City upon a Hill

This scripture was cited at the end of Puritan John Winthrop's lecture or treatise, "A Model of Christian Charity" delivered on March 21, 1630, at Holyrood Church in Southampton, before his first group of Massachusetts Bay colonists embarked on the ship Arbella to settle Boston. In quoting Matthew's Gospel (5:14) in which Jesus warns, "a city on a hill cannot be hid," Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans that their new community would be "as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us", meaning, if the Puritans failed to uphold their covenant with God, then their sins and errors would be exposed for all the world to see: "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 byword through the world". Winthrop's lecture was forgotten for nearly two hundred years until the Massachusetts Historical Society published it in 1839. It remained an obscure reference for more than another century until Cold War era historians and political leaders reinterpreted the event, crediting Winthrop's text, erroneously, as the foundational document of the idea of American exceptionalism. Winthrop's warning that "we will become a story" has been fulfilled several times in the four centuries since, as described in Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance by Kai T. Erikson in 1966. More recently, Princeton historian Dan T. Rogers, in his 2018 book ''As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon'', made an effort to correct the record, arguing that there was no grand sense of destiny among the first Puritans to settle Boston. They carried no ambitions to build a New Jerusalem, they did not name their new home Zion, or Canaan, the promised land of milk and honey; rather, they sought only a place to uphold their covenant with God, free from the interference they experienced in England. By the second generation of settlement, New England was considered a backwater in the Protestant Reformation, an inconsequential afterthought to the Puritan Commonwealth in England and the wealthier Dutch Republic, and in truth, America's sense of destiny came generations later. ==Use in American politics==

On January 9, 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy quoted the phrase during an address delivered to the general court of Massachusetts: On November 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan referred to the same event and image in his election-eve address, "A Vision for America". Reagan was reported to have been inspired by author Manly P. Hall and his book The Secret Destiny of America, which alleged a secret order of philosophers had created the idea of America as a country for religious freedom and self-governance. Reagan would reference this concept through multiple speeches; In 2016, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in the 2012 election, incorporated the idiom into a condemnation of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign: During the 2016 presidential race, Texas Senator Ted Cruz used the phrase during his speech announcing the suspension of his campaign. President Barack Obama also alluded to President Ronald Reagan's use of the phrase, during his speech at the Democratic National Convention the same year, as he proposed a vision of America in contrast to that of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. In 2017, former FBI director James Comey used the phrase in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election: On November 10, 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used the phrase while delivering an address at the inauguration of the Ronald Reagan Institute Center for Freedom and Democracy. Chair Bennie Thompson, of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, used the phrase in his opening remarks on the first day of hearing on June 9, 2022. ==Use in Australian politics==

In Australian politics, the similar phrase "the light on the hill" was famously used in a 1949 conference speech by Prime Minister Ben Chifley, and as a consequence this phrase is used to describe the objective of the Australian Labor Party. It has often been referenced by both journalists and political leaders in that context since this time. ==Use in hymns==

The phrase is used in "Now, Saviour now, Thy Love Impart", a hymn written by Charles Wesley. ==See also==