America: 'A City on a Hill'?

The Puritan leader, John Winthrop, proclaimed on the boat to Boston in 1630:

He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.

His vision of the American enterprise is that we would be the ones who got Christianity right. But that project has not always gone well. As one recent author put it, “America is not a kind of biblical Israel, but a kind of biblical Babylon” (Brian Zahnd, from the documentary Postcards from Babylon). In the instance of Winthrop, for example, his self-perception of being God’s chosen people may not have aligned with how the Native Americans saw him. Winthrop was on the council that initiated the Pequot War, which destroyed that entire tribe, and he himself profited from the war by acquiring two Pequot slaves for himself.

So was Winthrop more like Israel or more like Babylon? And how about the colony of Massachusetts that he founded?

Jesus’s famous line about his followers being a “city on a hill” (Matthew 5) is couched between verses like this:

• “Blessed are the poor in spirit”

• “Blessed are the peacemakers”

• You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.’

So how do you reconcile the vision of America as a Christian nation with the vision of Jesus of what it means to be community of his followers?

Talk with Jesus about these things today.