ruthpoor
- Dec 6, 2023
- 14 min read

Arcadia and Manifest Destiny: the Shape of Muscular Christianity and Teddy Bear Patriarchy

As the foreboding hyperobject of climate change barrels toward humanity, we have simultaneously begun to understand the tremendous importance and weight of our current situation on an industrial (and in some places, post-industrial) Earth. It is vital that an 'all halt' is signaled in the ethical consumption of land pertaining to companies, governments, and individuals. This consumption affects more than the physical land, but metaphorical consumption of marginalized bodies and lives occupying non-white spaces. It is now imperative that all individuals reflect upon plausible privilege and ethics, no matter their position in their respective hierarchies. Creating and enforcing restrictive laws on governing bodies and companies are widely discussed in eco-activist circles. However, when applied to the microcosm of a community, critical approaches are sometimes abandoned due to the relative (re: mathematical) impacts of individuals compared to corporations. This disengagement implies that ethical consumption should only be considered when a collective body reaches and maintains a certain size, and thus, equating individual/collective responsibility as an inverse relationship to wealth. While I agree that the ethical engagement of ecology should include poverty studies and considerations, eliminating the discussion of shared resources due to one's seemingly infinitesimal effects removes the possibilities of building upon generational knowledge and the passage of ethical thought. I also believe that this non-partisan dogma parallels Libertarian political beliefs that drive to decentralize governments as a means to replace democracy with white, privatized powers. Neither solution of governed or privatized engagement satisfies, as this essay attempts to outline. Instead, looking toward anarchic systems that exist as holistic, Indigenous, and ecologically centered relationships.

As it applies to ethics, a significant influence in the Western canon is Christianity. Most eco-activists engage with Unitarian congregations or other progressive denominations within contemporary Christian studies. This essay argues ecological considerations are vital in a Christian context, no matter the sect. In connection to the dominant histories and influences on colonialism, Christianity must acknowledge its privilege in the United States as being built on exploitation and the domination of stolen land. If the religion wants to continue, admitting its inherited sins is imperative. The goal of this author and essay is not to damn an entire faith but to identify problematic cultural influences within the Christian doctrine that continue to influence congregations today. A Christ-like approach to eco-theology is exemplified in the writings of Stanley Saunders, professor at Columbia Theological Seminary. Or the collection of essays arranged by Hessel and Ruether in "Christianity and Ecology." Ecologists and theologians across major universities in the US have begun the critical process of imbuing the ethical treatment of God's creation and the co-creative/care process that treatment needs to facilitate. It is past time that these dialogues and activists be integrated into the pan-Christian ethical lens as Western congregations continue to bypass the cultural gluttony in which we consume material and land—and recontextualizing Christianity as an existence that works alongside Indigenous belief versus conquering and exploiting.

In addition to the possibilities of Christian reform, this author and essay aim to understand the anthropocentric origins and connections of Manifest Destiny through colonialist and Christian perspectives. Like 'American Progress,' an anthropomorphized, angel-like presence of a newly born country passes over the land with the rising sun (Image 6). To illustrate this author's point, this essay analyzes art historical resources, use of taxidermy in education, Imperialist cartography, Victorian literature, religious studies, and sports history; these various examples are used as instances of domination when it pertains to white settlers exacting power over nature/Indigenous lives. This essay also suggests alternative and restorative ethics that center Indigenous voices to replace colonialist structures.

“We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx...” - Walking - Thoreau

Beginning with 'Teddy Bear Patriarchy,' author Donna Haraway presents this term as inspired by U.S. president Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt, which is characterized by an expansionist or Imperialist means of 'obtaining' land through force of conquest or invasive analysis. While Teddy Bear Patriarchy refers explicitly to the years of Roosevelt's presidency and the following decades, the lineage of this type of relationship in Western/colonialist expansion was not novel. Throughout the 1800s (and prior), British and American explorers demonstrated a relationship with the 'exotic' or 'foreign' vis a vis Imperial exploration and Christian conquests. Through the research for this paper, I learned various examples breaking exploration and conquest down into parts, which I have relayed into three steps for this essay.

