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Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice
IVP Academic
256 pages
L. Daniel Hawk, Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice (IVP Academic, 2026).
What should Christians think about manifest destiny, the 19th-century belief in divinely inspired expansionism? Thanks to the work of American historians over the last half century, we know the expansion of white settlement had a devastating effect on Native American culture, including European diseases that devastated Indigenous peoples. Trade with Europeans transformed everyday life in Native communities.
As manifest destiny pushed Native Americans farther and farther west, they had to submit to US assimilation efforts, fight American troops to preserve their homelands and culture, and watch the United States violate or ignore treaty after treaty. It is not a pretty picture.
In Undoing Manifest Destiny, biblical scholar L. Daniel Hawk aims to expose this narrative of white expansion and to help Christians “dismantle” and “demystify” it. He examines its biblical justifications, particularly the ways Euro-American settlers appropriated scriptural narratives—such as the Israelite conquest of Canaan—to legitimize Native American dispossession. Hawk argues these Christian interpretations are theologically unsound, rooted in self-serving readings of selected biblical passages. By reexamining those texts, he seeks to undo the moral authority manifest destiny has long claimed.
Hawk has written a historically inflected sermon. The book says very little about the lives of actual Native Americans: He is more interested in white Christian narratives than in Indigenous people. White people are the villains, Native Americans are the victims, and little else complicates the picture. Such a binary approach might convince Hawk’s primary audience—morally conscious Christians interested in social and racial justice—and one hopes it does. But it is not a work of history.
Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, 2023)
Historian Ned Blackhawk, author of the National Book Award–winning Rediscovery of America, shares Hawk’s core premise: “Despite assertions to the contrary,” Blackhawk writes, “American democracy arose from the dispossession of American Indians.”
But Native Americans are not passive in his telling. Blackhawk insists that a “full telling of American history must account for the dynamics of struggle, survival, and resurgence that frame America’s Indigenous past.” He sees Native American societies “in motion, not stasis,” and argues that too many writers foreground elimination as the defining feature of Native history while minimizing “the extent of Indigenous power and agency.” Where Hawk’s Native Americans are victims, Blackhawk’s are at the center of the national story, offering a far more complex narrative.
Blackhawk offers a sweeping reinterpretation of American history. Spanning from early European colonization through the 20th century—the same ground Hawk covers—The Rediscovery of America shows how Native nations influenced diplomacy, trade networks, and even the formation of democratic practices.
Blackhawk reminds us that European colonization “was never a predetermined success” and shows how Native nations shaped the course of the American Revolution and the Civil War. He also recovers the contributions of Native American activists such as Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Henry Roe Cloud, and Vine Deloria Jr., who fought for Indigenous rights and challenged the “mythology of Indian disappearance.”
Blackhawk’s work builds on a generation of scholars associated with “the new Indian history,” an approach to the American past that centers Native agency rather than decline.
Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2001).
One of the most prominent voices in this tradition is Daniel Richter, whose 2001 book Facing East from Indian Country remains one of the best introductions to the field for general readers. I have used it with undergraduates for two decades.
Richter’s book is a masterpiece of historical thinking. He invites readers to reconsider early American history by metaphorically “facing east” from the vantage point of Native communities rather than looking westward from European settlements. The approach, which requires both historical empathy (walking in the subject’s shoes) and imagination, centers Indigenous Americans and reconstructs a world in which Europeans are on the margins.
“If we shift our perspective to try to view the past in a way that faces east from Indian country,” Richter writes, “Native Americans appear in the foreground, and Europeans enter from distant shores. … Cahokia becomes the center and Plymouth Rock the periphery.” For Richter, the story of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is best described as North America during the period of European colonization rather than as the European colonization of North America.
In the end, Hawk, Blackhawk, and Richter all want to expose the darkness of manifest destiny (in its various manifestations—I am using the term loosely here). Hawk uses the past to preach, and in some cases sermons are necessary. Blackhawk and Richter, like all good historians, tell a fuller story that inevitably triggers the reader’s moral imagination without the homily.
John Fea is a visiting fellow in history at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and distinguished professor of American history at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
