Many Europeans who fled religious persecution in the old country came to the new world in order to rightly serve and worship Christ. The pilgrims and Puritans wanted to be a community set apart for God and his purposes. Thus they often saw biblical passages as being relevant to their new start in the new land.
There would be many examples of this, but one of the more famous ones comes in the form of a short message from the English lawyer and Puritan leader John Winthrop (1588-1649). He sailed to America in 1630 along with some 700 other Puritans on several ships.
He served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1630 until his death. Just before making the trip to North America, or while en route, he delivered his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” In it is found the famous phrase, “a city upon a hill”.
That of course is a reference to Matthew 5:14 in which Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Winthrop wanted the Christian commonwealth in Massachusetts to be a beacon for Christ and to differ from the rest of the world.
He wanted the people to keep covenant with God, lest his wrath break out on them for breaching that covenant. As he said in the second half of his message:
Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The 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, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when 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. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal 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 by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. 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 out of the good land whither we are going.
And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. “Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil,” in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.
Therefore let us choose life,
that we and our seed may live,
by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,
for He is our life and our prosperity.
Note how so much of this draws upon Deuteronomy 30:15-20:
“See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.”
Many of the other colonies and communities were founded on similar principles. They saw themselves in similar ways to ancient Israel. Setting up a Christian community in which God was above all, and not the state, was a key concern. As such, liberty, rightly conceived, was a key emphasis.
City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalismby Van Engen, Abram C. (Author)
But this notion of liberty was quite different from what most folks today conceive it to be. Many volumes can be cited here which discuss all this, but the important 2018 volume City on a Hill by Abram Van Engen is well worth utilising. He is worth quoting at length here:
Winthrop and his fellow Puritans did envision New England as a place where the godly were “called unto liberty,” but their definition of liberty is not what most people today would understand. Theirs was not a call to civil and religious liberty in some open form of a tolerant and pluralistic society where all may do as they please. Winthrop and other Puritan leaders never intended to create such a place. What they hoped to establish, instead, was a place where the “godly” would no longer be prevented from worshipping God as they ought. Thus, Puritans frequently paired “liberty” with “purity.” As the leading minister John Cotton explained in his farewell sermon to departing Puritans, the people of God would be able to discern God’s blessing when they found in their dwelling place “the liberty and purity of his ordinances.” Liberty and purity. As Cotton wrote in a 1634 letter, “It hath been no small inducement to us to choose rather to remove hither [to New England] than to stay there [in England], that we might enjoy the liberty, not of some ordinances of God, but of all, and all in purity.” In another dispatch, two years later, Cotton specifically rejected the idea of democracy, for “if the people be governors, who shall be governed?” Instead, he said, three things mutually support one another: “authority in magistrates, liberty in people, purity in the church.” As he explained, “Purity, preserved in the church, will preserve well-ordered liberty in the people, and both of them establish well-balanced authority in the magistrates.” Winthrop agreed. For the Puritans, freedom did not establish religious pluralism but something much closer to its opposite. As they understood it, liberty was nothing less than a removal of corruption and constraint so as to enable people to flourish within a pure church and a well-ordered commonwealth. No longer forced to worship God falsely, Puritans would be free—in a better society—to worship him in spirit and in truth.
Understanding this pairing of liberty and purity allows us to see how and why the Puritans acted as they did in New England. On the one hand, fearing arbitrary rule, they established a system of church and state that was remarkably reformed and progressive for their day and age. On the other hand, fearing licentiousness and hoping to experience the pure ordinances of God, they cracked down on religious dissent. The Puritans had a powerful sense of right and wrong, and they did not understand why anyone would allow the wrong to persist. When they spoke of their longing for liberty, they wanted true godliness, as they understood it, to be set free from an ungodly culture. But they never intended to allow erroneous religion to take root. In fact, that is precisely why so many of them left England—because false religion, or “men’s inventions,” had so deeply informed the Church of England. The Puritans wanted to set it right. In moving from England to New England, therefore, these Puritans remained consistently intolerant of religious practices they considered untrue, pernicious, and wrong. (pp. 33-34)
All this differs from the “right to choose” mentality of those wanting abortion on demand and the like, and it differs from the hardcore libertarians who believe that liberty means being able to do whatever one pleases, free of all government control.
For Winthrop and the Puritans, this was an ordered liberty and a God-exalting one. While that may be hard to see realised in today’s secular West, it is nonetheless a good model to promote and emulate. As Francis Bremer summarises things in the Epilogue to his lengthy biography:
Though a prominent historian referred to Winthrop as “America’s first great man” in the New York Review of Books in 1997, and presidents and politicians have long quoted from his “Christian Charity” sermon, for the public at large John Winthrop is the forgotten founding father. To a large degree this has been the result of changing historical fashion as it has affected the story of the puritan founders of New England. Until the late nineteenth century the public had willingly received the judgments of popular historians—most of them New Englanders—that the puritans and their Pilgrim religious cousins were the true architects of what made America what it was, and Winthrop proudly held his place among the other stalwarts held up for Americans to emulate. The characterization of the puritans evolved over that period. Cotton Mather and his contemporaries depicted them as the new chosen people and Winthrop as the “American Nehemiah” of the new Jerusalem. By the time of the American Revolution the colonists were being refashioned as apostles of liberty rather than of godliness. (p. 383)
For further reading:
There are plenty of books to read on this – some older, some newer, some more particular, some more general. Here are just a few:
Bremer, Francis, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Evans, M. Stanton, The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition. Gateway Books, 1994.
Rodgers, Daniel, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. Princeton University Press, 2018.
Morgan, Edmund, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Little, Brown and Company, 1958.
Van Engen, Abram, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Yale University Press, 2020. Wilsey, John, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea. IVP, 2015.
