The universalist mission of Christ, which had raised up America to be a 'City on the Hill,' would be triumphantly completed. This Christian mission was essentially, in American eyes, a Protestant one. The American Christian republic was a triumphant success. It was so, essentially, because it was Protestant - failure was evidence of moral unworthiness, of the kind associated with decadent Catholics in Southern Europe and Latin America.
In the 1870s, the Ultra-Protestant and strongly anti-Catholic preacher Henry Ward Beecher used to tell to his congregation in New York: 'Looking comprehensively through city and town and village and country, the general truth will stand, that no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault - unless it be his sin … There is enough and to spare thrice over; and if men have not enough, it is owing to the want of provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality and wise saving. God's will was directly expressed in the destiny of a country where success-breeding virtue was prominent. This was Protestant triumphalism, and its dynamic was American triumphalism. George Bancroft, in his History of the United States, began (1876 edition): 'It is the object of the present work to explain the steps by which a favoring providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory.' Sooner or later the entire world would follow suit. Leonard Woolsey Bacon, in his History of American Christianity (1897), saw ‘great providential preparation, as for some “divine event,” still hidden behind the curtain that is about to rise on the new century.'
The 'divine event' was the Christianization of the world in accordance with American standards of justice and probity. That was to be a religious event.
It was thought that America would succeed in bringing to reality 'vision of nearly two millennia before - a universal faith. The evangelizing of the world was a task for American leadership.
“We must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is more important that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world. We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received and each of us must do his part if we wish to show that this nation is worthy of its good fortune.” (Theodore Roosevelt).
Americans believed in a God-ordained moral code.