1. Inquiry and investigation

2. Documentation and extraction

3. Settlement and geographical occupation.

These steps, along with additional tactics including dislocation/discrediting Indigenous peoples/thought through economic and social means, etc., all contribute to building a Euro-centric framework of thinking.

An example of this first step, 'inquiry and investigation,' is American explorer and ornithologist John Audubon, who published a series of plates with intricately rendered images of American birds and indigenous plant life in 1805 and through 1830. Specifically, I want to focus on the pairing of image and text in Audubon's work as a means to demystify the 'unknown' in settler mindsets (Image 2). As seen in the image of the great American Flamingo are supplementary sketches of webbed feet and the interiors of the bird's beak, which, depending on the edition and print, the illustrations are sometimes paired with brief captions. This example of invasive analysis is conditional on capturing and killing the subject for closer examination. In addition to the picture of the body, Audubon's images are paired with the faux-naturalization of indigenous wildlife through romanticized landscapes. While it can be argued that the field and history of science, at its core, exists through this problematic cycle, a romanticized 'naturalization' allows anthropocentrism in ecology to go mostly unnoticed.

As it applies to scientific fields, empirical knowledge is sometimes transmitted in the form of taxidermy, specimen collections, and other institutionalized forms of preservation and conservation. As discussed in the dialogues of "Composting the Herbarium," Aloi, Oresky, and Pluymers, point out that this form of transmission directly relates to how taxidermy and education are paired with the realm of scientific knowledge. This type of collecting and formatting of taxidermied bodies builds normalcy behind extracting life from its habitat and placing it within a controlled setting to understand the subject better. Because of this, it is important to remember both the funding and personal justifications of Audubon's work. While much of his research was funded by family and friends (or business partners), just as much of the money for Audubon's work was backed by museum institutions, both British and American. And other than his general affinity for nature and birds, Audubon's early occupation at local museums in the U.S. influenced the style in which data was gathered. It also naturalized his use of hunters who acquired specimens. I bring this up as the authorship and motivations matter in understanding how Audubon's work was valued societally during the Victorian era and how we understand scientific history.

Conceptually related is British explorer and theorist Charles Darwin. Published between 1830 and 1860 were his theories of evolution and various other notebooks from his intensive voyage off the coast of Africa. I think of Darwin's expedition as a pairing of the first two steps in colonialist expansion. Still, I want to focus on Darwin's collection of bird specimens as the second step of 'extraction.' A large part of Darwin's exploration of the Galapagos involved mapping and taxidermy. In this instance, I think of cartography and taxidermy as 'keys' to education and transmission of knowledge– a key that both 'unlocks' and acts as a cipher.

The animals collected by Darwin relate to the purposes of Audubon's plates in that their collection is meant to exist as an educational tool and a means to classify 'place' within the strata of Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species (Image 3). Both Darwin and Audubon fall under a similar spell of faux-naturalization with animals and environments similar to the description by John Berger in "About Looking," resulting in a 'sublime animal.' Specifically, when animals are placed in a didactic relationship with humans, they are often romanticized and exotified. "The capturing of animals was a symbolic representation of the conquest of all distant and exotic lands. 'Explorers' proved their patriotism by sending home a tiger or an elephant." Also, like Audubon, Darwin benefited from his national allegiance to England as the entirety of his expeditions were paid for by the British government. I also find it noteworthy to connect Darwin's Cambridge education with his scientific motivations. Particularly his study of Paley's 'Natural Theology' or 'Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity,' which makes an argument for divine design in nature. Both Darwin and Audubon exemplify the first two steps in Imperial exploration and act as the precedents in colonization and geographical occupation.

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.” - Walking - Thoreau

Before connecting Roosevelt to Teddy Bear Patriarchy, I want to define the second term used in this essay. Muscular Christianity was a term published and used as early as 1830 then popularized in the U.S. around 1852. For example, in Thomas Hughes' "Tom Brown's School Days," (1857) the expression is described in a moralist view that builds connections between Christianity and physical virtue through emphasizing sports in public schools. Another is Charles Kingsley's "Westward Ho!" (1855), a novel that follows English soldiers that sail westward to the 'New World.' Specifically, this term describes a belief in patriotic duty, discipline, self-sacrifice, masculinity, and the moral and physical beauty of athleticism. But in addition to this definition, Kingsley's "Westward Ho!" connects both Muscular Christianity and Imperialist conquest, which is applied in images such as this illustration of William MacGregor (Image 1).

