[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]When President Reagan[.small-caps] left office in 1989, he returned in his farewell address to a Puritan sermon from 1630 and called America, one last time, a “shining city on a hill.” With its luster newly restored, Reagan claimed, the country could again fulfill its original purpose and serve as “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.” What Reagan did not say – or seem to know – was that this “city on a hill” national story had been invented only recently. The sermon Reagan quoted was one the Puritans themselves never noted, published, cited, distributed, or read. [.article__paragraph--cap]

The tale of America as “a city on a hill” reveals the nature of origin stories and how they work. An origin story takes a fact from long ago and turns it into a framework, an explanation for all that follows, a definition of identity, and a guide for action. When Reagan staked his career on a Puritan sermon, he was not trying to inform Americans about early New England; he was using a moment from early New England to define national purpose.

John Winthrop, the first Puritan governor of Massachusetts Bay, did write and probably did deliver a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which he declared that “we shall be as a city upon a hill,” a reference to Jesus’ exhortation in the Sermon on the Mount, “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid” (Matt. 5:14). But if the gathered Puritans had known he was giving a mission statement for a nation that did not yet exist, they might have paid better attention. Instead, the sermon disappeared.

The first record we have that anyone knew this “city on a hill” sermon existed came in 1838, when historians in the archives of the New York Historical Society tried to herald its importance, but no one paid them much mind.

It was only in the wake of World War II, and only through the dogged work of a Harvard professor named Perry Miller, that this sermon gained purchase on the American imagination. John F. Kennedy, a Harvard graduate, became the first president to cite John Winthrop. On January 9, 1961, as he took his farewell from Massachusetts on his way to the White House, Kennedy announced that he was “guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella,” and then quoted the sermon: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill – the eyes of all people are upon us.” Kennedy emphasized those eyes. He took the warning, the fear of failure. A weight of dread and responsibility, which Winthrop felt, transferred through his words to the president-elect.

But after Kennedy, that dread seemed to disappear. The “city on a hill” began to shine. In the years that followed, Winthrop’s sermon became the key to the meaning of America, its calling as a model and a beacon for the world. By the time Reagan said his farewell in 1989, it seemed common knowledge that America was founded as a “city upon a hill” in a Puritan sermon of 1630 and had been so ever since.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]In establishing the United States[.small-caps] as a “city upon a hill,” Americans both invented something new and drew from something old. Winthrop’s sermon was revived in 1961, but the mythic tale of Pilgrim Landing dated back to the 1800s. According to this story, a small band of refugees crossed the Atlantic and endured terrible conditions in pursuit of religious liberty. Just before landing, they signed a compact that laid the foundations of American democracy. [.article__paragraph--cap]

The story of Pilgrim Landing posited an origin fully formulated at the very moment of arrival. From the Mayflower flowed all we supposedly stand for as Americans: democratic self-rule in the interest of freedom and religious liberty, colored with the pursuit of righteousness and the blessing of God. In short, the United States of America arrived in 1620 and finally flowered in 1776. The seed became the tree. The Declaration of Independence arose from a planting at Plymouth Rock.

What did not arrive at Plymouth Rock in 1620 was a sermon declaring that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” That text came with Winthrop, ten years later, aboard the Arbella and headed for Boston. Boston is not Plymouth. Puritans were never Pilgrims. In fact, the two groups had fundamental disagreements about the Church of England and their positions in America. Over time, however, those differences blurred. When Reagan wanted to place Winthrop at the origin of America, he simply called the man a “Pilgrim.” Who would know the difference? Part of making “city on a hill” the foundational text of American origins was forgetting the details of those origins.

But why was Reagan talking about Pilgrims anyway? After all, the first permanent English settlement in America came in 1607 at Jamestown in Virginia, thirteen years before Plymouth. Moreover, four of the first five American presidents were Virginians. Where was Virginia in the national tale? Origin stories create national memory by forgetting parts of national history.

While Virginians had long insisted on giving pride of place to Virginia, most historians demurred. The problem was clear: starting in Jamestown and moving through Virginia would require highlighting colonizers who came not for God or freedom but for gold and gain, enslaving Africans to achieve their ends. Slavery existed in New England, too, but there it was far easier to ignore. A Pilgrim origin story allowed Americans to stand for the virtues and values they wanted to promote: God, liberty, and self-government. As a result, history textbooks bracketed Jamestown: Virginia was part of finding America, not part of founding it. That work came at Plymouth.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration is a good moment to remember these stories, how they came about, and what they erase. The American Revolution produced the origin story it needed. Pilgrim Landing did not create an independent nation in 1776; an independent nation in 1776 created the mythic origin of Pilgrim Landing.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]To understand how[.small-caps] the Pilgrim origin story came about, picture a new nation uniting thirteen colonies of vastly different economies and cultures. What does Georgia care for Massachusetts? What do New Hampshire and South Carolina have in common? The new United States has a substantial problem: lots of local allegiances and a lack of national identity.[.article__paragraph--cap]

We know this problem persisted because it was at the center of the country’s first presidential farewell address. In 1796, almost two centuries before Reagan’s farewell, President George Washington worried about local attachments overriding national bonds. “Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country,” he declared, “that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.” National citizens needed a national identity, and the salience of that identity needed bolstering.

