Lending a philosophical framework for Manifest Destiny were certain worldview assumptions about land. “For Europeans, land not occupied by recognized members of Christendom was theoretically land free to be taken. When practically possible, they did so. The Christian colonizers of the Americas . . . conceived the territory itself as sacred.”78 As so many have noted, this was “the New Canaan—a land promised, to be reconquered and reworked for the glory of God by His select forces, the saving remnant in the wilderness.”79