Deepening the connection to British and American sports within the Victorian period, Muscular Christianity developed synchronistically as the Young Men's Christian Athletic Association or the YMCA appeared in England and the U.S. (British - 1844, American - 1851). The birth of games such as basketball and many others from the YMCA abstractly relates back to ideas of conquest or 'claiming' of land and space. American football is probably the most literal example as teams attempt to fight for yards on a battlefield. In 1896, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a friend of Roosevelt, reflected upon the sometimes-deadly reality of sports as "the time given to athletic contest and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world conquerors." Roosevelt himself had similar views of the necessity of violence in 'play' and a cavalier attitude when confronted about the subject (Image 5). Not-so-coincidentally, Muscular Christianity's leaders in England were both Hughes and Kinglsey–America's leader was Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt's presidency (1901) marked the turn of the century in an interesting way. His personal history as a general in the Mexican-American war followed the timing of western expansion and Manifest Destiny in the United States, just as it did end the Victorian period. (Image 7) A couple of the leading factors in Roosevelt's beliefs and engagement with western expansion was hunting, sports, and Teddy's view on Muscular Christianity. "There is only a very circumscribed sphere of usefulness for the timid good man," which in Roosevelt's mind presented Muscular Christianity as the only solution to connect 'usefulness,' or service, to men and faith with the physicality of the body. Both Muscular Christianity and Roosevelt's brand of patriarchy goes hand-in-hand, reinforcing one another. A manifestation of this is one of Roosevelt's favorite activities– participating in hunts– which also led to his legend and legacy of the Teddy Bear. The function of the hunter, as mentioned earlier, feeds into the culture of knowledge through taxidermy just as much as it relates to 'rights of passage.' In Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," On page 23, it's explained that "This is the effective truth of manhood, the state conferred on the visitor who successfully passes through the trial of the museum ... The body can be transcended ... the sex (male) which risks life and in so doing, achieves his existence. In the upside-down world of Teddy Bear' Patriarchy, it is the craft of killing that life is constructed, not in the accident of personal, material birth." They continue the explanation in connection to the display of taxidermied bodies in a museum's architecture. Specifically observed is how the dioramas present as 'side altars' or as stations of the cross. The visual language of the space is modeled after spaces of worship to reinforce the gravity of each vignette. Strengthening this connection between Protestant Christianity and hunting, page 49 continues, "...a baptism of blood from the victim whose death brought spiritual adulthood– the status of a hunter, the status of the fully human being who is reborn in risking life, in killing."

Just like Audubon and Darwin, in the name of faith and science, colonial invasion and expansion existed as a microcosm in the dynamics of the safari. Like others before him, Roosevelt would have hunted with an entourage of men who each had a specified knowledge or trade to contribute to the party. He, Roosevelt, would have been the 'leader' of the expedition. "The credos of realism and organicism are closely connected; both are systematizations of organization by a hierarchical division of labor, perceived as natural and therefore productive of unity." Due to the division of labor within the hunting ritual, Haraway hypothesized these dynamics are directly correlated to the social relations of domination. Because of this relationship, expansion and conquest are naturalized within the ceremony of the hunt.

Roosevelt's seeming omnipresence paired with his myth-like public persona made him a perfect characterization of the United States as it entered into the new century. But more so than exemplifying western expansion in the continental united states, Roosevelt and his administration demonstrated a move to international domination with the construction of the Panama Canal. (Image 4). The third step, geographical occupation, is a varied display from the extremes of physically dividing an entire country in half to Christian missions 'sophisticating' Indigenous youth in the southwestern U.S.. America at this point in history is now filled with myth and legend, creating a haze in which blinds the country and the spectating world. America is the home of the free, a wealthy and expansive land of promise. The traveling shows of Buffalo Bill in Europe and romantic paintings of Turner and Cole depict the United States as an exciting destination full of possibility (Image 11).

