The Rest Is History - 152. American Crusades

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

On today's episode Tom and Dominic are joined by Andrew Preston, a Cambridge University professor whose new book focuses on religion in American war and diplomacy. What is the role of religion in the American outlook? How has it shaped foreign policy? What is the relationship between pacifistic religious ideals and a crusading mentality? Join us tomorrow for another episode, which focuses on more recent American history and its relationship with religion. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. In 1637, 17 years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in the New World, a force of the colonists joined with native allies to launch a devastating attack against a Native American tribe called the Pequots. 400 of the Pequots were wiped out. Men, women, children left dead amid the blazing of their wigwams. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, wrote a contemporary witness. And the streams of blood quenching the same and horrible was the stink and scent thereof. And that the tone of that reflects a sense of horror that was bred of a

deeply Christian anxiety about the bloodshed that had been committed by the Puritans together with their Native American allies. But at the same time, even as some of the Pilgrim Fathers were expressing their sense of shock, there were others who were answering with the claim that God licensed slaughter in defense of Israel. Sometimes the scripture declare if the women and children must perish with their parents, one of the settlers said. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings. So, Dominic, that kind of brilliantly, right at the kind of the wellsprings of American history, it kind of sums up this sense of ambivalence,

of tension in the American view towards war, towards relations with other peoples. And it's a deeply rich theme, isn't it? I know you're very interested. It's a great theme, Tom. First of all, I'll say for regular listeners to to this podcast those of you who are playing a drinking game based on how often tom says deeply christian you are already one drink down so congratulations and there's going to be a lot of that there's going to be a lot of that i think today because you came up you came up with the idea of this i did i did not my choice so i'll tell you why i

came up with it because i think um for europe like us and Britons like us, Tom, the religiosity of American political rhetoric is fascinating because it's so unusual in a sort of 21st century European context. And we've, of course, lived through a succession of United States wars, as famously the War on Terror, which George W. Bush accidentally, in an apparent slip of the tongue, described as a crusade. And the subject of, you know, people have attacked the Americans as crusaders. And we had, some months ago on this podcast, Professor Andrew Preston from Cambridge, who came on and talked brilliantly about Vietnam.

And when I knew him years ago he was embarked on this massive research project that basically took him to every tiny you know theological seminary in midwest of the United States about the interface between religion and war in American history and his book's called the sword sword of the spirit shield of faith so he's a top historian of American religion and foreign policy. But interestingly, he's also a top Canadian. So he's kind of got a slight... Midway, yes, between Britain and America.

Exactly. So he's the perfect person to be talking to. And have you sourced him for us? Sourced him? Yeah, he's right here now, Tom. Andrew, welcome. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.

I'm absolutely delighted that we're going to be talking about this theme. And I didn't suggest it. Well, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm absolutely delighted that we're going to be talking about this theme and I didn't suggest it. Well, okay. So I realise I'm not going to get much of a word in edgeways between the two of you in this podcast, but go ahead, Tom, have the first question. So Andrew, would it be legitimate to say that the American way of war, the American way of diplomacy, that you can trace it back to the Pilgrim Fathers, to the beginnings of New England? I think there's certain ideas that you can trace back. to the Pilgrim Fathers, to the beginnings of New England? I think there are certain ideas that you can trace back. They disappear for a while,

and then they're revived at various points. But the ideas were certainly there in the early 17th century, partly from the Pilgrims, but also from the Puritans who come over in 1630, John Winthrop and his great fleet, where he says, the eyes of the world are upon us. And he tries to set up an example for, um, Americans to follow. I mean, historians since have said he wasn't actually

intending to speak for time immemorial for this great superpower for, you know, 400 years later. Um, but just, he was sort of invoking just standard Puritan doctrine about being special and being, you know, they have a providential mission and whatnot. Um, uh, but then that that that idea of the u.s being a city on a hill with the eyes of the world upon them um becomes really embedded in american political culture so so that kind of speaks to a couple of questions we got from our listeners um on our discord channel so liam boyd asked how we're defining american crusades and mark woodhouse said basically hasn't religion isn't everybody's aren't everybody's wars um informed by their

religious faith why is america any different and i suppose that's the the the six thousand million six billion actually six billion dollar question um andrew is america different are its wars and and if so is that because of that puritan heritage well listen for your for your listeners i mean i don't write the publicity that you guys come up with ahead of time so i'm not claiming that the u.s is completely unique i don't know what he's lying he does write the people uh but no i certainly wouldn't claim that americans are absolutely unique in this and nobody else has been informed by religion or their their their ways of waging war the reasons for waging war I certainly wouldn't do it on a podcast with one of the hosts here who's written a lot on that in other societies and other periods of time.

