As a City on a Hill
The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Publisher 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.
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Princeton historian Rodgers (Age of Fracture) argues that the comparison of America to a city on a hill that politicians often use, quoting from John Winthrop's 1630 lay sermon "Model of Christian Charity," is not true to the sermon's original sentiment and distorts the historical legacy of the passage. In its 17th-century context, the text was a meditation on social obligation in an age of "holy experiments," Rodgers writes, revealing Winthrop's anxiety over the Puritan project. Far from a perennial cultural touchstone, the sermon remained out of print and largely uncited for centuries. Rodgers tracks the text in references across time, with highlights including the novels of Herman Melville, letters from the trenches of WWI, Liberian colonists' writings, and finally a rejection of the sermon by 21st-century evangelical Protestants. He argues that its ideas mainly appear in 19th- and 20th-century literature as conversations about nation-building simply because those ideas were ubiquitous in American society at that time. It wasn't until Cold War era writers and thinkers revisited the "Model" in search of evidence of America's universal nature (ignoring the text's historical context) that it regained popularity. Through a winding, enthralling timeline, Rodgers successfully illuminates the strange history of "a text that we think we know so well that we barely know it at all."
