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Book Reviews Book Reviews As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. By Daniel T. Rodgers. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. 356. $29.95 cloth.) “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.” So wrote John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in his “Model of Christian Char- ity” in 1630. As the story goes, these lines in “America’s most famous lay sermon” were delivered aboard the Arbella, flagship in the En- glish Puritans’ Great Migration to New England. Setting forth the meaning of the Puritans’ errand into the North American wilder- ness, Winthrop’s words have also been said to embody the meaning of America itself, articulating the world-historical mission of the ex- ceptional nation. Most of this understanding of Winthrop’s “Model,” Daniel Rodgers tells us, “is a modern invention and much of it is wrong” (4). The “Model” is not technically a sermon because it does not begin by opening a biblical text, and was probably never deliv- ered orally either aboard ship or elsewhere. More significantly, the modern reading utterly mistakes Winthrop’s tone and meaning. He was not voicing a triumphant nationalism; his hopes were conditional, his audience local, his message one of caution. He was not promis- ing “incipient Americans that they were destined to be a radiant light to the world” but warning emigrants who sought refuge in America for a purer church and a better life that if they dealt falsely with God in that effort they would surely “perish out of the good land” (5, 308). Rodgers “awakens us to the presence of a historical myth” and of- fers “a much-needed revision to the legend that has been built around John Winthrop’s famous sermon”—or so say the august blurbers on the book’s back cover, some of whom should know better. In fact, no one with even a passing familiarity with the scholarship on American Puritanism over the past generation—from Theodore Dwight Boze- man in the mid-1980s to Michael Winship’s latest book—will be at all surprised by anything in the first hundred pages of AsaCityonaHill. The New England Quarterly, vol. XCII, no. 2 (June 2019). C 2019 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_r_00736. 293 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00736 by guest on 28 September 2021 294 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Rodgers knows the difference between what readers of history know and what politicians or op-ed writers say, and he has insightful things to say across the board, from his astute commentary on scholarship to his perceptive reading of pop culture. But sometimes he fails to mind the gap. When he says that “[d]oubt does not fit the standard picture of New England’s Puritans,” whose “standard picture” does he have in mind (31)? The public’s cartoon Puritan with the buckle on his hat? Or when he says that “we” have not read the “Model” “nearly as seriously as we should” or that “we” have not clearly seen the difference between Abraham Lincoln’s “critical nationalism” and the “patriotic certainties of the Civil War preachers,” who again are “we” (57, 156)? Other scholars have read the “Model” seriously and have come to Rodgers’s conclusions; all serious modern commenta- tors on Lincoln’s religion note its difference from the standard pulpit discourse of his day. Myth-busting bluster aside, there is much to recommend this book. Anyone who has gone past the soundbites to read the whole text knows that the “Model of Christian Charity” is actually mostly about charity—love—as the ligament binding the Christian social body to- gether. But Rodgers handles this theme—and others from Winthrop’s writing and from seventeenth-century Puritanism generally—very well. His clear, crisp prose and cogent arguments are reminiscent of one of his mentors, Edmund Morgan, whose biography of Winthrop, The Puritan Dilemma (1958), was for many years the best short in- troduction to American Puritanism. But the real value of the book is in its discussion and analysis of the later history of the “Model.” However much reflective of a Puritan “mind” in 1630, Winthrop’s text disappeared into archives. Although it was published in the nineteenth century, it was little noticed until the mid-twentieth. As Rodgers discusses, Americans in the revolutionary era could describe themselves as God’s New Israel without help from Winthrop. Pro- moters and critics of America’s “manifest destiny” in the antebellum era did not need the “Model” either. Neither did religious nationalists from the Civil War to World War II. Those who employed the city on a hill metaphor drew not from Winthrop but from the original biblical source: Matthew 5:14. Winthrop’s “Model,” and the New England Puritans more gener- ally, first became hailed as the taproot of American national character in the enormously influential work of the historian Perry MillerThe ( New England Mind [1939 and 1953], and Errand into the Wilderness [1956]), and then through the work of the critic Sacvan Bercovitch Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00736 by guest on 28 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 295 (The Puritan Origins of the American Self [1975] and The American Jeremiad [1978]). Rodgers writes of them with keen critical percep- tion but also a generous appreciation for their “writerly force” and “intellectual virtuosity” (206, 231). But the man who gave Winthrop’s “Model” its “modern public life” was Ronald Reagan (233). Rodgers shows how Reagan (and not just his speechwriters) worked the “city on a hill” theme into his speeches for years, initially as a battle cry against communism and cultural decay in the 1960s and ulti- mately, by the end of his presidency, as a reassuring beacon of morn- ing in America. In a brilliant deconstruction of how the notion of “American exceptionalism” was injected into twentieth-and twentieth- first century presidential politics, Rodgers demonstrates how, since Reagan, invocations of the city on a hill became pervasive in po- litical rhetoric. All the major candidates for president in 2016, for example, endorsed exceptionalism and saluted the shining city—all, that is, except the candidate who won by stressing not history and hope but an American “disaster” that could be rescued only by his deal-making. After discussing Miller and Bercovitch, Rodgers leaves scholars to their “cloisters” to follow the “Model” into the realm of public speech with Reagan (232). He only mentions historians again briefly, in con- nection with the culture wars over high school textbooks, asserting that “historians rushed to keep pace with the election results” by fea- turing Winthrop’s city ever more prominently in their accounts (249). But the myth of a triumphalist, proto-nationalistic Puritan mission in 1630 had already been laid to rest by Bozeman in “The Puritans’ Er- rand into the Wilderness Reconsidered.”1 By the 1990s, most scholars had turned away from trying to see Puritanism as the root of Amer- ican character. Puritanism was restored to its seventeenth-century context as one of many transatlantic religious movements shaping a variegated colonialism, and historians of early American religion had adopted what Charles Cohen called a “post-Puritan paradigm.” Rodgers concludes his book by writing that “we might do worse than to take a text onto which so many modern yearnings have been pro- jected . and put it back, more wisely and humbly, into history” (287). To suggest, however, that only Rodgers himself has done this is, while dismantling one myth, to fashion another. 1New England Quarterly 59 (1986): 231–51. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00736 by guest on 28 September 2021 296 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Christopher Grasso is professor of history at the College of William and Mary. He is the author most recently of Skepticism and Ameri- can Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (2018) and the editor of Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War (2017). Franco-America in the Making: The Creole Nation Within.By Jonathan K. Gosnell. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. 347. $60.00 cloth.) Recent US censuses have indicated the surprising presence and persistence of populations speaking French at home. Extrapolating from 2010 and afterwards indicates just over 1.3 million native speak- ers, coming after speakers of Spanish (of course), Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Korean. As the third most widely spoken language of European origin, it moves to third place overall if speakers of French Creole, over 700,000, are included. These French speakers are di- verse in origin: French nationals living and working in many parts of the US, Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana, people of Quebec/French- Canadian descent in New England, “snowbirds” in south Florida, and the Haitian diaspora. Parallel to these considerations, much academic writing in re- cent years in French and Francophone Studies, given momentum by extensive work on Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa, has been de- voted to ‘de-centering’ metropolitan France and exploring the post- colonial realities—and memory—of the French and Creolophone speaking worlds. Some examples include: Charles Forsdick and David Murphy’s Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction (2003), Jean-Marc Moura’s Littératures francophones et théorie post- coloniale (2013), and my own France and the Americas (2005) and The French Atlantic (2009). At the same time, political polarizations between France and the United States, particularly at the moment of the Iraq War, have impelled and implied a certain distancing (very mistaken, as we shall see) between those polities and cultures.
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