In
Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an
American Myth
(Continuum, 244 pages,
$24.95)
Richard M. Gamble
In November 1979, while Jimmy Carter worried over the United
States’ “crisis of confidence,” Ronald Reagan announced his
candidacy for the presidency. He told the country what it believed
about itself: It was not the nation that was to blame for the
spiritual and economic doldrums of the '70s, but an unimaginative
and incompetent federal government. Drawing on the rhetoric of
republican revolutionary Tom Paine, Reagan called for his fellow
Americans to “begin the world over again.” From Franklin Delano
Roosevelt he took the image of a “rendezvous with destiny,” and
from Pope Pius XII the belief that “into the hands of America God
has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.”
At the climax of his speech, Reagan reached deep into the past
to summon a metaphor from the colonial Puritan leader John
Winthrop. He quoted words from a moment in 1630, when Winthrop,
standing on the deck of the tiny ship Arbella as it sailed
across the Atlantic to Massachusetts, told his fellow band of
pilgrims,
We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people
are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this
work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present
help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the
world.
Reagan then challenged America to become, for the sake of “a
troubled and afflicted mankind,” a “shining city on a hill.” With
that metaphor, he signified that the United States enjoyed a divine
blessing to rescue the world from its cycle of decline, through
commitment to the principles of liberty and democracy.
Reagan was neither the first nor last political figure to borrow
Winthrop’s phrase, only the most successful. (In a display of his
rhetorical powers, Reagan added “shining,” combining the old gospel
metaphors of “city on a hill” with “light of the world,” and the
extravagance stuck.) Writing from the 1930s through the '50s,
atheist historian Perry Miller interpreted the phrase as a Puritan
goal to export republican revolution to the world. John F. Kennedy,
the first major 20th century figure to employ it, catapulted the
image into the public mind in his farewell address to the
Massachusetts legislature in 1961, using it as a metaphor for
ethical government, and, once later, to represent the nation’s
spirit of public service. In her 2009 memoir Going Rogue,
Sarah Palin uses it as a shorthand for American exceptionalism: “We
must remain the Shining City on a Hill to all who seek freedom and
prosperity.”
Ultimately, the differing meanings of these few words tell us
more about the person speaking them than about our past. The phrase
is so much part of modern political vocabulary that to know what
John Winthrop actually meant by it requires strenuous exercise of
our typically flabby historical imagination. This is where Richard
Gamble, a professor at Hillsdale College (and — full disclosure —
one of my professors when I studied there) comes in. In his latest
work, he deftly excavates true meaning from the layers that have
accreted, century by century, on top of this phrase, originally
from the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew. He shows how
“city on a hill” became part of the “useable past,” which can be
“repurposed” for modernity. But the goals of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony, as Winthrop described them, don’t fit within that
contemporary secular narrative.
Mr. Gamble states that the discourse in which Winthrop’s phrase
appears, A Model of Christian Charity, was not the
permanent record of America’s self-consciousness it is currently
believed to be. The description of dozens of high school history
textbooks notwithstanding, it is likely Winthrop never delivered
the speech to the passengers of the Arbella. Even more
curiously, the document completely disappeared from all American
historical records for over 200 years.
The manuscript was composed in 1630, but the only known copy was
held by the Winthrop family until 1809. It eventually made its way
into the hands of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which in
1838 published a carelessly edited transcription as part of an
anthology of early Massachusetts documents. From then, the
discourse slowly made its way into the history books. But the now
famous phrase, “wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon
a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us,” was not regarded as a
key to the document until as late as 1939.
Winthrop has already done much of the interpretative heavy
lifting for any historian who cares to examine the document on its
own in terms. He explicitly defined the “end,” or purpose of the
colony, calling for the Puritans “to do more service to the Lord,”
to provide for “the comfort and increase of the body of Christ
whereof we are members,” in the hope “that our selves and posterity
may be the better preserved from the common corruptions of this
evil world” and hopes that they might “serve the Lord and work out
our salvation under the power and purity of his holy
ordinances.”
Winthrop’s vision was for a small political-religious community,
bound by history, locality, and the shared convictions of culture
and religion. He hoped that “succeeding plantations” would imitate
the good example of the Bay Colony, but there is no sense in
The Model that Winthrop hoped to grow the colony beyond
the walls of the little town. There is a suggestion, something Mr.
Gamble does not discuss, that Winthrop didn’t expect the colony in
its Puritan form to last for more than a few lifetimes. He
certainly did not mean to speak generally of New England, let alone
the non-existent United States of America.
