Tom Woods

We’ve all heard Ronald Reagan describe the U.S. as a “shining city on a hill,” a nation like none other, with a special mission to bring liberty everywhere, etc. That phrase, minus the “shining,” comes from the Bible, of course, as mediated through John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay and his lay sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” In the course of reviewing Richard Gamble’s recent book In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth, I recently wrote about how Winthrop’s statement was transformed into the iconic image of an imperial America.

Some excerpts:

American exceptionalism is a bipartisan phenomenon, and in modern America its most potent expression is the “city on a hill,” a biblical image employed by John Winthrop in “A Model of Christian Charity,” the lay sermon he composed in 1630 on his way to New England. In fact, so iconic has that image become that Americans no doubt assume it has been invoked and appealed to in an unbroken tradition from its 17th-century drafting down to the present day….

For over two centuries after Winthrop composed the “Model,” it was altogether unknown to the American public. Only in 1838 was the manuscript published, and in the ensuing years it was cited and discussed only sparingly. And even then, the “city upon a hill” imagery was almost never emphasized as the document’s rhetorical or philosophical crescendo. For the most part, Winthrop’s remarks were described as an admirable exposition of the demands of Christian charity, and that was that….

The John Winthrop who told his wife that God would “provide a shelter and a hiding place for us and ours” had a finite goal, namely a place of asylum for the Puritans and the establishment of proper Christian worship and civil government as called for in the Bible. For him, that meant worship expunged of popish superstition, churches emancipated from the authority of bishops, the Word of God as the central focus of the church service, and a political society in which sin was to be punished and Christian charity promoted. Ambitious, to be sure, but finite.

This new Christian community of New England, said Winthrop, ought to imagine itself as a city upon a hill, with the eyes of the world upon it. The Puritans had to be faithful to their covenant with God in order not to bring shame on the cause of the Gospel. God would surely bless them if they remained faithful, but he would just as surely withdraw those blessings and punish them if they failed.

Winthrop held that the mission of the Puritans was do to service for the Lord, to build up the body of Christ (i.e., the church), to preserve their posterity from the corruptions of the world, and to live their lives according to “his holy ordinances.” Not exactly the mission statement later glosses on Winthrop’s words would have in mind.

In the scholarly realm it was Perry Miller, the prolific 20th-century historian of the Puritans, who did so much to link Winthrop’s city on a hill to the idea of a messianic American consciousness….

According to Miller, Winthrop and the Puritans sought to establish a “revolutionary city” in New England that would regenerate the world. Miller conceded that the Puritans themselves probably did not understand the full significance of what they were doing—an admission that throws his own interpretation into rather serious question, though he believed Winthrop himself did hold this messianic vision. Gamble is skeptical. “Winthrop understood the mission behind the mission, Miller claimed, although it sounded more like Miller was the one blessed with the special gnosis.”

During Reagan’s presidency, Theodore Dwight Bozeman accused Miller of having invented the “idea of an exemplary Puritan mission” and noted that the “city on a hill” language was a “rhetorical commonplace,” not the document’s interpretive key….

It was Ronald Reagan who seared the image of the city on a hill (the “shining city on a hill,” in his rendition) into the national consciousness….

Reagan spoke of the city on a hill nearly two dozen times in presidential speeches. His was “a city aglow with the light of human freedom, a light that someday will cast its glow on every dark corner of the world and on every age and generation to come.” Gone for good was the idea of divine judgment to be visited upon a disobedient city. This was a city that boasted only promise, and a distinctly secular promise at that.

Gamble is at pains not simply to trace the evolution of the “Model of Christian Charity” and its “city on a hill” in American culture but to insist that the original city on a hill was a biblical image, not a political symbol. It was not a physical place at all but the Christian church itself, conceived of as the community of believers wherever they may be found. The Christian community, Gamble insists, ought to be outraged at the secular appropriation of one of its most arresting images….

There is no such resentment, of course. The intellectual debasement of American conservatism, combined with the grotesque and impious neoconservative conflation of Christianity and “America’s mission in the world,” have decimated the kind of religious sensibilities that would alert the properly formed Christian conscience to blasphemy.

Thus when Abraham Lincoln is found to have said that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against” America’s ideals, this does not shock or scandalize American Christians. When George W. Bush said “the light shined in darkness and the darkness did not overcome it,” and by “light” meant American ideals, few American Christians batted an eye.

So we have the following spectacle: a religious image is adapted by an earthly government for secular purposes, in order to urge Americans to pursue a messianic world mission that would have been dismissed with contempt by a classical conservative like Edmund Burke and which bears more in common with the French Revolution and its wars of ideological expansion than it does with anything conservatives would have recognized—and so-called conservatives cheer….

Read my article “Whose City? Which Hill?”