In the wake of independence, therefore, the nation took on the task in earnest. It drew maps to visualize unity and hung them in every tavern. It emphasized national holidays, like the Fourth of July, and insisted on civic rituals. It also turned to history. A common nation needed a shared story. That call grew louder in the 1820s, and national history became the national rage. It was at this moment that the actions of 1776 created the Pilgrims of 1620.

As the New England orator, lawyer, and senator Daniel Webster proclaimed in 1820: “At the moment of their landing, [Pilgrims] possessed institutions of government and institutions of religion … framed by consent, founded on choice and preference” that “fill up our whole idea of country!” Webster’s speech started the process. Before him, the Pilgrims had always been a regional tale of New England pride, never a national origin story. Webster changed that. He set the Pilgrims apart as exceptional and linked them forward to Lexington and Concord, so that every American pursuit of freedom followed in their footsteps. This speech then circulated through the schools. States had just recently required the teaching of history, and teachers needed material. Webster filled the gap. So did many other New England writers who began flooding the market with textbooks, drawing on a long culture of writing and printing. At a time when national identity required national history, New England supplied the country with Plymouth Rock.

They did not, however, supply the nation with Winthrop’s sermon. No textbook mentioned “city on a hill.” In the telling of origins, Puritans only swelled the ranks; Pilgrims started the tale. Winthrop landed too late.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]How, then, did Winthrop’s[.small-caps] “city on a hill” assume its place in American culture? It took nothing short of a world war. The aftermath of World War II placed the United States, for the first time, in a position of global leadership – a condition in which it needed a new origin story to define its identity and purpose, a “meaning to match its force,” as Perry Miller, the Harvard historian, said. According to him, the Pilgrims simply would not do. They washed ashore with no plan and little purpose. They piddled around in Plymouth until they were absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay colony. What more could one really say? “Plymouth was a minute, relatively insignificant community,” Miller insisted. Their chief desire was “to be let alone.”[.article__paragraph--cap]

Massachusetts Bay, on the other hand, represented something different. The Puritans came with clear plans and deliberate ends. And those ends could all be found in a single sermon, Miller said, delivered at the very start of the enterprise by John Winthrop himself. When it comes to “the American mind,” he insisted, “Winthrop stands at the beginning of our consciousness.”

When Reagan declared the United States a “city on a hill,” he ditched Miller’s disdain for the Pilgrims and grafted these two origin stories together. Winthrop became the spokesman of the Pilgrims – a historical inaccuracy – and his “city on a hill” sermon of 1630 established liberty as the identity and end of the United States. The nation was designed, from its origin, to model freedom and bring it to others.

Meanwhile, Virginia languished – ignored, forgotten, set aside. No one denied the history of slavery, but few made it a part of the origin and identity of the nation. It was a blight on America, not what America was all about. Then, as the four hundredth anniversary of Pilgrim Landing approached, a self-declared “new origin story” emerged. Disseminated by a national newspaper and integrated into school curricula (as Webster’s speech had been), the 1619 Project foregrounded racial violence and the lasting legacies of slavery, competing with Plymouth Rock and the “city on a hill” to define the nation through a single point of origin.

This essay is not about 1619, nor about 1620, but about the “city on a hill” sermon of 1630 – an origin story first made famous after World War II and one that is now, perhaps, waning away again. Yet these origin stories – 1619, 1620, 1630 – share common features. In 1820, Daniel Webster took a single ship, the Mayflower, and turned it into an origin story that would define the nation according to self-government and religious liberty. Ronald Reagan, following Miller and Kennedy, took a single Puritan sermon and used it to define the nation as a light for the lost, a leader of the free world, an asylum in this dark world for refugees seeking home. And in 2019, Nikole Hannah-Jones took a single ship, the White Lion, and created “a new origin story” that would highlight the racial violence and injustice integral to this nation’s rise.

Origin stories serve important ends. But the ends are what make the origins into stories. And those stories, taken individually, never capture all the origins that make America what it is. We are these beginnings, and many more besides. The American Revolution created a nation in need of such stories, an ongoing felt desire for a tale that could define the country’s identity, unite its citizenry, establish its purpose, and set its path. We are a nation of many origins, ever competing for one story to bind them all.