“It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.” - Walking - Thoreau

Arcadia, in Christian belief, is an idealized representation of heaven on earth. While humans represent the 'city of God' in church architecture and some city planning, the 'land of God'- arcadia - is where humans and nature live in peace. An Eden-like, post-lapsarian reality in which the manifestations of this pastoral utopia exist as paintings with a Romantic-style and warm lighting that appears as veils through the clouds or glowing through breaks in the trees. Like 'the Oxbow' (Image 8), paintings aspire to represent the sublime; others are filled with pacified staffage subjects, such as in the Peaceable Kingdom (Image 12). Exemplary of this approach and parallel to transcendentalism is the landscape painters of the Hudson River School. These painters are respectable in both technique and their ability to create an artistic style, school, and mindset resembling the dominant European art world. While successful in their own right, the motivations of the Hudson River School in some ways were to naturalize western expansion and romanticize the possibilities of a Christian utopia. As seen in Image 9, methods of Christian symbolism are used. In particular, the rainbow appears in the sky of a painting with 'new' and 'unsettled land.' This gesture signals that the land has been promised to the powers of colonialism as a covenant from God. Likewise, the American Dream is made as a promise through adversity, work, and suffering reflected as Manifest Destiny in a Noah-inspired narrative. While the Hudson River School primarily depicts the eastern United States, its legacy and influence led to painters such as Albert Bierstadt, who created paintings from Yellowstone (Image 10). I bring this subject up because the idea of arcadia (in addition to Manifest Destiny) reflects the same colonial values that uphold institutionalized ways of learning: a curated and romantic illusion of 'the real' and life—the controlled approach of studying a subject in a scientific bubble, hermetically sealed.

“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. “ - Walking - Thoreau

It is also important to revisit this time in history as I see familiar circumstances and values arising today. Scholar Iren Annus linked the growth of Muscular Christianity in the United States to broader societal changes which were occurring throughout the country, including the emancipation of women and the influx of immigrants who worked blue-collar jobs. At the same time, white Protestant men became increasingly white-collar. These factors contributed to increased anxiety over masculinity among white males in the United States. In this realm of hyper-masculinization, the orchestration of American sports events becomes very meaningful. The space is sanctified from the architecture to team-related vestments as prayers are read over courts and fields. Just as it is holy, it's equally regimented and militarized, all of which is intensified by the double-edged sword that is identity politics. Sports figureheads such as Tim Tebow, Manny Pacquiao, Josh Hamilton, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and Jeremy Lin use social media platforms to emphasize their particular brand of masculinity and Christianity as exemplified in their political/physical bodies. America's faith in violent sport reflects the belief in brutality, by which action creates the great American male.

As acts of resistance, feminist and futurist writing (applied to living in the anthropocene) lies in interfaith and Christian texts across the country. A contemporary example of pan-Christian ecological studies is the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, which provides sect-specific examples of Christian thought supporting environmental sustainability. While these writings and think-tanks are essential for the Christian reformer, this author also believes in Indigenous familiarity—particularly the wisdom to recognize the value of Indigenous leaders in the forefront of Sustainability efforts. Kim Tall Bear notes in their essay Critical Relationality the idea of the earth as a lover over the earth as a mother. This sentiment exists as a necessary foil to the powers of patriarchy and the extension to animals and the earth as providers. Creative solutions to new ways of relating exist in the work of Skawennati and Tiara Roxanne, both in the realm of cyberfeminism, creating Indigenous futures in cyberspace, as well as building Indigenous data sovereignty. Just as artist and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier reclaims literal land and space from what she terms as "sacrifice zones." These zones are defined as marginalized communities and people who are placed as the barriers between dangerous or toxic environments and white (re: wealthy) communities. Examples are; dumping grounds on the south side of Chicago, maquiladoras on the southern U.S. border, the 9th ward of New Orleans, et al. It is imperative that the leaders in these most affected places be offered representation. Efforts to preserve and reconcile stolen and abused land are exemplified in the work of these artists, and it's only through creative, sustainable futures that our planet can continue.

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