Is America the “City on a Hill”?

Last night, during Day 4 of the Republican National Convention, Dr. Ben Carson declared that

The vision of a shining city up on a hill came from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. America is that shining city. We are the beacon of hope for the world. At this moment in time, President Donald Trump is the man with the courage, the vision, and the ability to keep it shining brightly.

Whatever one may think of President Trump, it should go without saying that when Jesus uttered those words about the “city on a hill” in the Sermon on the Mount 2000 years ago, he wasn’t actually talking about America. But Carson is hardly the first politician to claim that he was. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both famously applied Jesus’ words to America, as have countless other politicians from both parties. Indeed, the Protestant theologian Peter J. Gomes credibly referred to it as “the most enduring metaphor of the American experience.” So what’s going on here? Why are all of these public officials acting like Jesus gave a sermon on America?

Part of the answer is that America is “a nation with the soul of a church,” as G.K. Chesterton once observed. After all, it is “the only nation in the world that is founded on creed,” a creed “set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.” So perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians often speak about America as if she were a Church, or even Christ. A mere day before Dr. Carson’s speech, Vice President Pence said:

So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and our freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

The reference this time was to the NIV translation of Hebrews 12:1-2, which says that we should “run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith,” only he has first replaced Jesus with the American flag, and then with “this land of heroes,” before pointing us to the Lord.

But (as I mention in Chapter 3 of Pope Peter), the history of the misappropriation of the “city on a hill” image goes back to the sixteenth century. However convinced they may have been of the merits of their own theological arguments, the Protestant Reformers had to explain how to justify going into schism from the visible Church. After all, St. Paul appeals to Christians “by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Cor. 1:10). The Greek word for “dissension” there is schisma, the root of the English word “schism.” He uses a similar word (dichostasia, literally “standing apart”) to warn that those who do create dissensions “shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal. 5:20-21).

So how did the Reformers explain why it wasn’t schism when they did it? Some of them didn’t bother pretending. Martin Luther frankly conceded that Protestants were schismatics, writing that “we, through God’s grace, are not heretics, but schismatics, causing, indeed, separation and division,” but that it was the Church’s fault that they had to go into schism in the first place. Other Reformers tried a different tack, redefining what the Bible means by “Church.” For instance, John Calvin took a subtle approach, arguing that you can’t judge schism by “external appearance,” since you would “thereby make Christ and all the prophets schismatics.” After all, he argued, the Sanhedrin that condemned Christ and the Apostles appeared to have legitimate authority. The true Church, Calvin argued, “may exist without any visible form,” and the Reformers weren’t in schism from that invisible Church.

Redefining “Church” in this way rendered the sin of schism meaningless, as Calvin essentially redefined schism as heresy. As he pointed out, “the distinction which Augustine makes between heretics and schismatics is, that the former corrupt the purity of the faith by false dogmas, whereas the latter sometimes, even while holding the same faith, break the bond of union.” In other words, “schism” isn’t a matter of the content of your creed, but of your relationship to the Church. It is by definition a matter of “standing apart” from the Church.

In response to these clever redefinitions, Catholic apologists of the age pointed the Reformers back to the plain words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:14-16):

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Richard Gamble (a Reformed theologian who literally wrote a book on the subject) has pointed out that for nearly 1600 years, Christians understood the meaning of Jesus’ words here as “always in reference to the church.” His entire point about the city being on a hill is that it’s visible, not invisible. Likewise with the light shining “before men.” Moreover, the followers of Jesus weren’t to each go their own way, but to be a city, a visible society. As St. Robert Bellarmine put it, “the Church is an assembly of men, as visible and palpable as the assembly of the Roman people, or the Kingdom of France, or the Republic of the Venetians.” That’s what Jesus plainly said in the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s a sharp contrast from the Westminster of Confession, which claimed that:

The catholic or universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all. (emphasis added).

So the Sermon on the Mount spelled big trouble for the Reformers. If the first 1600 years’ worth of Christian exegesis was right, and Jesus was describing the true Church as being a visible society in the Sermon on the Mount, then it meant that the Protestant Reformers were guilty of the damnable sin of schism. At first, Abram Van Engen (who has also written a book on the subject) says, “Protestants responded by simply ignoring this verse altogether.” But eventually came up with another clever redefinition: Jesus was speaking not of the Catholic Church in the Sermon on the Mount, but of local churches.

The “city on a hill” image took a further redefinition with the Puritans. John Winthrop, the newly-elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, famously used the image to describe the Puritans’ attempt to create a model society in New England, declaring that “we shall be as a city upon a hill” and that “the eyes of all people are upon us.” It was a masterful sermon, and later politicians have eagerly drawn upon it, neatly tying together Christian imagery and the history of the first pilgrims. Somewhere along the way, probably with President Ronald Reagan, the metaphor morphed slightly to become a “shining city on a hill.”

So there you have it. Jesus spoke about the Church as a visible society in the Sermon on the Mount, but Protestants redefined this to be about local churches. The Puritans then redefined it further by applying it to the Massachusetts Bay Colony (where church and state were technically distinct). And because the American revolutionaries descended from those Puritans, that misappropriated language has been woven into our national DNA from our conception. That’s the five hundred years of errors that lead to America’s “most enduring metaphor” being a nationalist misappropriation of Jesus’ words about the Catholic Church.