Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice

Summary

As White settlers spread across North America, they crafted and enacted an epic story of their God-given dominion―over the land, over Indigenous nations, and over the future. Their narrative constructed a myth of innocence that justified a massive program of violence and dispossession by suppressing a darker history. That history still reverberates today, from settler America's relations with the Indigenous nations of the United States to ways the land has been commodified as property. It's time for the whole truth to be told.

In Undoing Manifest Destiny, L. Daniel Hawk exposes the belief systems and practices that settlers developed to justify the displacement, destruction, and cultural erasure of Indigenous peoples, beginning in the early American colonial period and extending to the present day. Writing as the descendant of White settlers and as a biblical scholar, he challenges settler Christians to uncover what the settler narrative denies and to work toward addressing historic injustices.

Hawk asserts that Christians were complicit with programs of erasure, and so Christians are called to confront and heal their residue today. Joining historical research with theology and biblical scholarship, Hawk helps us recognize the myths that shape the American imagination and to engage our faith for a better way forward.