Upon hearing the phrase “a City on a Hill,” jaded Americans probably think of their country’s many failed efforts abroad: for example, illegal drone strikes by the U.S. military on Yemeni nationals. Or they may recall Ronald Reagan’s use of the phrase, and perceive a Cold War conceit about American global leadership that perished in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

These Americans can be forgiven for associating John Winthrop’s immortal line with the most triumphal, progressivist, and imperialist versions of American exceptionalism. But this association is unfair. Winthrop and the American Puritans held a sophisticated and ambivalent view of national exceptionalism, under which a people must observe the conditions of their covenant with God or else see His favor withdrawn. Perhaps as we modern Americans experience a cynical hangover after the giddy confidence of the “unipolar moment,” revisiting the Puritans’ nuanced notion of what it means to be an exceptional people can bring needed perspective, and restrain us from falling for triumphalism or despair.

Since the United States’ founding, Americans have viewed Puritan New England as a prototype of the republic. Observers of American life from Alexis de Tocqueville and John Quincy Adams to Sacvan Bercovitch and David Hackett Fischer have held that studying Puritan institutions, folk-ways, and mores enables us to understand America’s republican culture. Some, however, think that relying on the Puritans as a political model overlooks America’s historic sins, inappropriately theologizes the nation, and prosecutes endless wars on behalf of global democracy and capitalism. Under this reading, there is little daylight between Winthrop’s “city on a hill” and Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” Utopianism may have changed from Calvinist Christianity to liberalism, but the same corrosive and dangerous chauvinism burns on.

But this view fails to do justice to the profoundly nuanced vision actually espoused by the Puritans. They nursed audacious hopes, to be sure, but harbored equally profound apprehensions of failure.

Aspirations for Holiness

Of course, I don’t mean to deny that there were utopian aspirations in American Puritan thought. Indeed, this aspect of Puritanism is essential to their thinking. Many of Massachusetts’s leading lights hoped their community could attain unprecedented holiness. Their goal was to hasten the instantiation of Christ’s kingdom on earth, which is prophesied in the apocalyptic book of Revelation. “Where was there ever a place so like unto New Jerusalem as New England hath been?” queried Increase Mather, a prominent minister. “It was once Dr. [Twiss’s] opinion that when New Jerusalem should come down from heaven America would be the seat of it. …”

Disillusioned by the Church of England’s reversion to Catholic errors, the English Puritans underwent voluntary exile into the American wilderness and hoped to find a new Promised Land. This bastion of righteousness, the Puritans thought, would emanate hope for Europe. “New England would become a strong light that would reach over to Old England, the Low Countries, perhaps even the whole Latin world, illuminating their darkness and drawing some away,” writes A. W. Plumstead. Increase Mather’s son, Cotton Mather, invoked imagery from Revelation in asserting New England’s status as an exemplary beacon shining upon the darkness and corruption of the Old World: “[I]t shall be profitable for you to consider the light which from the midst of this outer darkness is now to be darted over unto the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.”

Fear of Wrath

Clearly the Puritans had lofty hopes for their settlement. But what the scholar E. L. Tuveson terms “apocalyptic Whiggism” (by which he means a progressivist expectation that history will inevitably usher in the reign of Anglo-Saxon civilization, along with its ideas about liberty) is far from the whole story. The Puritans consistently spoke of New England as a latter-day Israel. This analogy to God’s chosen nation obviously entailed grand aspirations. But inextricable from their hopes for a special communal relationship with God was an equally intense fear of peculiar divine wrath.

This ambivalence is nowhere more visible than in the “city on a hill” address itself, John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” (1630). The thesis of this speech, which the future governor of Massachusetts Bay delivered as the settlers embarked from England, is that New England’s special relationship with God is conditional. If the New Englanders commit themselves to corporate righteousness, and to unity through mutual love, then according to Winthrop, “[t]he Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways.”

But with the prospect of exalted peaks comes that of low valleys. Winthrop delivered the famous line: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.”

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