Civilizing the Savages
How the US Used Religion to Justify its Empire
This week we commemorated the 247th birthday of the United States. Coincidentally, the previous weekend I stumbled upon an amazing exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery while sheltering from the heat and humidity of Washington, DC. Strolling in the indoor patio, we saw an announcement about 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions. The exhibit's timing coincides with the 125th anniversary of the conflict generally known as the Spanish-American War. In reality, it was a Cuban-Spanish/Filipino-Spanish/United States getting involved because it could crush a weakened Spanish Empire and expand its territory/U.S. commercial and missionary interests back a coup in Hawaii War. That war is the reason why, down the road in history, yours truly was born a U.S. citizen 80 years later. The exhibit includes sections devoted to each of the territories that Spain lost, ceded, or sold to the United States (Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico); plus the territory where it backed a coup led by commercial interests (Hawaii).
Watching the exhibit so close to the 4th of July got me thinking about foreign policy and secularism. Some of the thoughts came to me back in March during the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. One of the things that is striking to modern eyes, unless you know the history of these particular conflicts, is the role that religion played in these 1898 campaigns. Christianity was used to advance U.S. imperial foreign policy.
In my beloved Puerto Rico, Protestantism was used to civilize the “savages” of the newly acquired land. The island was officially made a mission field for various Protestant denominations, including the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, and the Disciples of Christ. The latter took root in my hometown of Bayamón, and I attended an elementary school run by one of their churches. The same “civilizing” impetus was far bloodier in the Phillippines, where Filipinos were already waging an independence war against Spain and weren’t interested in becoming a U.S. colony. Hawaii was a kingdom with its own political system, but a combination of business interests and missionaries who could give the current Religious Right a run for its money managed to stage a coup against Queen Lili’uokalani.
Of course, the United States did not invent the excuse of Christinaizing as a way to become an empire; Spain and Portugal perfected the craft, which was later copied by other European powers in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. In fact, unlike most European states, the U.S. did not have a state church, you know, Establishment Clause. Essentially, the missionaries were, from a certain point of view, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, private contractors.
The politics of U.S. secularism are quite provincial. Most political stances are reactive, meaning that secular organizations often react to something the Religious Right is doing. So, what could a secularist U.S. foreign policy look like?
Would it manage the empire without further considering its impact on the world? Or would it question the system's underpinnings and proactively change it, making it more humane? Who knows? The influence of religion in U.S. politics is far wider than in the domestic realm, and much of the damage done by U.S.-based missionaries around the world is sanctioned, if not sponsored implicitly, by the state. But we must seriously consider what kind of world we want to build beyond removing clergy exceptions, vaccine exceptions, and the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.
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