The term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S.
westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread
republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism.
Yet few people realize the degree to which "Manifest Destiny" and
American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic
civil-religious discourse. John C. Pinheiro traces the rise to
prominence of this discourse, beginning in the 1820s and
culminating in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Pinheiro
begins with social reformer and Protestant evangelist Lyman
Beecher, who was largely responsible for synthesizing seemingly
unrelated strands of religious, patriotic, expansionist, and
political sentiment into one universally understood argument about
the future of the United States. When the overwhelmingly Protestant
United States went to war with Catholic Mexico, this "Beecherite
Synthesis" provided Americans with the most important means of
defining their own identity, understanding Mexicans, and
interpreting the larger meaning of the war. Anti-Catholic rhetoric
constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or
against the war and was so universally accepted that recruiters,
politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical
activists, abolitionists, and pacifists used it. It was also,
Pinheiro shows, the primary tool used by American soldiers to
interpret Mexico's culture. All this activity in turn reshaped the
anti-Catholic movement. Preachers could now use caricatures of
Mexicans to illustrate Roman Catholic depravity and nativists could
point to Mexico as a warning about what America would be like if
dominated by Catholics. Missionaries of Republicanism provides a
critical new perspective on ''Manifest Destiny,'' American
republicanism, anti-Catholicism, and Mexican-American relations in
the nineteenth century.
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