For many years now, such a story of America has been supported by one particular phrase: the declaration that we are a “city on a hill.” When politicians and scholars first began calling the United States a “city on a hill,” they pointed to the place of these words in “A Model of Christian Charity,” a sermon supposedly preached aboard the Arbella by John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, as he and his Puritan followers sailed to New England. In that moment, in that sermon (we have been told), Winthrop opened the story of America. He called on us to serve as a beacon of liberty, chosen by God to spread the benefits of self-government, religious liberty, and free enterprise to the entire watching world. Invoking the “Sermon on the Mount,” where Jesus uses the metaphor to describe his followers (Matthew 5:14), Winthrop declared, “For wee must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” Ignoring the scriptural basis for this proclamation, President Ronald Reagan explained in his 1989 “Farewell Address to the Nation” that “the phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man.” The significance of Winthrop’s statement, in other words, has everything to do with its timing—with the “fact” that Winthrop made this statement at the beginning of America, defining its identity and purpose ever since.
Because Winthrop’s sermon has so often been said to open the story of America, pundits, politicians, commentators and scholars have often found that they cannot avoid it. “A Model of Christian Charity” has become fundamental to the meaning of America. The presumed significance of Winthrop’s sermon has been reinforced by publishing it in anthologies, teaching it in classrooms, and invoking it in speeches. “A Model of Christian Charity” has become so central to American traditions that one scholar has pronounced it as “a kind of Ur-text of American literature,” another has declared it the “cultural key text” of the nation, and still another called it the “best sermon” of the millennium.
Yet Winthrop’s sermon came to fame only recently. It is, in many respects, a product of the Cold War. In the 1950s, a widespread and worried search for the meaning of America turned increasingly to “A Model of Christian Charity” as the answer. According to the prominent scholar Perry Miller, who taught at Harvard from 1931 to 1963, Winthrop’s sermon best defined the ideals and principles America has always represented. From Miller, the story spread, and soon the words of Winthrop found their way into the speeches of American presidents. Yet before the Cold War began, no politician and hardly any scholar had ever bothered with Winthrop’s sermon at all.