tions, and char­ ac­ ter—was as yet un­ cer­ tain) was a na­ tion, was the only thing that was cer­ tain” (Na­ tion­ al­ ism, 402; em­ pha­ sis orig­ i­ nal). For a help­ ful over­ view see pp. 15–25; for a de­ tailed dis­ cus­ sion see pp. 399–484. 7. I am using Chris­ tian na­ tion­ al­ ism to de­ fine phe­ nom­ ena often de­ scribed by the term “civil re­ li­ gion.” Rob­ ert Bel­ lah first drew the term from Rous­ seau and ap­ plied it to what he ­ argued was a dis­ tinct ­ system of be­ lief and prac­ tice cen­ tered on the po­ lit­ i­ cal state, pos­ sess­ ing its own theol­ ogy, moral code, holy days, holy fig­ ures, and rit­ ual prac­ tices. For ­ Bellah’s orig­ i­ nal essay, along with sev­ eral oth­ ers that cap­ ture the es­ sence of the early dis­ cus­ sion of civil re­ li­ gion, see Rus­ sell Ri­ chey and Don­ ald Jones, eds., ­ American Civil Re­ li­ gion (New York: ­ Harper and Row, 1974). De­ spite some over­ lap in sub­ ject mat­ ter, I have cho­ sen to use Chris­ tian na­ tion­ al­ ism ­ rather than civil re­ li­ gion for two rea­ sons. First, my pri­ mary inter­ est is how ­ American Chris­ tians have ­ adopted the na­ tion as an ob­ ject of re­ li­ gious sig­ nif­i­ cance ­ within the Chris­ tian world­ view. I am inter­ ested in na­ tion­ al­ ism as a fea­ ture of ­ American Chris­ ti­ an­ ity. But civil re­ li­ gion more typ­ i­ cally re­ fers to the re­ li­ gious 144 E Notes to pages 4–6 di­ men­ sion of the po­ lit­ i­ cal ­ sphere or to the use of re­ li­ gion by the ­ powers-that-be for po­ lit­ i­ cal pur­ poses. Ro­ nald ­ Beiner’s 2011 study de­ fines civil re­ li­ gion as “the ap­ pro­ pri­ a­ tion of re­ li­ gion by pol­ i­ tics for its own pur­ poses” (Civil Re­ li­ gion: A Di­ alogue in the His­ tory of Po­ lit­ i­ cal Phi­ lo­ so­ phy [Cam­ bridge: Cam­ bridge Uni­ ver­ sity Press, 2011], 1). Sec­ ond, in my judg­ ment the pri­ mary con­ cerns driv­ ing con­ tem­ po­ rary usage of civil re­ li­ gion are theo­ ret­ i­ cal and nor­ ma­ tive, ­ rather than the nar­ rowly de­ scrip­ tive goals of my study. His­ to­ rians have used the term for de­ scrip­ tive stud­ ies sim­ i­ lar to my own (see, for ex­ am­ ple, Harry Stout, Upon the Altar of the Na­ tion: A Moral His­ tory of the Civil War [New York: Vi­ king, 2006], xx–xxii). But the term seems best ­ suited for dis­ cus­ sions among po­ lit...