I think in the modern period, the United States has been maybe not unique, but has been unusual for great powers in the consistency in which religion has been a factor in shaping why Americans wage war, how they conduct their diplomacy, how they behave themselves in the world. But no, I mean, Americans are unique in having a religious impulse. Following on from this idea of the pilgrims and then other settlers coming to the New World, obviously, there's a kind of scriptural idea there, modelling it on Joshua leading the children of Israel into the Promised Land. And notoriously, Joshua's conquest of the promised land involves quite a lot of slaughter. And so right from the beginning, you have this kind of ambivalence. Are the Puritans, the other settlers there to bring

the word of God to the natives? Or are the natives the enemy to be got rid of? And that is a kind of tension that informs the whole push westwards, isn't it? I mean, it becomes secularized to a degree, but there is a kind of ambivalence there. Oh, without question. Absolutely. The ambivalence, tension is a better word even than ambivalence. You know, the new world, the states that are now Connecticut and Massachusetts and whatnot, um, were a new Jerusalem for these people. Um, and they weren't necessarily settling those lands in order to conquest, um, and in order to exterminate people who were already living there. But the ideas that they brought forth with them combined with remember religion

isn't exclusively influential. It's not the only thing that's motivating these people. You also have, you know, the desire for land and to settle it and to expand and to, to populate and that sort of thing. But the idea is those religious ideas that are there that you talked about, Tom, provide this kind of fuel that just propels this expansion. And it also provides a lot of ways in which, um, the people who become Americans, it's, you know, they're colonists at the time, but the people who become Americans, how they can justify that expansion. At the same time, though, and this gets back to a question that Dom asked from one of your listeners about how are we defining American Crusades? It's not just about expansion. It's not just about conquest. It's not just about war and the aggressiveness that religion can justify and can provide that But then those two ideas are also very much

in tension between the kind of desire to expand and be aggressive. And you have these religious justifications for doing that, but then also the pacifistic ideas. And they're constantly in tension. And so why I would call it American Crusades, Dom, you asked earlier, is that whether it's for peace or whether it's for war there's this crusading mentality behind it um almost always and that's what that's where i see the religious influence as being entirely um over the long duray in american history so if we can dig into that early moment for a second so we're in the sort of 17th century um puritans arriving from you know largely from england and from from heavily Puritan areas of England. Like Cambridge.

Like Cambridge and like, yeah, Eastern England. I mean, you look at all those names in New England, right? How is that different? And how is the crusading impulse different from, let's say, the Spanish who arrive in Mexico or in Peru or something? I mean, obviously, they also have a very strongly Christianizing ethos, which historians have sometimes thought of as just a fig leaf for greed, but I think clearly isn't.

They genuinely believe in it. Does the Puritanism, I mean, it's the standard thing that we secular Europeans say slightly mockingly about Americans. Oh, they're 17th century Puritans. You've never grown up. Does that make them different? I can see you enjoying that line as a secular Canadian. It's a good line.

Of course. Yeah, exactly. I love that line. Because it's true. So does it make them different? Well, there are differences, of course, to how the Spanish and the Portuguese go about their business. The English settlers, the colonists, think that they're different. They very much think that they're

different. They think that they're better, and they think that the Spanish are going about it all the wrong way. Initially, the English aren't all that concerned with spreading the gospel and with converting Native American peoples, initially. That changes over time. But initially, they want to land, they want to settle. They don't necessarily want to find a whole lot of gold. I mean, they'd love to find the gold, but of course, the gold isn't there in somewhere like Massachusetts. And so they just want to settle. And they kind of want to be left alone at first. But very quickly, like within 10 years, there are flashpoints and conflicts that then between the Pequot and the Narragansett and other Aboriginal tribes and the settlers. And that then

