"City Upon a Hill" Sermon
In 1630, aboard the ship Arbella crossing the Atlantic Ocean, John Winthrop—Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—delivered what would become among the most consequential addresses in American political history. The sermon, formally titled "Christian Charity: A Model Hereof," contained a phrase drawn from the Bible's Gospel of Matthew that would echo through centuries of American life: "We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."[1] That single line transformed Winthrop's text from a colonial religious document into an enduring metaphor for American purpose, identity, and civic ambition—and linked the city of Boston, Massachusetts, permanently to a defining national ideal.
Background and Context
John Winthrop delivered his sermon to fellow Puritan immigrants who were embarking on an uncertain journey to establish a new society in the wilderness of New England. The men and women aboard the Arbella were not yet settlers; they were still at sea, facing an unknown world. Winthrop's address was meant to prepare them spiritually and socially for the challenges ahead.
The sermon drew on the biblical image of "a city set on a hill," a phrase originating in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's Gospel. That image provided Winthrop with a framework for describing what he believed to be the moral purpose of the Puritan venture into the unknown.[2] By invoking it, Winthrop linked the settlers' colonial enterprise to a larger spiritual and communal obligation—not merely a mission of survival, but a demonstration of virtue to the watching world.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony that Winthrop governed would eventually give rise to the city of Boston, formally established in 1630, the same year as the sermon. The physical and symbolic landscape of Boston—including its famously hilly terrain—has since been intertwined with the memory of Winthrop's words. Mayor Marty Walsh, for instance, drew plaudits at his inauguration by invoking Boston's many hills, riffing on the "City on a Hill" metaphor as a way of connecting contemporary civic life to that original Puritan vision.[3]
The Sermon's Content
Despite its fame as a statement of national destiny, the sermon's actual content was, at its heart, a radical exhortation to love and fellow-feeling—a plea to set aside self-interest in favor of communal welfare.[4] Winthrop's core argument was that justice and mercy were the two essential rules by which his community must conduct itself. He considered these principles necessary for preventing the society of poor and rich over which he presided from fracturing into competing self-interest groups.
The sermon asked a direct question: "What rule must we observe and walk by in cause of community of peril?" Winthrop's answer was the same principles—justice and mercy—but applied with what he described as "more enlargement towards others and less respect towards ourselves." Having established mutual love as the foundational model of Christian charity, he summarized the object of the entire colonial enterprise: "The end is to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord...that ourselves and posterity may be the better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world."[5]
Winthrop presented his vision as a layman's framework for a new civil body politic—not a purely ecclesiastical decree, but a practical blueprint for social organization. The sermon acknowledged plainly that the seductions of ambition and self-interest were as dangerous to the common good as famine or disease. This realistic appraisal of human nature, combined with an aspirational call to virtue, gave the address its distinctive moral texture.
The "City Upon a Hill" Phrase
The phrase "a city upon a hill" became the single most cited element of the sermon, serving as the source of the document's lasting fame. The sermon is famous largely for its use of that phrase, which was employed to describe the expectation that the Massachusetts Bay Colony would shine like a beacon to other nations—that the colonists' success or failure in building a godly community would be visible and consequential to the entire world.[6]
The phrase originates in the Gospel of Matthew, specifically in Christ's Sermon on the Mount, and Winthrop adapted it to provide what he saw as the spiritual stakes of the colonial mission. By doing so, he gave Matthew's text a new civic context and helped shape what would become perhaps the most enduring metaphor of the American experience: that of an exemplary nation called to virtue and mutual support.[7]
Whatever the colonists did in founding their community, Winthrop argued, would carry enormous weight—because "the eyes of all people are upon us." This sense of being under perpetual observation, and of needing to conduct oneself accordingly, became a cornerstone of how later generations interpreted the sermon's message.[8]
American Exceptionalism and Political Legacy
"A City upon a Hill" has been cited as one of the earliest examples of American exceptionalism—the idea that the United States holds a unique position in the world, defined not merely by power but by moral obligation and example.[9] The sermon has been referenced throughout American political history, invoked by leaders and commentators who wished to connect contemporary events to a founding national purpose.
The scholar Perry Miller, who helped bring the sermon to broader academic attention in the twentieth century, pronounced it the first articulate statement of community in American thought—a sermon expounding the idea that America would be committed to the life of the mind.[10] Miller's interpretation helped establish the text as a foundational document in American intellectual history, not merely in Puritan religious studies.
Politicians from both major parties have drawn on Winthrop's language when making arguments about American identity and purpose. The phrase "city upon a hill" entered the mainstream of presidential rhetoric and political speechmaking, making a modest colonial address into a recurring touchstone of national self-understanding.
Relationship to Boston
The sermon's connection to Boston is both literal and symbolic. Winthrop and the passengers of the Arbella were sailing to establish what would become the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the nucleus from which Boston grew as a settlement and, eventually, a major city. The sermon was thus composed and delivered in the immediate context of the founding of Boston and its surrounding region.
Boston's notoriously hilly topography has given the "city upon a hill" metaphor an additional local resonance over the centuries. The image of a city built on elevated ground—visible to the surrounding world—maps neatly onto the physical geography of the Shawmut Peninsula, where Boston was first established. This geographical coincidence has made the metaphor feel especially apt when applied to the city.
The phrase continued to reverberate in Boston's civic culture well into the twenty-first century. Mayor Walsh's invocation of the metaphor at his inauguration reflected an ongoing awareness among Boston's civic leaders that Winthrop's words remained a living part of the city's public identity.[11]
Scholarly Reassessment
Later scholarship has urged a reassessment of how the sermon has been read and used. Critics and historians have pointed out that the text is frequently mischaracterized as a triumphalist statement about American greatness or destiny when, in fact, Winthrop's original intent was far more cautionary and communal in nature.[12]
The sermon was, in its original form, more concerned with the dangers of failure than the promise of glory. Winthrop warned that if the colonists failed to uphold the principles of justice and mutual love, their community would become a cautionary example—a city on a hill watched and judged not for its success but for its moral collapse. The phrase "the eyes of all people are upon us" carried the weight of accountability, not merely aspiration.
This distinction matters for understanding how the sermon has functioned in American political culture. When the text is invoked to celebrate national achievement or exceptionalism, it is often stripped of Winthrop's original insistence on obligation, communal sacrifice, and the ever-present risk of moral failure. Scholars have argued that recovering that original emphasis changes the meaning of the sermon substantially, shifting it from a statement of confidence to one of sobering responsibility.
Significance and Endurance
The sermon "Christian Charity: A Model Hereof" has endured not because it resolved the tensions it described—between rich and poor, self-interest and communal good, ambition and virtue—but because it named them so directly. Winthrop's text presented a community at the edge of the unknown with a moral framework designed to hold it together under strain.
The sermon remains a subject of active scholarly, political, and cultural discussion because its central questions have not aged. How a society balances individual interest against communal welfare, what obligations the powerful owe the vulnerable, and what it means to live under the observation of history—these remain live questions in American public life. Boston, as the city most directly descended from Winthrop's colonial enterprise, occupies a particular place in the ongoing conversation about what the "city upon a hill" ideal demands.[13]
The phrase itself—compact, biblical, and charged with moral weight—gave Winthrop's sermon life long after the specific circumstances of the Arbella voyage had passed from living memory. In doing so, it provided not only the most enduring metaphor of the American experience, but also a permanent thread connecting the city of Boston to the founding ideals, and founding anxieties, of the nation it helped bring into being.[14]