I got nothing.

Harry Stout provides us with a disturbing problem: American culture promulgates the incorrect impression that, "for much of its colonial and national experience, America has lived at peace with its neighbors, locally and globally."[1] Even more haunting is Stout's claim that, "judging from the texts, scholars of American religion ignore almost all external geopolitical engagements once English immigrants are dropped off the boats in the brave New World."[2] From the course of this class, we know that this is simply not true. Additionally, Stout refutes this misconception outright rather quickly: "In all, I have charted 280 military interventions or nuclear standoffs outside of the United States on every corner of the globe, in addition to the already referenced 29 Indian wars on the continent, for a total that exceeds 300."[3] Here, Stout begins to cite Tuveson's "redeemer nation", and I am called back to McCullough's thesis on "messianic interventionism." Although many Americans have become disenchanted with American global interventionist policy, religious notions of America as an active instrument of divine justice are still relevant, and very prevalent, in the cultures that reinforce providential ideologies. Does a lack of devoted literature on the relationship of religion and war in American history allow for these ideologies to persist? Stout believes that the New Social History is largely to blame for the movement of American historians away from writing on religious-historical topics--is he right?


[1] Harry S. Stout, Religion, War, and the Meaning of America, 279.
[2] Ibid., 282.
[3] Ibid., 278.