The Bible in American Law and Politics. John R. Vile
to an enduring fact” (2018, 244–45).
This was probably most evident in a speech that Reagan gave to celebrate the centennial of the Statue of Liberty on July 23, 1986. Calling the ship from which Winthrop delivered the speech as the Arabella rather than the Arbella, and at one point incorrectly identifying the Puritans as Quakers, Reagan explained, “A little group of Puritans huddled on the deck. And then John Winthrop, who would later become the first governor of Massachusetts, reminded his fellow Puritans there on that tiny deck that they must keep faith with their God, that the eyes of all the world were upon them, and that they must not forsake the mission that God had sent them on, and they must be a light unto the nations of all the world—a shining city upon a hill” (speech in Balmer 2008, 213). Further elaborating his belief in American exceptionalism, Reagan intoned, “Call it mysticism if you will, I have always believed there was some divine providence that placed this great land here between the two great oceans, to be found by a special kind of people from every corner of the world, who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope” (Balmer 2008, 213)
In associating the city-on-the-hill analogy with American exceptionalism, Professor Patrick Deneen has delineated four types of vision. He describes the vision of John Winthrop, like Nathaniel Nile’s sermon, as “Two Discourses on 105Liberty,” and some Anti-Federalist writings as examples of what he calls communal perfectionism. He believes that George Washington’s Farewell Address and John Quincy Adams’s speech on July 4, 1821, were what he describes as liberal isolationism, which focused chiefly on America’s role as an example to other nations. Deneen believes, however, that there was a fine line between liberal isolationism and liberal expansionism, both at home (as in manifest destiny) and abroad, as in the American acquisition of colonies after the Spanish-American War and in Ronald Reagan’s own vision of the shining city on a hill. Finally, Deneen identifies a category that he calls global communalism, which looks forward to expanded internationalism. Deneen posits that all four forms of American exceptionalism depart from the Augustinian distinction between the city of God, which consists of members of the church, and the city of man, or earthy kingdoms, none of which Augustine thought could claim a heavenly mission (Deneen 2012, 49).
See also American Exceptionalism; Covenants, Compacts, Contracts, and Constitutions; Kennedy, John F.; Model of Christian Charity; Moses; Pilgrims; Reagan, Ronald (Evil Empire Speech)
For Reference and Further Reading
Balmer, Randall. 2008. God in the White House: A History; How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. New York: HarperOne.
Deneen, Patrick K. 2012. “Cities of Man on a Hill.” American Political Thought 2 (Spring): 29–52.
Dunn, Richard S. 1987. “An Odd Couple: John Winthrop and William Penn.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Society, Third Series 99: 1–24.
Holland, Matthew S. 2007. Bonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of America—Winthrop, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Johnson, Paul. 1995. “God and the Americans: The City upon a Hill.” Commentary 99 (January): 25–32.
Kennedy, John F. 1961. “The City upon a Hill Speech.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. January 9. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/the-city-upon-a-hill-speech.
Morgan, Edmund S. 1958. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown.
Noll, Mark A. 2012. “’We Shall Be as a City upon a Hill’: John Winthrop’s Non-American Exceptionalism.” Review of Faith & International Affairs 10 (May 24): 5–11.
Rodgers, Daniel T. 2018. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Schweitzer, Ivy. 2005. “John Winthrop’s ‘Model’ of American Affiliation.” Early American Literature 40(3): 441–69.
Vile, John R., ed. 2015. Founding Documents of America: Documents Decoded. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Civil Disobedience
Christian leaders throughout history have generally advocated obedience to laws, especially those that were legally enacted for the common good. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39). In Matthew 22:21, Jesus urged followers to “render to Caesar the things that are 106Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s,” and, in the opening verses of Romans 13, Paul urged Christians to submit to governing authorities.
There are occasions in both the Old and New Testaments, however, that also praise those who have stood up to injustice and disobeyed unjust laws. Exodus praised midwives who refused to carry out orders to slay newborn Hebrew boys. The book of Daniel recorded that his three friends were willing to be cast into a fiery furnace rather than bow down to an idol. King Saul’s own bodyguards refused to carry out his order to kill priests who had fed David, while Hebrew kings were instructed to write out passages from the law to which they were bound to adhere (Waskow n.d.).
In the New Testament, after religious leaders cautioned early Christians against preaching the gospel, Peter responded in Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men” (Blankley 2012). Historically, Christians have suffered martyrdom rather than surrendered their faith.
Many individuals fled to the United States for refuge after being persecuted for their beliefs. Quakers had been harassed for their refusal to duff their hats to rulers, while Puritans hoped to found a purer church than they had left in England.
Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” better known today as “Civil Disobedience,” which was published in 1849, is one of the more articulate defenses of civil disobedience. In Thoreau’s case, he had refused to pay a poll tax during the Mexican-American War, which he considered to be an attempt at expanding American slave power (Perry 2013, 94–125). Although his perspective was largely that of libertarian individualism, numerous Christians expressed their unwillingness in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War to help enforce fugitive slave laws. One pastor, J. C. W. Pennington, likened such participation to Judas’s decision to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver (Perry 2013, 111). In so doing, opponents of the laws that required the return of escaped slaves appealed to a higher moral law, much as they believed American revolutionaries had done in an earlier generation.
In the years leading up to the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, American suffragists practiced civil disobedience in order to highlight the cause of women’s voting.
During the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. combined the idea of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. He eloquently defended his views in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote in response to a number of pastors and religious leaders who had accused him of being an outsider who was stirring up violence, after he was imprisoned for failing to get a permit to demonstrate.
Justifying his action in part on the basis of his presidency of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King cited a number of biblical precedents: “Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond