Consider the phrase: “city upon a hill.” Is your first thought of Jesus’ metaphor regarding the church in Matthew 5:14? Do you think of John Winthrop’s address to his fellow Puritans on the Arbella as they made their way to the new world in 1630? Or do your thoughts turn to America as a nation?
More likely, they turn to one of the latter two uses of the phrase. Indeed, “city on a hill” has been woven into our national vocabulary. Politicians have been appropriating that phrase and applying it to contemporary America for a half century. For example, Mitt Romney –– along with several other failed GOP presidential candidates –– invoked it numerous times during the last election style referring to the need “to keep America the shining city on a hill.” It is part of our national identity. But this has not always been the case.
Hillsdale Professor of History Richard Gamble chronicles the story of the phrase in his recent book, “In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth.” He meticulously details the history surrounding Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “The Model of Christian Charity,” the work’s absence in national discourse for 250 years, and its extensive use in recent political rhetoric to conclude that it means something much different from Winthrop’s use and from the biblical metaphor.
Though the specific context of Winthrop’s work is difficult to determine, Winthrop penned the Model specifically for the settlers of the new Puritan colony, not for America. Indeed, using the “city on a hill” to describe America takes the phrase out of Winthrop’s original context, since Winthrop had no conception of what the colonies would be or even what his new voyage would bring. He was instead addressing a specific group of people in a specific time and place: Puritans in a new land who all believed that God enacted a special covenant with them as a church body. Their “city” referred to their community, which was inextricably linked to their church and religious beliefs –– a context far removed from its modern secular usage to refer to a nation.
Though this metaphor is now ingrained in the canon of American Scripture (along with the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address), it was by no means destined to be that way. Gamble notes that the model went unnoticed for almost two centuries before it was published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1828. Then, even when nineteenth-century historians began using the model to describe Puritan settlements, they did not quote those now famous words, “city on a hill.” In fact, it was not until John F. Kennedy, in his 1961 farewell to the Massachusetts legislature, did those words enter into contemporary American politics and culture.
Ronald Reagan, however, more than any other figure, embraced the application of the phrase to America and cemented its position as part of America’s civil religion. In more than twenty presidential speeches, Reagan referred to America as the “shining city on a hill.” Reagan’s city stood as an earthly paradise for economic freedom, democracy, and America’s global mission, but, most notably, was completely devoid of all reference to the original Biblical quotation. Invoked by Republicans as part of the vocabulary of American exceptionalism, the metaphor holds a prominent place in today’s discourse.
Gamble, to be sure, writes this book as a historian concerned with historical investigation, but he writes it also as an American who is concerned that simplistic slogans like “city on a hill” replace “genuine expression of American principles.” Reducing the entire American experience into a few trite words, he says, only obscures “the vast complexity of the nation’s history” and distorts the past.
Gamble also writes this book as a Christian who is concerned with the conversion of a Biblical metaphor into a national myth. Gamble rightly wants Christians to recover the metaphor and sever its association with this earthly country because “the language of the church cannot be appropriated by the state without consequences.” Such consequences are the blending of the “things of Caesar” and the “things of God,” which ultimately makes an idol out of the City of Man and prevents the biblical metaphor from being a biblical metaphor.
Gamble writes, “[I]t may well be that the deepest fault line today in American culture lies not along the obvious divide between religious and irreligious people but along the largely overlooked divided between religious orthodoxy and Americanism.” In Search of the City on a Hill contributes to the necessary dialogue over America’s national self identity as it begs the question, “not how is America exceptional but is America exceptional?”
ameregaglia@hillsdale.edu
