Winthrop was certainly no radical egalitarian of the sort found in Hill’s revelatory book The World Turned Upside Down, about the Levellers and Ranters who dreamed during the English Civil War of expanded suffrage, the redistribution of wealth, and limits on the size of property that any landowner could possess. But neither was he insouciant about the plight of the poor, however much he believed, as he wrote in the opening lines of “Model,” that God “hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor.” These words have often been read as an ominous overture to the long history of Americans justifying the extremes of poverty and wealth as consistent with natural law. But as Rodgers shows, this is a bad caricature. Rather, Winthrop hoped that in the New World, God would touch the hearts of those empowered like himself “so that the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor.” One of the most significant passages in “A Model of Christian Charity” is his discussion concerning the repayment of loans. If the debtor “have nothing to pay,” he said, citing Deuteronomy 15:2, then “thee must forgive him.”
Rodgers gives a subtle account of how the memories of destitute people in old England—“wandering ghosts in the shape of men,” as Winthrop called them—haunted not only Winthrop but also other magistrates and ministers in New England, where harsh measures such as whipping vagrants were implemented alongside the “abatement of taxes for poorer town residents” and grants of grain or firewood to families in distress. “Grudging as it often was,” Rodgers writes, “public, tax-supported responsibility for the poor” was “a fixture of New England town life.” “By 1700,” he points out, “Boston was spending perhaps a quarter of its budget on poor relief.” At the center of As a City on a Hill is the insight that Winthrop and his fellow Puritans believed that “market price and ordinary market relations would not suffice for a moral community.”
In later chapters, Rodgers tells the story of how “‘A Model of Christian Charity’ was plucked out of Winthrop’s context” by politicians, pundits, and even some historians and “reimagined as something quite different—as a founding document for the nation itself.” In the process, “the moral question Winthrop had placed at the core of his text would no longer be the part of the Model that mattered.” Winthrop and his fellow Puritans were turned into prophets of nationalism and unfettered capitalism, and “the aching tension,” as Rodgers calls it, “between the social fact of inequality and Winthrop’s yearnings for a community rooted in love” was all but lost.