Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less fantastic than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within.
Concerned as he was with distancing his approach to governance with his religious affiliation, Kennedy edited out any mention of God from the original sermon. But he did accurately capture something of the uncertainty Winthrop himself must have felt casting off from a familiar shore. Moreover, by entwining the dangers faced by the Arabella with his own, he enlisted “city upon a hill” in the Cold War conflict that would define his presidency, making of it a “bulwark” not against Rome but Moscow. Though he could not have known how well “terror without and disorder within” would capture the decade that had just begun, the threat of the “shipwreck” Winthrop feared remains palpable in Kennedy’s borrowing of the words.
Not so just thirteen years later, when Ronald Reagan began testing out the trope that would define his political future. Then governor of California, Reagan used more of Winthrop’s words than Kennedy had, adding back in the theology that the Catholic president had excised: “Standing on the tiny deck of the Arabella in 1630 off the Massachusetts coast, John Winthrop said, ‘We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we 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 throughout the world.’ ”
Elsewhere in the speech, delivered at the first Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, Reagan offered his own religious interpretation of this early moment in American history:
You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage. This was true of those who pioneered the great wilderness in the beginning of this country, as it is also true of those later immigrants who were willing to leave the land of their birth and come to a land where even the language was unknown to them. Call it chauvinistic, but our heritage does set us apart.
Reagan would go on to use his version of the city upon a hill at every major juncture in his public life, including three campaigns for the presidency, two administrations, and perhaps most significantly in the farewell address that marked his departure from the national stage. Describing his last week in the White House in January 1989, he closed his final remarks as president with an elaboration of his understanding of what Winthrop might have had in mind on the Arabella 359 years before:
The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.
Of course, Winthrop’s city was never “shining,” nor was it so well established as the thriving and cinematic cityscape Reagan described. It is also a remarkable feat of revisionism to praise the governor who exiled Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams as a “freedom man.” Yet the most interesting departure from history in this American creation myth may be that though Reagan spoke often of the courage it took to reach this city, there was for him little hint or risk of the possible “shipwreck” of which the Puritans were warned. His city upon a hill, “built on rocks stronger than oceans,” was divinely guaranteed success in a way Winthrop’s and Kennedy’s were not.
In the forty years since Reagan successfully repainted the origins of the United States with this broad brush, nearly every national candidate has repeated some version of “city upon a hill” as creed and shibboleth. Even Obama, years before he delivered his affirmation of multi-religious America, made use of this well-worn Christian phrase. Invoking Winthrop’s city as Kennedy did, while speaking in Massachusetts, he delivered a commencement address that at once echoed and questioned earlier allusions. He did so when he was still just the junior senator from Illinois, his presidential future still far from certain:
It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a city upon a hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed.
For over two hundred years, it has. Not because our dream has progressed perfectly. It hasn’t. It has been scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, wounded by racism, shaken by war and depression. Yet, the true test of our union is not whether it’s perfect, but whether we work to perfect it.
Obama’s city upon a hill was a return of sorts to Kennedy’s; he removed it from its theological frame, treating it instead as a verse from the secular scripture of American history. Nonetheless, he did not depart as far from Reagan’s interpretation as it at first might seem. After all, he still insisted that it was with the Puritan dream of a city upon a hill that the “American experiment began.” He would not embrace this dream, however, without acknowledging how it had been “scarred”—a mixed metaphor, perhaps, but an arresting one: a wounded city upon a wounded hill.
Despite Obama’s overwhelming victory in two presidential elections, his revised sense of the city upon a hill, taking into account as it does the many ways it has not been perfect, has not yet supplanted the fortieth president’s “shining” notion. Nor is it likely to. The phrase maintains its “mysticism,” to use Reagan’s terms, and it remains “chauvinistic.” While making no threats, its use implies, like the infamous Spanish Requerimiento, a society certain in its supremacy and the righteousness of even its questionable acts.
