Part 3 of a Series

Massachusetts Bay 1630

“In the beginning, all the world was America.”

- John Locke

The city on a hill was – and remains – both a real place and a dream. Those who set sail on the Arabella had few illusions about the hardships they would face in Massachusetts. But Winthrop’s sermon gave a special meaning to this new colony in a new world. Theirs was to be no commonplace community, he told them. It was a covenant with God and an example to others. Succeed, and we “shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” Fail, and we “shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed.”

“A Model of Christian Charity” was no primer for the American Dream; nor was the colony the Puritans created a portent of America’s future. Almost all the values we associate with the American ideal – democracy, liberty, equality, opportunity, individualism, diversity, dissent, even “rags to riches’ – were anathema to Winthrop, something he made crystal clear in his first sentence: “God Almighty, in his most holy and wise providence, has so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in submission.”

These people had not come to establish religious freedom; they had come to purify their church – and to unbendingly discriminate against other religions. They had not come in search of economic opportunity and certainly not to create a melting pot for future immigrants. They didn’t propose to convert the natives; nor were they driven by some manifest destiny to settle a continent. In fact, they didn’t even plan to stay. Their intention was to create a community so pure, so godly, and so intolerant that they would be invited back to England to show those they’d left behind how to do it.  In a community where “the care of the public must oversway all private aspects,” our Bill of Rights would have been unthinkable. In Massachusetts Bay Colony, they didn’t only hang witches; they also hanged Quakers.

So why do we keep trotting out Winthrop’s sermon from four centuries ago – or at least the part about the city on a hill? What can it possibly tell us today about our lives, our aspirations, our dreams? Especially since the mission Winthrop articulated failed spectacularly. The people back in England, whom the Puritans desperately sought to impress, weren’t paying attention, and the colony’s fall from grace was swift. Its people sinned, their families fell apart; they enriched themselves through land speculation and showed little zeal for civic duty. In short, they broke nearly all Winthrop’s admonitions. And yet, they prospered. “Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill,” wrote Perry Miller, the foremost historian of early New England, “they were left alone with America.” And they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.