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

Reckoning with the Colonial Past to Bring Justice to the Present

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.

In this book, Hawk

• combines settler colonial theory, historical analysis, and Christian theology to examine how settler America sought to erase Indigenous presence from lands taken by the United States and its colonial predecessors;
• offers a decolonizing perspective that challenges the church to acknowledge its complicity with the colonial project and to enter into dialogue directed toward setting things right; and
• highlights contemporary manifestations of colonialism in US interactions with its Indigenous citizens, demonstrating that past issues are still present and need to be addressed today.

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.

This book is an invaluable resource for scholars, educators, students, and readers invested in areas such as post- and de-colonial studies, race and ethnicity, United States history, and social justice. Deepen your understanding of history, confront unsettling truths, and work toward justice and healing with Undoing Manifest Destiny.

L. Daniel Hawk (PhD, Emory University) is professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Ashland Theological Seminary in Ashland, Ohio. Aspects of his work on biblical narrative take a postcolonial turn in books such as Joshua in 3-D: A Commentary on Biblical Conquest and Manifest Destiny and as coeditor of Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations.