[An excerpt from the In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth.]
In popular culture, the phrase “city on a hill” has become so closely identified with Ronald Reagan and before him with
[An excerpt from the In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth.]
In popular culture, the phrase “city on a hill” has become so closely identified with Ronald Reagan and before him with John Winthrop that even Christians can forget that the words originated not with a founder of a colony but with the Founder of their faith. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States has achieved near-monopoly control over the metaphor. Despite scattered references, nothing in the wider culture has the power to challenge the American nation’s ownership of the metaphor. Even the Church in America might not have that power. When a megachurch markets itself under the name “City on a Hill,” does it reclaim the metaphor for Christian use or only draw attention to how successfully America has appropriated it? People driving by might even think that the congregation’s name is a clever reuse of an American metaphor.
The metaphor of the “city on a hill” comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. In quick succession, Jesus compared his disciples to salt, light, and a city, and then back to light again. He warned them—and clearly it is a warning— “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 5: 13-16). Barely half of one verse, the city metaphor proportionately takes up little space in Jesus’ sermon. In fact, its position between two references to light means the city can also reasonably be read as a subordinate part of that larger metaphor. Despite its small role in its original context, the “city on a hill” has become the object of varied and conflicting interpretations that overshadow the rest of the passage.
Whether Jesus had in view only his chosen disciples, his followers in general, or the universal Church he promised to build, he clearly did not address the metaphors of salt, light, and city to the Roman Empire of his day. He could have done so. Others living during roughly the same era did just that. A century earlier, the Roman statesman Cicero combined two of these three images when he warned his fellow Senators at the time of Catiline’s conspiracy that he “seem[ed] to see this city, the light of the whole world and the fortress of all the nations, suddenly involved in one general conflagration.” Centuries earlier, the Athenian general and statesman Pericles had praised his city as a model to all the Greeks. Jesus, in contrast, gave these metaphors to his Church and not to an earthly kingdom. At some point in history—we will never know when—someone first applied the city metaphor to something or someone other than Jesus’ disciples, to something or someone outside the boundaries of the Christian church. That may not have happened for many centuries. It may not have happened first and only in America. But along the way it became commonplace to talk about America as the embodiment of Jesus’ hilltop city.
It is not natural or inevitable that America should have been given this sacred identity. The path from first-century Palestine to twenty-first century America is not an obvious one. Nor is the path from a sermon about life in the Kingdom of God to blogs about national destiny. Along that path, individual Americans did something to Jesus’ metaphor that changed it. Gradually or abruptly, intentionally or not, they helped remake the “city on a hill” from “a metaphor into a myth,” to borrow a phrase from historian Michael McGiffert. Even if we cannot pinpoint the exact moment of transformation, we will see in the following pages that at one time Americans chiefly used the “city on a hill” to describe something transcendent and theological, and then at a later time chiefly to describe something earthly and political. The transition required nothing less than the unmaking of a biblical metaphor and the making of a national myth.
The metaphor of the “city on a hill” comes up most often these days when historians, journalists, and politicians try to trace the origin of some praiseworthy or blameworthy feature of modern America back to its alleged Puritan roots. They engage in what the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield called the “quest for origins.” They look for the source of what they love or hate about the United States and its domestic and foreign policies. They imagine how the Puritan exceptionalist narrative, supposedly embodied in the idea of the city on a hill, set the nation’s trajectory toward civic and religious freedom, toward democracy, economic prosperity, and humanitarian benevolence