breaks out in violence and small wars in really, really incredibly violent wars. The Europeans take this violence with them over to the New World. Native Americans are practiced at warfare and pretty brutal warfare as well. So it becomes a kind of, a lot of these conflicts turn into a holy war, partly because of that religious, the things that Tom was talking about before, that kind of tension within this sort of message that, or not message, that the values that Puritans and pilgrims and other English settlers have, that they have from their religious faith and from the Bible. And then once there's some momentum that builds up, it just generates its own steam. Well, Andrew, could I ask you about a further wave of settlers who are Quakers? And Quakers, you know, they're bred of the same kind of Protestant milieu in England as the Puritans. But they are, I mean, you could almost say they

have a kind of aggressive pacifism. They kind of introduce a new strain of thought. And how does that fuse with the traditions that you have? So they found Philadelphia, city of brotherly love. How did those traditions fuse with those in New England over the course of the 17th and then into the 18th centuries? Well, the Quakers are one of those really important founders of American pacifism. They're not the first, but they're one of the most important. And they bring a strong, they don't bring it, it's already there, but they have a very strong reformist ethos and impulse that heavily shapes how Americans view others and how they view the wider world. It doesn't mean that it then dominates or changes the way Americans interact with others. But that reformist impulse is a kind of conscience check, right? It's the angel on the shoulder of Americans who say, if you're going

to expand, if you're going to do this, these these sorts of things, you have to do them for the right reasons and you have to do them in the right ways. I want to be clear, it doesn't mean that Americans always do them in the right way. So there's a lot of incredible violence that happens that historians now think we can actually call it genocide, even though the term is ex post facto, it's a historical to apply it to that period. But it does look and feel and sound like what we would today call genocide. And yet, in a lot of ways, the American project, be it Westward expansion or overseas is shaped by that very strong reformist pacifistic impulse. If we're going to do this, we have to do it for the right reasons and in the right ways. And that's kind of where I go

to go back to that idea of American Crusades, where American Crusades comes back in. That sort of story is kind of settlers versus, you know, English, largely English settlers versus indigenous people. But there are obviously other players in the story for North America. So we mentioned the Spanish and the Portuguese

in Mexico and Brazil and so on. But obviously there's the French who are Catholics. And this is, say, the 18th century, late 17th, early 18th century. It's the point at which Britain and Britishness are being created. And there's an idea in Britain of Britain as a sort of Protestant redoubt leading the charge against Catholic France. What do people think in North America? Because they're obviously fighting the French too, right?

They're fighting lots of wars against the French in the 18th century. Do they think of them as kind of, well, I know what you think they think, because you write about wars of permanent reformation. So do you think these are kind of European-style religious wars fought out in the North American continent? In part. Yeah, in part. Definitely. I mean, you know, Dom, you know the American name for the Seven Years' War. What do the Americans call the Seven Years' War?

What do they call the American Seven Years' War? They've got to give us some nonsense title, no doubt. Well, no, they give it, I mean, this speaks exactly to what you were just asking. They call it the French and Indian War. Okay. And they fight a series of wars in the 18th century. And they're British wars, they're imperial British wars, or they're great power wars that Britain fights. And they're known to people in Britain as, you know, the War of Austrian Succession or the War of Spanish Succession or the Seven Years War or something like that. And they're known by different names in the colonies. And the name for the Seven Years' War, the French and Indian War, says it all because a lot of these wars are about fighting the papists and their Indian allies and sort of getting rid of that influence and continuing to spread this kind of English influence. Or it's not English influence, it's English settlement, because that's civilization. And you're sort of pushing civilization. And then when you get to the 19th century, those ideas become fused in a very, very powerful ideology that's partly religious, not entirely, but partly religious called manifest destiny.