For this reason, it is thanks more to Reagan than anyone else—including Winthrop himself—that “city upon a hill” has come to mean what it does today. And it is thanks to the growing ubiquity of the phrase over the past several decades that even the earliest moments of our prehistory are now remembered as if they were merely scenes from this mythical city’s construction. Different as they were in approach and outcome, the various settlements throughout North America—those of the Spanish in the South, and those of the English, Dutch, and French in the North—are often viewed through this single lens, as if the radically divergent forms of Christianity brought across the Atlantic were a unified monolith of faith; as if the lands soon conquered by Europe were not already full of cities upon hills of their own.
All of which made the new president’s words in January 2009 all the more surprising. They represented not only a nod to minority
voters who had favored him by unprecedented margins in 2008 but a rhetorical shift away from the Puritan dream of uniformity and toward the more complicated truth of difference, an acknowledgement that the nation “shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth” cannot be contained in a single religious idea. To speak of the United States simply as a city upon a hill as described in Christian scripture is to limit it by pretending that it is not home to many traditions, each with a scripture of its own.
While demographic changes since the transformation of immigration policy in the 1960s may have made this broadening of the national religious self-definition inevitable, the president’s own life provides some insight into why this rhetorical shift came about just when it did.
Certain parts of his biography, of course, are well known: Born to a Kenyan father with Muslim roots and to a Kansan mother with family ties to mainline Protestant churches, Obama was perhaps destined from birth to be a man with a multilayered religious identity. As he described his earliest spiritual education in his memoir Dreams from My Father, he attended both a Muslim school and a Catholic school in Indonesia. Neither one inspired religious devotion, but he was taught a first commandment applicable to either learning environment: “Be respectful,” his mother had simply said. Consideration for others’ faiths mattered more than his own individual belief, or lack thereof.
Back in the United States, the future president’s spiritual education took another turn, which may have seemed likely to lead to no religion at all but in fact opened up the world of global faiths in all their possibility. “I was not raised in a religious household,” he writes, in The Audacity of Hope. “My maternal grandparents, who hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in Baptist and Methodist teachings as children, but religious faith never really took root in their hearts. My mother’s own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism.”
Despite this inheritance, he soon discovered that to live in America can mean having eclectic interfaith experiences as if by osmosis. “This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction,” Obama adds of his mother. “In her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites.”
On his father’s side, Obama was exposed to other traditions—of faith and of doubt. The man also named Barack Obama was largely absent from his family, but his son knew that the senior Obama, too, had come from a religious background defined by change. “Although my father had been raised a Muslim,” Obama writes, “by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition.”
Obama was not merely a product of his parents, his schools, or the homes in which he was raised, however. It was only as an adult, during his work as a community organizer in Chicago, that he ultimately embraced Christianity—specifically African American Christianity, often called the black church. “I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change,” he writes. “Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation.”
To the diverse international lessons of his youth, he added the call to communal action found in a particular American tradition. This combination led him to be informed by his faith, but he was never limited by it at the expense of openness to the broader community. “Given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater,” he has written. “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers”—precisely the sentiment that he echoed when looking out over a million and a half well-wishers packed between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial in January 2009.
The years since Obama’s first inaugural have been in many ways the pinnacle of acceptance and influence of those formed on the margins of the demographically dominant Christian faith. Look no further than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for proof: The black church that remains Obama’s primary inspiration was born of the experiences of African Americans going as far back as Onesimus and Omar ibn Said. It is not merely an ethnic variation of the Christianity brought from Europe, but a distinctly American tradition shaped by practices with deep African roots. And the gathering of diverse spiritual influences in the current White House does not end there. During his first campaign for the presidency, Obama famously carried a figure of the Hindu deity Hanuman and a Catholic icon of the Virgin Mary among an assortment of good luck charms he kept in his pocket. Just three months in office, the Obamas hosted the White House’s first Passover seder; a celebration of an iftar dinner marking Ramadan came six months later. Though he had been dogged through the campaign by rumors that he was secretly a Muslim, the president did not shy away from making clear that Islam was as welcome in his new home as it was in the homes across the country. “Tonight’s iftar is a ritual that is also being carried out this Ramadan at kitchen tables and mosques in all fifty states,” he said. “Islam, as we know, is part of America.”