A reader writes: “My non-religious Libertarian friends completely disagree with my view that we are endowed with unalienable rights by our Creator. That being said, do you agree with that? (Right to be free, right to live) and if so, how can I defend my position to someone who feels rights can only come from a state?”

If your friends don’t believe in a Creator, then of course they aren’t going to believe that rights are bestowed by a Creator. That gap is unbridgeable as long as one of you is a religious believer and the other is not.

But I don’t understand why your friends think the only remaining option is that rights come from a state. There are other options, too: (1) there is no such thing as rights; and (2) rights exist, but are not divinely bestowed. They would be odd libertarians indeed to think people have no rights until a group of people wearing funny hats declare that they do, especially given that your friends would now need to explain how, if there is no such thing as rights prior to the state, these people get the right to establish a state and start barking out commands in the first place.

If you’re just looking to persuade your friends of the idea that rights exist, you might benefit from this lecture I gave on the history of rights theories. Unfortunately, it’s broken into small parts.

(Thanks to Travis Holte for the playlist.)

This one in Israel. Time reports:

As promised, the landscape of Israel is dotted with battery-switching stations, 27  blue-and-white buildings bearing the logo of Better Place, the most ambitious electric car enterprise in the world. The batteries are right there too, rows of lithium-ion blocks that can be lifted in and out of the rear of a four-door Renault Fluence in a bit more than the time it takes to fill up at the pump.

The only thing that’s missing is the cars — or, rather, the people who want to drive them.

In six months, Better Place has sold only 500 cars in Israel, the country that was supposed to showcase the vision of its founder, Shai Agassi, who predicted 100,000 totally electric vehicles would be on the road by 2016, sticking it to the petroleum industry and the despots it funds. Instead, Agassi is gone, forced out as CEO last month because of mounting losses seated in the hesitancy of Israeli consumers to commit.

Read “A Smart Car Dream in Israel — Not So Smart After All?“

All through the 2012 campaign, we had to listen to naive progressives who thought Ron Paul was the obvious choice for big business, since after all he favored competitive markets, lower taxes, etc. Somehow they missed that Dr. Paul opposed all bailouts, opposed all corporate welfare, and wanted to shut down Bailout Inc., the Federal Reserve. For reasons that to this day have not been made clear, this counted for nothing.

Also counting for nothing is the fact that virtually every Wall Street firm you can think of would, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, see the whole world burn down before they would accept a pure free market. They want a system that benefits them.

Here’s Michael Jones, CIO of Riverfront Investment Group, explaining on election eve, as the re-election of Obama is looking increasingly likely, why “the market” will be relieved that no sound-money person like a Ron Paul will be appointed to the Fed. (By “the market” he doesn’t mean the array of voluntary exchanges in society; he means the parasites that need non-market institutions like the Fed in order to survive.)

The one thing you’ve definitively and undeniably taken off the table, is whomever [sic] replaces Bernanke is 2014 will be every bit as committed to monetary accommodation as Bernanke is. So there’s no chance of a Jim Grant, Ron Paul, hard-money advocate at the Federal Reserve at the end of Bernanke’s term and that’s a tremendous reassurance to the market.

If Obama wins, which is looking likely, the fiscal cliff is on the table, hard money is off the table, and net-net, I think the market will say, ‘Well, we never were that scared about the fiscal cliff anyway, and isn’t it going to be great to have Bernanke at the Fed for the foreseeable future.’

(Thanks to Lynette Largent.)

On Twitter, Rupert Murdoch says the resignation of CIA director David Petraeus seems suspicious and there must be more to the story. Anyone who follows American government knows there is always more to a story like this. But because Murdoch said it (and I know Murdoch is not one of us, but that’s not the point), left-liberals responded with laughter and scorn, for who could possibly think we’re not getting the full story? Further evidence that QUESTION AUTHORITY is dead as a governing principle for the Left. (Thanks to Robert Wenzel.)

We need time to figure out what happened to the GOP in this presidential election, says Amy Kremer of Tea Party Express. “We need to figure this out. It’s not going to be something that’s figured out today, not going to be figured out tomorrow. It’s going to take a lot of communication and discussing, it’s going to take a while to figure it out.”

It’ll take quite a long time, I guess, to figure out why a guy with less charisma than Bob Dole, no principles he wouldn’t sell out for ten votes, and different from the incumbent only in degree, might not have won.

I’ve commented on Amy Kremer before: on her zealous support for Paul Ryan despite his having betrayed what her faction is supposed to stand for, and on her declaration in June 2011 that Tea Party Express would support whoever the GOP nominee turned out to be, thereby squandering their political capital for no good reason.

“I grew up under Eisenhower,” says Stone, “and it’s gotten scarier because of the Bush and Reagan people and now I find Obama scary in a way that I had not done in 2008.”

About his presidential campaign.

The making of the new Marillion album.