Redeemer nation

In the introduction to his contribution to the Oxford History of the United States ( What Hath God Wrought , 2007), Daniel Walker Howe quotes an 1850 Methodist women’s magazine’s ecstasies over the telegraph: “This noble invention is to be the means of extending civilization, republicanism, and Christianity over the earth. It must and will be extended to nations half-civilized, and thence to those now savage and barbarous. Our government will be the grand center of this might influence . . . . The beneficial and harmonious operation of our institutions will be seen, and similar ones adopted. Christianity must speedily follow them, and we shall behold the grand spectacle of a whole world, civilized, republican, and Christian . . . . Wars will cease from the earth . . . Then shall come to pass the millennium.”

This is a remarkable statement on a dozen different levels: The conflation of Christianity with civilization, specifically American republican civilization, and the corresponding hint that the rest of the world is divided into barbarians and semi-barbarians; the neo-con enthusiasm for “spreading democracy” (here republicanism); the faith in technology, which could be a plug for the World Wide Web; the religious tenor of the whole statement; the prediction of a technology-driven American globalization; the sadly ironic invocation of the “harmonious” working of American government, a decade before the civil war; the more tragically ironic reality of two world wars within the following century, wars that sometimes put technology – the very same technology celebrated here as the path to peace – to murderous uses.