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.
[2][3] 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".
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.
More recently, Princeton historian Dan T. Rogers has corrected the record, explaining that there was no grand sense of destiny among the first Puritans to settle Boston.
[5] 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.
I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier.
[9][10] I have quoted John Winthrop's words more than once on the campaign trail this year—for I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining city on a hill, as were those long ago settlers ...
These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans.
Senator Barack Obama also made reference to the topic in his commencement address on 2 June 2006, at the University of Massachusetts Boston:[13] It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began.
I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places.In 2016, 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney incorporated the idiom into a condemnation of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign: His domestic policies would lead to recession; his foreign policies would make America and the world less safe.
We come together; we solve problems; we win, they lose; and we execute our foreign policy confident that we are that shining city on a hill.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 9 June 2022.