Political commentators often refer to an image of a shining “city on a hill” as a metaphor for the American experiment. Ronald Reagan used it in his Election Eve address in 1980 and again in his farewell address in 1989. The phrase originates in the parable of Salt and Light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:14. Its significance in the American political context refers to a passage in “A Model of Christian Charity”, a sermon by Puritan leader John Winthrop given at Holyrood Church in Southampton to his first group of Massachusetts Bay colonists just prior to embarking on the ship Arabella to cross the Atlantic to settle Boston. Winthrop warned that their new community would be “as a city on upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us”, meaning, if they dealt “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". The sermon was largely forgotten until published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1838. It then languished until the Cold War era, when it became thought of as a foundational document in the idea of American Exceptionalism. Winthrop’s aim was to establish nothing less than a new kind of model community based on the highest principles, and his words make clear the exceptional behavior needed to bring that mission to life.

“We must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with a pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren… we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection.”

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