Yeah. And manifest destiny then is the is the is a name for a process that had already been happening. But the Americans, it's their manifest destiny to expand, to expand their territory. And as they expand their territory, they expand their civilization. Because it is civilization, it's civilization moving into barbarism and sort of pushing out barbarism. And the pact with God that they have, which goes back to some of the things Tom was mentioning earlier, the pact is that they have a right to do this, to expand, but then they also have a responsibility to civilize the territories that they're expanding into. But isn't that also with, I mean, so with Protestantism, perhaps particularly with Quakerism, there is a

consciousness of sin as well. So Quakers, for instance, start to lead the campaign against slavery. And there is a sense that you have throughout, I suppose it's a kind of universal Christian anxiety, that greatness in itself is problematic, that everything that it takes to rule, to be powerful, to settle, to dominate others, in a way, if you're a devout Christian, can be an issue. The first should be last, the last should be first. And is that something that is kind of a shadow over American greatness from the beginning as well, do you think? Because I mean, we see that absolutely in the present day. Is that something that you think originates from this kind of early

modern Christian seedbed? I hadn't actually thought about it like that. But yes, I think you're absolutely right. I think you're absolutely onto something. I mean, the interesting thing is, by the time we get to the 19th century, where slavery is an embedded institution in the United States with the cotton gin and the vast expansion of slavery in the first half of the 19th century, there then emerges a very strong abolitionist movement that comes out of this tradition that you're talking about. But that abolitionist tradition is also quite expansionist and believes pretty strongly in manifest destiny, just as long as slavery doesn't follow. So the anti-slavery doesn't actually map out always onto pacifism or onto... And in fact, a lot of pacifists, like the coiner of the phrase, Manifest Destiny, John L. O'Sullivan, he himself considered himself a Christian pacifist. And he believed in Manifest Destiny, not because they had to go and exterminate all the Indians, but because this was just what God meant. I mean, America would expand and everything else would just follow because this was just and this was exactly how history should be unfolding.

Yeah, right. So the idea that all these ideas are in some way specific to America, but also are universal because that's to be Catholic is to be universal. Christianity is a universalizing, globalizing religion. It's for absolutely everybody. Famously, when the American settlers come to rebel against their divinely anointed liege lord, King George III, and commit the fatal sin of rebellion, they cast this rebellion as something that is universe defense of universal rights a universal understanding of what humanity is does this commitment of the founding fathers to kind of universal enlightenment values is that an expression of something that in its in its marrow

is of kind of an expression of christian universalism you've asked that question in such a loaded way that you can only answer yes well if yes. If I say no, is this going to get, is the whole program going to stop? Thanks for listening. But also, is it not also a response to the fact that actually there are multiple different variants of Christianity in America? So not just kind of Protestant subsects, but, you know, there are Catholics settled in Maryland or whatever as well. So that if you can kind of bury all these Christian differences and kind of rebrand them as a kind of universal package that somehow transcends Christian identity, then you can launch a revolutionary war. I mean, to your question, the answer is yes. And it's both. And something that was very prevalent from the founders onwards is that both Christianity, even though a lot of them weren't conventionally Christian, and what we would later call Americanism, were both considered to be, they were assumed to be

universal values. And so for a long time, this Christian identity that is inherently, even if people weren't necessarily crusading Christians themselves, like a lot of the founders, this desire to spread civilization, to spread the blessings of civilization, which is inheriting Christianity, that's behind Christian conversionism, is also very much at the heart of what it means to be an American, and very much what it means to be at the heart of what it means to be an American in the world. Just a question about the American Revolution. So, you know, the Revolutionary War, as they call it, the War of Independence. So in that war, I mean, you wrote in your book, religion was central to the outbreak and course of the Revolutionary War.

I can see you've got your eyes closed as you're desperately trying to recall your own book. That's great to see. That's very gratifying. It trips us all up. So do they see that? Do you think that late 18th century Americans saw that war in a similar way to the way in which their 17th century English predecessors had seen the Civil War in England? So they had famously seen Charles Stuart as the man of blood, and they thought they were appointed by Providence, and they were fighting to preserve the true Protestant faith and all this sort of thing. The papists are at the gates and stuff. Is there a bit of an element of that with the American War of Independence as well? Do you think that

there's a sort of threat of absolutist tyranny and potpourri and stuff? Is that looming somewhere at the back of their imagination? I think it's looming. I mean, I think it's right at the very front of their imagination, even if not just to us, but to some people at the time, it didn't seem very logical, especially with people who actually were slave masters, who actually owned people as property, that they were then accusing the British of King George and of Parliament of being slave masters and enslaving the American colonists, which of course is incredibly hypocritical on so many levels. No, they absolutely believed it, but not everyone believed it. And so it's sort of one strand of that very dichotomous view of way of looking at the world. And also, if you're going to launch a kind of crusade or a war, you would have to do something for the very best of causes and for the very, very best of reasons. And then that often led people to exaggerate the sort of ideological reasons for why they were doing it. And religion helped.

