Pilgrims & Progress

"As a city on a hill” is a line borrowed from the Gospel of Matthew by John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but one popularized and repeated endlessly by Ronald Reagan, who added the adjective “shining” to emphasize America's unique and faultless character. In his sonorous fashion, Reagan insisted that Winthrop's words were a cornerstone for the foundation of the nation and expressed the essence of the American dream. In Reagan's telling, the “shining city on a hill” trope was a stirring call at the height of the Cold War for Americans to recapture the courage and fortitude of the nation's founders, and to live up to ideals set forth by the country's pietistic first settlers. But like many of the things Reagan imagined to be fact, his shining city was mostly a distortion of what the Puritans actually believed and what Winthrop wrote