American
exceptionalism is a bipartisan phenomenon, and in modern America
its most potent expression is the “city on a hill,”
a biblical image employed by John Winthrop in “A Model of
Christian Charity,” the lay sermon he composed in 1630 on
his way to New England. In fact, so iconic has that image become
that Americans no doubt assume it has been invoked and appealed
to in an unbroken tradition from its 17th-century drafting down
to the present day….
For over
two centuries after Winthrop composed the “Model,” it
was altogether unknown to the American public. Only in 1838 was
the manuscript published, and in the ensuing years it was cited
and discussed only sparingly. And even then, the “city upon
a hill” imagery was almost never emphasized as the document’s
rhetorical or philosophical crescendo. For the most part, Winthrop’s
remarks were described as an admirable exposition of the demands
of Christian charity, and that was that….
The John
Winthrop who told his wife that God would “provide a shelter
and a hiding place for us and ours” had a finite goal, namely
a place of asylum for the Puritans and the establishment of proper
Christian worship and civil government as called for in the Bible.
For him, that meant worship expunged of popish superstition, churches
emancipated from the authority of bishops, the Word of God as
the central focus of the church service, and a political society
in which sin was to be punished and Christian charity promoted.
Ambitious, to be sure, but finite.
This new
Christian community of New England, said Winthrop, ought to imagine
itself as a city upon a hill, with the eyes of the world upon
it. The Puritans had to be faithful to their covenant with God
in order not to bring shame on the cause of the Gospel. God would
surely bless them if they remained faithful, but he would just
as surely withdraw those blessings and punish them if they failed.
Winthrop
held that the mission of the Puritans was do to service for the
Lord, to build up the body of Christ (i.e., the church), to preserve
their posterity from the corruptions of the world, and to live
their lives according to “his holy ordinances.” Not
exactly the mission statement later glosses on Winthrop’s
words would have in mind.
In the scholarly
realm it was Perry Miller, the prolific 20th-century historian
of the Puritans, who did so much to link Winthrop’s city
on a hill to the idea of a messianic American consciousness….
According
to Miller, Winthrop and the Puritans sought to establish a “revolutionary
city” in New England that would regenerate the world. Miller
conceded that the Puritans themselves probably did not understand
the full significance of what they were doing – an admission
that throws his own interpretation into rather serious question,
though he believed Winthrop himself did hold this messianic vision.
Gamble is skeptical. “Winthrop understood the mission behind
the mission, Miller claimed, although it sounded more like Miller
was the one blessed with the special gnosis.”
During Reagan’s
presidency, Theodore Dwight Bozeman accused Miller of having invented
the “idea of an exemplary Puritan mission” and noted
that the “city on a hill” language was a “rhetorical
commonplace,” not the document’s interpretive key….
It was Ronald
Reagan who seared the image of the city on a hill (the “shining
city on a hill,” in his rendition) into the national consciousness….
Reagan spoke
of the city on a hill nearly two dozen times in presidential speeches.
His was “a city aglow with the light of human freedom, a
light that someday will cast its glow on every dark corner of
the world and on every age and generation to come.” Gone
for good was the idea of divine judgment to be visited upon a
disobedient city. This was a city that boasted only promise, and
a distinctly secular promise at that.
Gamble is
at pains not simply to trace the evolution of the “Model
of Christian Charity” and its “city on a hill”
in American culture but to insist that the original city on a
hill was a biblical image, not a political symbol. It was not
a physical place at all but the Christian church itself, conceived
of as the community of believers wherever they may be found. The
Christian community, Gamble insists, ought to be outraged at the
secular appropriation of one of its most arresting images….
There is
no such resentment, of course. The intellectual debasement of
American conservatism, combined with the grotesque and impious
neoconservative conflation of Christianity and “America’s
mission in the world,” have decimated the kind of religious
sensibilities that would alert the properly formed Christian conscience
to blasphemy.
Thus when
Abraham Lincoln is found to have said that “the gates of
hell shall not prevail against” America’s ideals, this
does not shock or scandalize American Christians. When George
W. Bush said “the light shined in darkness and the darkness
did not overcome it,” and by “light” meant American
ideals, few American Christians batted an eye.
So we have
the following spectacle: a religious image is adapted by an earthly
government for secular purposes, in order to urge Americans to
pursue a messianic world mission that would have been dismissed
with contempt by a classical conservative like Edmund Burke and
which bears more in common with the French Revolution and its
wars of ideological expansion than it does with anything conservatives
would have recognized – and so-called conservatives cheer….