Now, in the revolution, it's not as prevalent as it was, say, in the English Civil War, because a lot of the founders weren't conventionally religious. So they didn't use religion in the same way that, say, Oliver Cromwell would have used it in the 17th century. But it's certainly there. So let's take a quick break here. And when we come back, let's get into the American Civil War. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back. We are talking about America's holy wars or America's crusades with Professor Andrew Preston from Cambridge.

Now, Tom, would you like to take us into the American Civil War? So moving on from the American Revolution into the 19th century, coming back to the question I asked before, because it does seem fundamental to the most brutal war that has been fought on North American soil. Is this seen by Americans themselves for Christian reasons as a problem? Is it feeding into the kind of the nexus of causes that will result in the Civil War? A guilt about slavery bred off kind of Christian understanding? For some people, unquestionably, absolutely. The argument that I make in my book about the American Civil War is that it became America's first war of humanitarian intervention, for a lot of the reasons that you just said, Tom. Most Americans at the time weren't abolitionists

at the outbreak of the Civil War. Most white Northerners were anti-slavery, but not for moral reasons, not because it was a sin, but because of how it was corrupting the American Republic and how it was preventing America from becoming this expansive capitalist power. But over the course of the Civil War itself, and Abraham Lincoln held that view when he became president, he wasn't an abolitionist. And he said, you know, if we can preserve slavery where it is and avoid the Civil War and prevent it from expanding, then that's fine. But once the war breaks out and it acquires a logic and a momentum of its own, people like Lincoln and other white northerners then embrace the moral crusade of ending slavery as a way to preserve the union and the two become

fused. And the language that Lincoln and others use then in the civil war in 1862, 63, 64, is highly moralistic. It's highly religious. Christian abolitionists who are either evangelical Methodists or Baptists or they're Unitarians or Quakers on the sort of more progressive end of Christianity, he's borrowing their rhetoric, he's borrowing their language. They're also giving constant sermons, writing constant pamphlets, writing songs that become very widely popular. And then what I found really interesting in my research is that later on in later wars, in 1898-99, the Spanish-American War, into the 20th century in the First World War, Americans are consciously adopting the Civil War as their model for a war of humanitarian intervention, a righteous war that is then justified by God. Just on Lincoln.

So Lincoln is a really interesting character, isn't he? Because the sort of stereotype of Lincoln is that he's a classic, you know, he's the American. It's to some extent in the public mind is the American equivalent of somebody like Gladstone. You know, he represents the very best, the most high-minded reformist kind of impulses. But the difference is that somebody like Gladstone in Britain is very obviously a kind of a stern Protestant. Lincoln's parents, I think, his parents were Baptists, weren't they? They were Calvinists.

But he's not, I mean, Lincoln's not himself conventionally religious, right? Isn't he a deist? Not at all. Not even. Yeah. I mean, Lincoln's not himself conventionally religious, right? Not at all. Yeah, well, he has a number of different influences on him and he believes a number of different things. And you can't pin him down like a lot of American presidents like Thomas Jefferson, like Ronald Reagan and a lot of people in between. Very difficult to pin down exactly what his faith was. And he didn't show a lot of religious, there was little evidence of his religious values or religious beliefs until he became president. There's not a lot of religious rhetoric in his speeches and whatnot. But during the Civil War, religion and religious

rhetoric and imagery and quotations from scripture become a big part of Lincoln's speeches. They become a big part of how he portrays the war to the American people. Sometimes it's explicit religious phrasing, but sometimes it's just the kind of biblical cadence of his speeches, to the extent that people considered his speeches as sermons, and Frederick Douglass famously called his second inaugural address, something like, I'm paraphrasing here, but like the greatest sermon in American history. But Andrew, doesn't that, I mean, doesn't that reflect the fact that America is so saturated in Christian practice, Christian assumptions, that in a way, it doesn't matter whether you are, you know, you're a church going, Bible reading Christian, you're still going to reflect assumptions that are so deep rooted that you can't really escape them.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. There are instances in which, say, during the Spanish-American War, when William McKinley decides to annex, which is the American euphemism for colonize, when it decides to annex the Philippines, and he does so for explicitly Christian reasons, it's not a coincidence that McKinley was a Bible-reading, church-going Methodist. But you're absolutely right, Tom, that the ethos, especially in the mid-19th century and at other times like the 1950s, when religion absolutely suffuses everything, that it's almost impossible to escape.

