City upon a Hill

"City upon a hill" is a phrase derived from the teaching of salt and light in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament.Template:Refn Originally applied to the city of Boston by early 17th century Puritans, it came to adopt broader use in political rhetoric in United States politics, that of a declaration of American exceptionalism, and referring to America acting as a "beacon of hope" for the world.<ref name=":0">Squiers, A. (2018). The Politics of the Sacred in America: The Role of Civil Religion in Political Practice. New York: Springer. pp. 62–63. Template:ISBN.</ref>

John Winthrop speech

Template:Further This scripture was cited at the end of Puritan John Winthrop's lecture or treatise, "A Model of Christian Charity" delivered on March 21, 1630, at Holyrood Church in Southampton, before his first group of Massachusetts Bay colonists embarked on the ship Arbella to settle Boston.<ref name=":1">Bremer, Francis, J., John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 171. It is often stated that the sermon was written aboard the flagship Arabella and delivered in Boston harbor, an error introduced by a cover letter on an early manuscript not in Winthrop's hand when the sermon was first published.</ref><ref>Winthrop, John, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, Harvard University Press, 1996, p.1 note 1</ref> In quoting Matthew's Gospel (5:14) in which Jesus warns, "a city on a hill cannot be hid," Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans that their new community would be "as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us", meaning, if the Puritans failed to uphold their covenant with God, then their sins and errors would be exposed for all the world to see: "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 the world".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Winthrop's lecture was forgotten for nearly two hundred years until the Massachusetts Historical Society published it in 1839. It remained an obscure reference for more than another century until Cold War era historians and political leaders reinterpreted the event, crediting Winthrop's text, erroneously, as the foundational document of the idea of American exceptionalism.

More recently, Princeton historian Dan T. Rogers, in his 2018 book As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon, made an effort to correct the record, arguing that there was no grand sense of destiny among the first Puritans to settle Boston. They carried no ambitions to build a New Jerusalem, they did not name their new home Zion, or Canaan, the promised land of milk and honey; rather, they sought only a place to uphold their covenant with God, free from the interference they experienced in England. By the second generation of settlement, New England was considered a backwater in the Protestant Reformation, an inconsequential afterthought to the Puritan Commonwealth in England and the wealthier Dutch Republic, and in truth, America's sense of destiny came generations later.<ref>Daniel T. Rodgers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon, Princeton University Press, 2018; Richard M. Gamble, In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth, Continuum, 2012; and Carter Wilkie, How modern leaders got John Winthrop’s ‘City on a Hill’ wrong: A call for humility has become the battle cry for American exceptionalism, CommonWealth Magazine, January 17, 2019.</ref>

Winthrop's warning that "we will become a story" has been fulfilled several times in the four centuries since, as described in Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance by Kai T. Erikson in 1966.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Use in American politics

On January 9, 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy quoted the phrase during an address delivered to the general court of Massachusetts:<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

On November 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan referred to the same event and image in his election-eve address, "A Vision for America". Reagan was reported to have been inspired by author Manly P. Hall and his book The Secret Destiny of America, which alleged a secret order of philosophers had created the idea of America as a country for religious freedom and self-governance.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref name="wp">Template:Cite web</ref>

Reagan would reference this concept through multiple speeches;<ref name="wp" /> notably again in his January 11, 1989, farewell speech to the nation: Template:Blockquote

Barack Obama, as a U.S. Senator, made reference to the topic in his commencement address on 2 June 2006, at the University of Massachusetts Boston:<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2016, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in the 2012 election, incorporated the idiom into a condemnation of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign:

During the 2016 presidential race, Texas Senator Ted Cruz used the phrase during his speech announcing the suspension of his campaign.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> President Barack Obama also alluded to President Ronald Reagan's use of the phrase, during his speech at the Democratic National Convention the same year, as he proposed a vision of America in contrast to that of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In 2017, former FBI director James Comey used the phrase in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election:<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

On November 10, 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used the phrase while delivering an address at the inauguration of the Ronald Reagan Institute Center for Freedom and Democracy.<ref>Template:Cite press release</ref> Template:Blockquote

Chair Bennie Thompson, of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, used the phrase in his opening remarks on the first day of hearing on June 9, 2022.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Use in Australian politics

In Australian politics, the similar phrase "the light on the hill" was famously used in a 1949 conference speech by Prime Minister Ben Chifley, and as a consequence this phrase is used to describe the objective of the Australian Labor Party. It has often been referenced by both journalists and political leaders in that context since this time.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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Use in hymns

The phrase is used in "Now, Saviour now, Thy Love Impart", a hymn<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> written by Charles Wesley.

See also

• American civil religion
• American Dream
• American exceptionalism
• British Israelism
• Christian Dominionism
• Christian Zionism
• Empire of Liberty
• Manifest destiny
• Replacement theology
• Safed in Israel, considered by some to have been the city Jesus had in mind
• Boston in Massachusetts, often nicknamed the "city on a hill", and named as such by the Puritans, in particular John Winthrop
• Scofield Bible
• Speeches and debates of Ronald Reagan
• The New Colossus

Further reading

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• Gamble, Richard M. (2012). In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth Continuum. ISBN 978-1441162328.
• Template:Cite web
• Template:Cite web
• Abram Van Engen (2020). City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Yale University Press.
• Matthew Rowley (2021). "Reverse-Engineering the Covenant: Moses, Massachusetts Bay and the Construction of a City on a Hill". Journal of the Bible and its Reception, 8, no. 2.