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This chapter on religion and culture argues that H. Richard Niebuhr's model of Christ and Culture is too abstract in this context. The Pacific Northwest has no assumed religious ethos; it is an open religious market, where religions live and die on how well they sell their brand. The taken for granted aspects of Protestant mainline and liberal Protestant churches have less success though they do have a market in gay and lesbian men and women who make up nearly a third all these congregations. The evangelical brand offers an extensive program in local and global missions that challenges their congregations to evangelize their community and the world.

This introductory chapter briefly explores the ways in which Americans re-examined racial conflicts in light of a newly perceived global mission of overseas commercial, military, and cultural expansion at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines cultural debates surrounding the relationship between whiteness and empire, highlighting the literary responses of four multiethnic U.S. writers: Frank R. Steward, Pauline Hopkins, Winnifred Eaton, and Ranald MacDonald. These writers used literary forms to complicate the popular association of whiteness with national mission or global progress. In their writings, nonwhite soldiers, scientists, explorers, and diplomats travel abroad, altering the racial scripts of empire by revealing the U.S. national mission for global power and leadership to be, instead of white, potentially multiracial. And yet they also detach race from empire by challenging whiteness itself as a social, scientific, and legal category—a strategy referred to as “shadowing the white man's burden.”

This chapter examines the U.S. reception of Rudyard Kipling's poem, “The White Man's Burden” (1899), in a variety of forms such as newspaper opinions, scientific treatises, political speeches, and parodies. This examination demonstrates that rather than intensifying Anglo-Saxonism or a racialized linkage between whiteness, U.S. nationalism, and overseas expansion, the poem instead exacerbated anxieties about the meaning and importance of whiteness for a U.S. global mission. While some satirists demonstrated the poem's hypocrisy by pointing out the onomantithesis in Kipling's binary treatment of black beneficiaries and white servants, for some readers Kipling's binary was not deceptively reversed but troublingly collapsed in a context where the meaning and stability of whiteness was in question. As part of the inquiry into racialization and empire building, the chapter shows the importance of literature both in scripting and in interrogating fictions of racial identity.

This chapter shows that throughout the nineteenth century, the country's cultural, political, and religious leaders spewed forth an excessive amount of bombast and hyperbole about national greatness and America's global mission. Not even a bloody and bitter Civil War tempered or moderated this patriotic excess. At century's end, a host of chauvinistic patriots, or “ jingoes” as they were called, reveled in the fact that the United States had gained an overseas empire and had joined the club of imperial nations shouldering the white man's burden. Years before, in the antebellum period, John Tyler was at the forefront of these shining lights among the post-Revolutionary generation who confidently hailed the nation's future glory and international luster.

For over a century, for better or worse, religion has provided much of the ideological glue holding US foreign policy together. It has played a large role in infusing Americans with a sense of global mission, prioritizing their foreign-policy goals, and identifying their allies and adversaries around the world. It has been a key instrument in mobilizing political will and grassroots support for national-security objectives. It has also provided one of the main tools to forge national unity and a shared sense of purpose during times of war. Religion has rarely determined US foreign policy, but it has helped shape the contours of America’s role in the world. Has all this changed in the age of Obama? Has America reached a threshold in which the historical foundations underlying the religious influence on American war and diplomacy have begun to creak, perhaps even to the point of toppling?