"Us" vs. "Them"

There is a familiar theme running throughout American history: the "us vs. them" mentality. The "us", of course, only pertains to white protestants while the "them" pertains to everyone else. Therefore, immorality found in any other group of people is to be expected, supposedly, because they do not properly worship "the one true God" like we do. God is believed to be on "our" side only. This is why American Natives were seen as savages, not people, and how genocide was able to be justified. Everything that us white folk do was ordained by God. Any flaws found amongst us are supposedly due to a religious weakness that Satan capitalized upon. Those Native Americans were not "religious" according to our definition of the term, so they were to be despised.

This "us vs. them" group mentality is a mechanism first used by the Puritans and it helped to define themselves by defining the despicable traits of others. James A. Morone, author of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, wrote, "Panics and witch-hunts are an American classic: nothing stirs the people or grows their government like a pulpit-thumping moral crusade against malevolent dastards."

(that is all for now, I will add to this later)