And that religion, so obviously we've talked about it as Christian a lot. Well, it is Christian. But there are all kinds of variations. And is it too simplistic to say that there are that there are specific i mean you talked about the sort of pacifist strain which obviously is represented by quakers and stuff i mean when you stand back and look at let's say the 19th century can you say that there is a distinct kind of episcopalian that's the obviously the the u.s equivalent of the church of england effectively or dissenting kind of Methodist, Baptist, or indeed Catholic, are there distinct views of America and its place in the world? Or by that point, has there

become a kind of, you know, as Tom suggested earlier, this sort of melting pot-ish kind of, you know, American civil religion that trumps all of that and transcends it? Well, I think there's definitely the civil religion that's there. And it gets to, you know, the point that Tom just made that this kind of, um, that religion suffuses everything. Therefore, uh,

Christianity or Judeo Christianity, although that term doesn't, it isn't coined until the 20th century, that it suffuses everything to the point that you have the emergence of a kind of civil religion. I mean, both of you have pointed out that there was a, um,

that there were many types of Protestantism, but also Catholicism, other Christians, Lutherans, for instance, and then Jews who were present in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But really, until the middle of the 20th century, until World War II, the United States is a Protestant nation. And so I wouldn't necessarily say that there was an Episcopalian stamp on American politics or foreign policy or a Methodist stamp, but there absolutely was a Protestant stamp. And everyone else had to conform to that Protestant norm, be they Catholics or Mormons or Jews. And they lived, as Franklin Roosevelt said,

who was actually very, very pluralistic, very tolerant when it came to religion. He appointed more Jews and Catholics to his cabinet than any president before him had. In fact, I think he appointed more Jews and Catholics to his administration than all presidents before him combined. But he did make the observation, not his own judgment, but the observation that the United States was a Protestant nation, and that Jews and Catholics lived there at the sufferance of Protestants. It's a remarkable thing to say. Yeah. Yeah. And also America's wars overseas.

So I guess the, the, the annexation, you know, war against Mexico in the 1840s. And then of course the, the annexation of the Philippines and the war against Spain and Cuba and so on.

These are all Catholic powers that they're targeting. I mean, is that, is that a coincidence or is that a motivator? It's not a coincidence. I want to be careful in saying it's a motivator, because if you say it's a motivator, you're implying that those wars would not have happened without the religious angle, which I don't think is true. I mean, the war against Mexico was clearly one great big land grab. The war over Cuba was not a land grab. And neither was initially the war over the Philippines. But it becomes that when the US decides to colonize it.

So religion isn't isn't making these wars happen, but it's it's shaping how they're how they're fought. It's driving some of the reasons why they're waged. And those are very Protestant ideas. And I'll give you an example from the Philippines. When the United States fought the Spanish-American War, the initial cause was Cuba. And it was over all those awful things that the Spanish were doing to the Cubans and the Cubans were fighting for Cuba Libre for their own independence. And that was 90 miles from the Florida shore. So it mattered a lot to Americans. Eventually, the U.S. went to war to kick Spain out of Cuba. And part of that war was fought in the Philippines as a separate theater of the war, simply because the U. Kong to Manila, sank the Spanish fleet, so it couldn't then sail all the way around the world to participate in the main theater of fighting, which was Cuba. But in knocking out the Spanish fleet in the Philippines, the United States now was the sovereign power, as it were, in the Philippines. And so McKinley was faced with this question, what to do with the Philippines? Do you give them independence? Well, he said, no, of course not, because they're completely unready for independence, self-government. They're not educated. They're not ready for it, which, of course, had incredibly racist overtones and

racist implications and motivations. But he wasn't prepared at all to give the Filipinos their independence, even though they, too, had been fighting for it, just like the Cubans. He said, do we give it over to another imperial power? And he said, no, that would be stupid. We can't do that. We can't just hand it to, we've taken it from Spain. We're not now not going to hand it to the British or the French. And so it was an incredibly difficult decision, extremely polarizing politically. And then he said, he later said, a few months later, that he decided to take the Philippines after asking God for guidance. And he said he got down on his knees and prayed to Almighty God for guidance. What do I do with the Philippines? And God told him to take the Philippines and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize

