Reflection on Manifest Destiny

In thinking about last week's discussion, I kept coming back to the idea of the religious mandate for manifest destiny that we kept coming back to. It strikes me that a religious motivation for expansion really is not at all unique to the US. Granted, the puritan idea, and City on a Hill and all that wraps the religious mandate in a distinctly American packaging, but it is still not all that different from other nations with territorial ambition. The Spanish went to South and Central America seeking what a history teacher of mine referred to "God, Gold, and Glory," which really are the same motivations (glory possibly excepted on occasion) that sent Americans westward. It is the same with the English, and the "white man's burden," which had its roots in the concept of Christianizing the native populations.
So, rather than being uniquely religious mandated, I think that manifest destiny has a certain uniqueness because manifest destiny (along with the American ideals which are tied to it) has taken on certain elements of being a religion. At one point Stephanson refers to the religious character of American nationalism. (108) Here, he is not referring to the fact that the US is a protestant based society, although that is certainly part of is argument, but rather pointing out that in many cases, nationalism itself became the unifying religion of the country. While that is not the central argument he is making, I think it is an important one, and one that sets the American concept of manifest destiny as being distinct from other expansionist powers.