The metaphor of a city on a hill, to Winthrop, was as much a
note of warning as of praise and hope: If the colony failed to
honor God by rigorous devotion to the virtues of Christian charity
and mercy and the right forms of worship, it would be ridiculed by
the whole world. Indeed, when Reagan first used the phrase in
October 1969, he included Winthrop’s cautionary prophecy, “the eyes
of all the people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with
our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to
withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a
byword through all the world.” But eventually the warning dropped
out under the weight of Reagan’s praise for America’s perpetual
excellence.
This is not the first time the past has been mythologized to
serve modern political purposes. Battling such false mythologies is
one of the most important challenges a conscientious historian
faces. Mr. Gamble explains the mentality of the field arrayed
against him:
The metaphor of the city on a hill comes up most often these
days when historians, journalists, and politicians try to trace the
origin of some praiseworthy or blameworthy feature of modern
American back to its alleged Puritan roots. They engage in what the
Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield called the “quest for
origins.” They look for the source of what they love or hate about
the United States and its domestic and foreign policies. They
imagine how the Puritan exceptionalist narrative, supposedly
embodied in the idea of the city on a hill, set the nation’s
trajectory toward civic and religious freedom, toward democracy,
economic prosperity, and humanitarian benevolence or, conversely,
toward genocide, capitalist exploitation, prudery, messianic
delusions, and ruinous overseas adventures. The “city on a hill”
finds itself caught in the fierce crossfire of the battle to define
the American identity.
To combat this cloud of witnesses, Mr. Gamble follows the best
historiographical practices: reading primary sources closely with
respect for the historical usage of language, collecting a large
body of high quality evidence, attending to the modern
historiography, making careful, limited judgments while avoiding
the cowardly piling on of hesitant qualifiers. But in the last
chapter, he editorializes on the history.
He laments that the phrase has been misused, not only by modern
politicians, but by the Puritan himself. Winthrop used the phrase
in a far different manner than Jesus, who told his disciples that
they, and by extension the church, would witness to the world the
faithfulness of a community to God, as an unmistakable light to the
world. The metaphor belongs, originally, to the Christian
church.
Modern Americans have become unable to hear that original
message through the historical noise. It has been co-opted, in much
the same way that Lincoln co-opted the Gospel phrase “a house
divided.” Mr. Gamble appeals to the church to reclaim the metaphor
for itself. It would be an act of service to America, to protect it
from false delusions of messianic glory. It would be an act of
service to its own members, to remind them of the church’s primary
responsibility as witness to Christ.
On November 14, in a speech at the Spectator’s 45th
Anniversary Gala to the gathered warriors of the right, who had
just about recovered their sense of balance in their wake of the
electoral defeat, Senator Tom Coburn roused the room with an appeal
to political courage on the model of George Washington’s resistance
at Valley Forge. Asking the room to seek conservative wisdom in the
great men of history who endured perilous times, he cited the
distinction of the ancient Christian theologian Augustine between
the city of God and the city of Man. Mr. Coburn invited
conservatives to regard the vision of the city of God as their own,
a vision in which all individuals are flawed, but welcomed into a
political life of shared prosperity on the basis of the
acknowledgement of human freedom, liberty, and dignity under one
Creator. He contrasted this vision with the leftist ideal of the
city of Man, which “offers shared misery through the redistribution
of wealth and class envy.” “Their vision,” he said, “is
unsustainable, ours is sustainable. Where they offer a rendezvous
with debt, we still offer a rendezvous with destiny.”
The old temptation is still at work. Augustine would have
resisted this transformation of his meaning. He wrote his City
of God shortly after 410 AD, the year when Alaric the Goth
sacked Rome. Jerome, the great saint and translator of the Bible
from Greek and Hebrew to Latin, wrote in a letter upon hearing the
news, “My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and sobs choke my
speech.” Romans began complaining that the ruin of their city was
the fault of the Christians who forced Rome to abandon its old
gods. Augustine’s work was a defense of the Christian doctrine that
hope lay not in human political organization, no matter how
honorable, but a heavenly Kingdom administrated by God.
Using the language of Christian eschatology to shape and to
inspire worldly political activity invites false hope and false
confidence. A movement charged with that sort of language all too
often becomes confident that it, and it alone, participates in a
divinely inspired political tradition with Messianic potential. Mr.
Gamble’s book, In Search of a City on a Hill, is a light
to beat back the darkness of that error.