and Christianize them. And then historians have never believed that. They've always thought that was hogwash. But none of them have looked at who McKinley was. He was this incredibly devout evangelical Methodist who always, I mean, if you look in McKinley's writings, his diary and whatnot, every time he faced a difficult decision, he was praying to God for guidance for it. So it's not, you know, it's quite realistic that he did this as well for the Philippines. Historians have singled out that one phrase, Christianize, that he wanted to Christianize the Filipinos. And they say, silly McKinley, they were already Catholic. They don't need to be Christianized. But McKinley, of course, knew that they were Catholic already. What he meant, they were proper Christians. They weren't true Christians. They had to be made Protestants. And with that is education.

There's a question here from Alfonso XIV, the pretender. Oh, I'm honored. Is the religious spirit in forming US wars any different from the evangelical component of 19th century British imperialism? And am I right that it's the annexation of the Philippines that prompts Kipling to take up the white man's burden? Exactly. It's that decision that McKinley was wrestling with and Kipling contributed. So Kipling writes that first. He's kind of encouraging the Americans to shoulder their responsibility as upholders of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, basically. Yeah, take up the white man's burden. But then, of course, the poem is full of all the problems that are going to ensue.

But Andrew, what you were saying a second ago raised a really interesting question I'm sure would appeal to tom because tom tom's basic tom's sort of modus operandi is to tell us how christian things are but also to point out how uncomfortable people are with acknowledging that so tom's constantly having kind of twitter battles with humanists do you think when we tell the story of america i mean people often you know you open the guardian or something and there's some great essay about American imperialism. Do we often miss the religious element to all this, do you think? Because historians are not comfortable talking. I mean, that's kind of your argument, isn't it, Tom? A lot of historians are not terribly comfortable talking about religion because they're not religious. They think we live in a post-religious age.

Well, no, I would say that they are religious. The criticism of empire is itself bred of Christian assumptions. Of course, I mean, that's what you would. You know, that's the whole thing. Yeah. But Andrew, what do you think? Do you think people are not as, so you gave McKinley as an example. So the thing that people would, the assumption that people would jump to is that McKinley

talking to God is merely a fig leaf for, you know, he wants markets. He's a cruel imperialist. But you don't think that at all, right? Well, I think it's, I just think that it's easy to sort of write religion out of that story, and just to assume that it's for material interest, that they're just looking for the China market, or they're just looking for strategic advantage against imperial rivals. But there's much more to it than that. because just the search for markets, just geopolitics, just sort of trying to find coaling stations for your Navy as you go across the Pacific to get to a place like China. All of those material, all of those material interests don't really explain how the U.S. decided to annex the Philippines and what they tried to do when they were there.

And in changing Filipino society and in imposing certain values and spreading certain values. So like I said before, you know, putting religion back into that story, because it was always part of the story. And I think just as it's a basic historian's duty to sort of examine history on its own terms and not on our terms. But just by putting religion back into that story, it's more historically accurate. I don't want to use the word accurate, but it's more historically representative of what actually happened. But then it helps us really uncover their motives of why they did what they did and how they did what they did. It doesn't change if you take religion out. Yes, the U.S. still fights the Spanish-American War.

Yes, it probably still annexes the Philippines. But it does so in extremely different ways with different consequences. And I think it's really the historian's duty to acknowledge that and to get to it. imperialism that both britain and america are obviously this this this sense of protestantism of evangelical certitude um the sense that they have been entrusted by god with um with with a global mission but also at the same time the kind of nagging anxiety that that breeds about whether it's the right thing to do and obviously for the for brit British imperialism, abolitionism becomes a kind of crucial justification for the expansion of the British Empire into Africa and kind of vast swathes of the world. America has defined itself, its sense of its own virtue is predicated on the fact that it is anti-imperial, that it has rejected the Babylon of, you know, Georgian London. That must be a kind

of complicating factor for American Christians when they face up to the, you know, they don't want to think that they're imperial. I mean, the British have no problem in saying, yes, we have a British empire. Americans right up to this day are very, very nervous about acknowledging that they've ever been an imperial power, whether that's in terms of, you know, the continental landmass of North America being an empire or the kind of expansion overseas into Philippines and, you know, or even, you know, it's kind of hegemony over Western Europe or Middle East or the Pacific today. And would you say that that's kind of bred of ultimately Christian?