Yet Obama is obviously not the source of this period of increased awareness; he is rather one sign among many showing how pervasive the influence of marginal religious traditions has become. When the nation faced another presidential choice four years after Obama’s 2008 election, for the first time neither major-party candidate had what would have been considered a conventional religious affiliation a century ago. As heir to the spiritual legacy of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and perhaps Handsome Lake, the Republican candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, represented the final proof of mainstream American acceptance of a movement that had once been literally chased beyond the nation’s borders. If foretold in the mid-nineteenth century, Romney’s candidacy would have seemed just as unlikely as Obama’s.
The first dozen years of the twenty-first century have also seen the election of Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, who took the oath of office with his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s Quran in January 2007. The House of Representatives later welcomed its first Hindu, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard, who took her oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita in January 2013. That same month, when another Hawaiian politician became the first Buddhist in the Senate, she promised she would not be the last. “There need to be many more of us in here,” Mazie Hirono said. “I am going to make sure that happens.”
No doubt there will continue to be increased representation of specific minority religious groups in government, and we should also expect growing numbers of those who are significantly influenced by traditions other than their own. When the then mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker, released a video in December 2012 discussing his political future, for example, he was shown seated beside a stack of religious tomes that included a Hebrew Bible, a New Testament, a Quran, and a Bhagavad Gita. Perhaps most interesting about the display was that he did not mention it at all, instead letting the collection of books speak for itself. The eclectic spiritual interests this small library represented did not stop Booker from being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013.
Of course, the early years of the twenty-first century have also been marked by some of the worst interreligious violence in the nation’s history. In the year following the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, hate crimes against Muslims increased by an astonishing 1,600 percent. A 2010 Gallup poll found that 43 percent of Americans readily admit feeling prejudice toward Muslims, and more than half of all adults in the United States have an unfavorable view of Isl
am generally. More than thirty states have reported incidents of violence or vandalism at mosques in the past five years. And clearly the perpetrators of these kinds of assaults do not harm followers of Islam alone. The first man killed in supposed retaliation after September 11 was the Arizona gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi, a member of that group of perennially mislabeled religious Americans, the Sikhs. Sodhi was shot outside his gas station on September 15, 2001, because his killer saw his turban and beard and assumed he was a Muslim. In the summer of 2012, Sikhs fell victim yet again to a violent attack—this time a mass shooting at a temple in Wisconsin. Responding to these attacks in a way no one did to those in Bellingham a century ago, President Obama said, “Regardless of what we look like, where we come from, or where we worship, we’re all one people.”
As important as it undoubtedly is to repeat this basic premise upon which the Republic stands, it may be time to ask if our dominant symbol of national unity may be part of the problem. Does the city upon a hill, that stubborn Puritan metaphor, carry with it the very images of walls and exclusion that contribute to attacks against those on the margins of the dominant faith? So long as the call to build Winthrop’s city endures, will we continue to imagine ourselves under spiritual siege and in need of a “bulwark” against whichever current peril must be kept at bay?
Perhaps it is time to consider a metaphor offering a different kind of inclusion. One possibility might be found in the image with which this book began. Not a fictional city but an actual place: the small side chapel at New Mexico’s El Santuario de Chimayo, in which we can read the whole history of the nation in a humble hole in the ground.
According to an account published in 1915, the tiny Catholic shrine in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains had been built early in the previous century “on the spot where for long years wonderful cures had been performed by the strange virtue of the soil.” From its earliest days, it had been a location that “every day throughout the year” attracted “men, women, and children from all directions… all inspired with full faith in the supernatural remedial power that is here manifested.”
One Nation, Under Gods Page 46