American colonial identity was built from medieval Christian and biblical archetypes

Evidence

In later centuries, European settlers engaged in a similar program of vilification and genocide of American Indians. While early explorers were functioning in a medieval world, later settlers still appealed to the narratives and themes embedded in the Middle Ages. Early colonists from England and elsewhere in Europe were also engaged in a slightly different project from their ancestors. Concerned with the conquest of land and the elimination of its inhabitants, they were also engaged in the project of formulating a new identity based on notions of Christian destiny, Anglo-Saxon mythology, racism, and Gothic sensibilities rooted in the medieval episteme. … The emergence of these communities is a broad subject not taken up here, except in the context of early US colonial history. The manner in which early Americans spoke about the land they occupied was situated in a Christian doctrine that validated white privilege, a mindset that was extended to the indigenous inhabitants of “New Israel.” In Robert Bellah’s oft-quoted article on American civil religion, he illustrates how the belief in an America determined by Christian destiny formed the basis of American political discourse, a language that necessitates, even today, the inclusion of Christian language in order to be legitimate. … As Bellah points out, American identity is rooted in a sense of divine agency and Christian destiny. “Behind the civil religion at every point lie Biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, Sacrificial Death and Rebirth. But it is also genuinely American and genuinely new.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 569

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the book’s medieval-episteme thesis into US civil religion; connects to Bellah’s civil religion scholarship and to the reader’s own claim that the monster-image is a manufactured projection. — connects to: Christianity was the non-negotiable core of civilized status in the antebellum Americas; Spain’s Reconquista directly modeled its American colonial arrangements — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 132; Anti-Ottoman crusader attitudes were transferred onto Native Americans by English colonists — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 206 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the reader’s project of showing the image preceding contact — here the medieval templates were carried into the New World and refitted onto American Indians before being reused for Muslims.