As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon

Description

How an obscure Puritan sermon came to be seen as a founding document of American identity and exceptionalism “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England’s founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop’s long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea. In doing so, he brings to life the ideas Winthrop’s text carried in its own time and the sharply different yearnings that have been attributed to it since. As a City on a Hill shows how much more malleable, more saturated with vulnerability, and less distinctly American Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” was than the document that twentieth-century Americans invented. Across almost four centuries, Rodgers traces striking shifts in the meaning of Winthrop’s words—from Winthrop’s own anxious reckoning with the scrutiny of the world, through Abraham Lincoln’s haunting reference to this “almost chosen people,” to the “city on a hill” that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia, to the era of Donald Trump. As a City on a Hill reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop’s words came to lodge in American consciousness. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of “timeless” texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past. Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents INTRODUCTION “The Most Famous Lay Sermon in All of American History” PART I TEXT 1 Writing “A Model of Christian Charity” 2 “We Shall Be as a City upon a Hill” 3 A Chosen People 4 New England in a World of Holy Experiments 5 Left All Alone in America 6 Love Is a Bond or Ligament 7 Moralizing the Market Economy 8 The Poor and the Boundaries of Obligation PART II NATION 9 Inventing Foundations 10 Mobile Metaphors of Nationalism 11 From the Top Mast 12 Constructing a City on a Hill in Africa 13 The Carnage of God’s Chosen Nations PART III ICON 14 The Historical Embarrassments of New England 15 Puritanism in an Existentialist Key 16 Arguing over the Puritans during the Cold War 17 Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill 18 Puritan Foundations of an “Exceptionalist” Nation 19 Ambivalent Evangelicals EPILOGUE Disembarking from the Arbella APPENDIX John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”: A Modern Transcription Notes Acknowledgments Index