I mean, it reflects kind of Christian assumptions, moral assumptions. I think it has, I think it reflects a lot of Christian assumptions. I think it reflects Protestant values, even if they're not necessarily very scripturally coherent, but a certain Protestant ethos that goes back to your, how we began this podcast and that idea that the United States, or that this is long, it's, that's a historical talking about the United States or that this is long, that's a historical talking about the United States in the 17th century, but that the American identity was forged through this self-conceit that they're a city on a hill and that the eyes of the world are upon them through to manifest destiny, through to imperialism. I mean, Americans, you're absolutely right, Tom. Americans deny that they've ever had an empire. It's a commonplace in American political rhetoric today to say, and it has been for a long time, to say that America has never had an empire and it never wants to be an empire, that they were arguing over whether they should have an empire. And imperialists called themselves imperialists and anti-imperialists called themselves anti-imperialists and had this huge, huge argument in 1899, 1900.

And a lot of those arguments, not all of them. So people who took part in this debate, people like Mark Twain, who were very critical of Christianity, very critical of missionaries, and also very anti imperialist. People like Mark Twain did not necessarily, well, they didn't at all use religious values or religious rhetoric. But a lot of people did at the time, including a lot of policymakers, including the President of the United States himself, William McKinley, and then to a much different extent, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt. So that was acknowledged at the time. It did play out. But then the Americans take over the Philippines. They fight this incredibly brutal war to suppress the Filipino insurgency because the Filipinos say, hang on, we just fought. We were your allies against the Spanish. Now you're going to dominate us. We don't like that. So there was this incredibly

brutal war. And then the united states you know suppresses the insurgency the philippines is an american colony within 10 years the americans do not have that british commitment to making the empire work that you were talking about that gladstone spirit if we call it if we if we're to give it a name and um they just kind of forget the empire they want to forget the empire they just want to completely the empire. They just want to completely leave it behind. Why do they, as it were, so Kipling has urged them to take up the white man's burden. And to some extent, they have taken it up. They did.

Oh, absolutely. Then they put it down again. Right? I mean, why are they embarrassed? Why do they become embarrassed by empire? So the United States in the mid-20th century is absolutely not calling itself an empire. And as you said yourself, no American politician now would say, we had an empire, or indeed, we are an empire. Why do they back away from that idea, the imperialist ideal, if you like?

I mean, because that predates the collapse of the European empires, doesn't it? They're backing away. Yeah, absolutely. At first, so you said, why do they put it down? But that implies that it's a conscious decision to put it down. I think it's just, Americans just don't care. There aren't a lot of, there are no American settlers

who go to places like the Philippines. It's not like Britain at all. There are very few Americans who even want, like government officials or military officials who want to be posted there. It becomes a sideshow. And so it's a process of forgetting, as opposed to a conscious decision to put down. And then American foreign policy, I mean, there's not really anywhere else in the world to take, right, to seize. And the unhappy experience of

the Philippines means that the US isn't looking to take anywhere over anyway. And then what defines US foreign policy after that? I mean, it fights two world wars and a Cold War against empires, against different types of empire, Nazi empire, Japanese empire, Soviet empire. You know, Reagan in 1983 calls the Soviets the evil empire. It becomes embedded in American foreign policy that not only are they not imperial, but their enemies, whether they're on the far left in communism or the far right in Nazism or somewhere vaguely in the middle,

maybe towards the Nazis in Japanese imperialism, that the enemy is empire. And so that becomes a dominating, that's not necessarily a religious idea, but it becomes very, very powerful. But also, I mean, it's an inheritance from the founding

of the United States, which was 40 years ago. Oh, absolutely. Of course. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And Americans, they return to that all the time. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely fascinating stuff, as ever, with Professor Andrew Preston. And we're going to come back tomorrow, moving to the 20th century, starting with the First World War, all the way up to the post 9-11 world, and then Trump, the present day, all that malararkey so we will see you then goodbye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad free listening access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

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