America the Exemplary: City on a Hill in Colonial and Revolutionary America Essay

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John Winthrop

What is America's role in the world? Considering that America was in many ways founded experimentally, it is only natural to imagine that outside observers are constantly looking to America as an example or a source of guidance. In particular, America's early status as an experiment in religious tolerance has led to the popularity of the phrase and image of "the city on a hill." Derived from Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount -- where Christ tells his followers "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden" (Matt. 5:14) -- the notion of America as both a model and a source of immense scrutiny is popular even to this day. In this paper I would like to examine three ways in which the notion of America as a "city on a hill" was persuasive in the period of America's founding: the idea will be considered religiously, socially, and governmentally through the examples of Puritan settlement in Massachusetts, Quaker settlement in Pennsylvania, and through the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers.

The notion of America as the Biblical "city on a hill" is unsurprisingly derived from the early Puritan settlement: John Winthrop's 1630 sermon preached to the first American Puritan colonists took the Biblical text, and suggested that these colonists would epitomize Christ's image of an example to others.

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What is interesting, however, is how easily the image itself would be undercut by the Puritan religious beliefs themselves. The notion of being under tremendous scrutiny is actually central to Puritanism. The Puritans themselves believed in the Swiss theologian John Calvin's notion of Predestination. This is the belief that, because God is all-powerful and all-knowing, He knows in advance which human beings are already going to Hell; in some sense, they are predestined to damnation. As a result, Puritan religious doctrine separates people into two categories -- the Preterite, who are already going to Hell, and the Elect, who are guaranteed of salvation no matter what they do. As a result, one's behavior should present an impeccable exterior in the eyes of others -- that is how a Puritan demonstrates that he or she is part of God's Elect. To Winthrop's congregation, the fact that these particular Puritans were willing to assert their religious principles enough to join this utopian experiment in the Massachussetts Bay Colony guaranteed their Election; now it was only important for them to behave accordingly.

American religious diversity intended to set a model for worldwide conduct was not exclusive to the Boston Puritans, though. Quakerism, which was an even smaller religious minority that had only been founded in England during the recent Civil War, but Quakerism emphasized the access of every person to some internal.....

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