Ronald Reagan frequently quoted his feel-good characterization of America as ”a
shining city on a hill," including in his
Presidential farewell speech.
He took the words from John
Winthrop’s address to the Puritans embarking for New England on the great emigration fleet of 1630, But as throughout his political career, Reagan's comprehension of principles was shallow, and his purpose manipulative.
Winthrop's speech, “A Model of Christian Charity," called on Puritans to build a Christian society in their new home, modelled on Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5: a "city on a hill" whose godliness would be an example to the divided nation they left behind, and "a light to the world" (Matthew 5:14).
The only way we can be what Jesus calls us to be, Winthrop told his fellow emigrants, "...is to follow the counsel of Micah [6:8]: to do justly, to love mercy, and walk humbly with our God." He continued,
"We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and our community in the work as members of the same body. The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as His own people. For we must consider that we shall be as a city on a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us 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...till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going."
The Puritans fell short of Jesus' commands for a Godly life, as we all do. But the "Model" Winthrop set before his fellow emigrants put before America's following generations the Pilgrims' certainty that Jesus' teachings were the only basis for a Godly society, and that obeying Him was the only way God would be pleased to bless this new land.
If we believe Jesus is Lord of all, as the Puritans certainly did, His commands for a Godly society are still the "model" for men of our time, and every other: even those for whom it is only an ideal of what makes a "good" secular society. Massachusetts, which grew from Winthrop's colony, indeed adapted that ideal for their secular polity, constituting themselves a "commonwealth," rather than a "state," in our new nation. The "-wealth" in that form of government is "weal," the ancient English word for "well-being:" and Massachusetts' secular governing principle to this day is the shared well-being of its people.
When Puritan-descendant John Adams wrote Massachusetts' constitution a century-and-a-half on from Winthrop's day, he described that principle as "...a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall shall be governed by certain laws for the common good."
The Puritans' uncompromising faith was that Christ's teachings were those "laws;"; and they would have been horrified at the thought that "the people" should be their source. But the Puritans' vision for their "city on a hill" was indeed (to secular understanding) a "commonwealth." A famous example is that, following age-old English custom, when Winthrop's company moved to the Shawmut Peninsula and founded Boston, they set aside 50 acres as grazing-land held in common by the community: and it remains "Boston Commons" today, a public park belonging to all of Boston's citizens.
(I have to wonder if Reagan was aware that the Puritan leader he so admired was imbued with such "socialist" ideas ? But of course Winthrop would have considered his "Model" the Spiritual communitarianism of the first Christians in Acts 2:44-45: a scripture Reagan may not have been familiar with.)
The Puritans' failed to live up to Jesus' commands that Winthrop set before them. We all do; which is the human reality for which God offers the honest...any who will admit to themselves and God their failure...the grace of repentance and forgiveness in Christ.
John Winthrop would never have questioned that Jesus' "Model" of a Godly society "got it right." He was at the same time too fervent a lover of Truth (Who Jesus IS) to not admit, confess and repent that the Puritan colony fell short of being the "city on a hill" Jesus commanded. He did so in his writings in later life.
But Ronald Reagan invoked that image for a very different purpose than Winthrop's:
"And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago.
But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands
strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no
matter what storm."
Reagan's nod to Jesus' commands came at the end of a valedictory in which he claimed America had risen in the previous 8 years (not coincidentally, his term in the White House) from recession, over-regulation, and the self-doubt of the Vietnam era, Reagan claimed too that America was once again respected throughout the world: he claimed a foreign leader at a summit-meeting once asked him the secret of the "the American Miracle."
I'm always very suspicious of self-congratulation, my own or anyone else's. Christianity teaches the discipline of rigorous self-examination: (I Corinthians 11:28, II Corinthians 13:5, Galatians 6:4, and I Thessalonians 5:21): that God demands of us unrelenting vigilance against self-deluding pride, without which we cannot recognize our failures, repent of them, and be forgiven.
From his writings we know Winthrop regularly practiced that discipline for his own life, and the life of the colony under his charge. And my understanding of Biblical truth is that all of us who honestly self-examine will find we fall short of God's command of righteousness, always.
Reagan's "shining city on a hill" is of the contrary spirit, a celebration of what he regarded as America's rightful pride in its greatness (restored, he said, under his administration). He credits those words to Winthrop, rather than Jesus: and characterizes Winthrop not as Jesus' follower (which Winthrop himself doubtless considered the whole point); but as what Reagan extolled as a "freedom man."
Reagan saw in his "shining city on a hill" no sins to confess: no slavery, no massacres of native Americans, no Vietnam: and he doesn't. A more honest President had held out to us in America's darkest days a vision of our nation that mirrored Winthrop's deep Christian consciousness of God's will and God's way; that America is "the last best hope" for human government on earth, and that our unrepented sins would destroy America, and that hope. But self-congratulation, not repentance, was Reagan's purpose.
"...a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the
men and women across America who for 8 years did the work that brought
America back. My friends: We did it...We made the city stronger, we made
the city freer...
"And so, goodbye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America."
It grieves me that even decades later many Americans still buy into Reagan's shallow, self-serving, vision of his “shining city on a hill;” a fictionalized ideology rooted in "American Exceptionalism" more than in reality. And I think we should be terrified that, because so many Americans believe the lie that God will bless an unrepentant proud nation such as Reagan urged us to be, America has never been in greater mortal danger than in our time.
