The Shining City on the Hill

I spent the weekend talking and writing about the greatness of this country, and I woke up this morning realizing I’d left much on the table. Because it is one thing to say America is great. It is another thing to say why, and to say what that greatness obligates us to do. So bear with me. You will be made to care. I, your host, will make you care.

Ronald Reagan borrowed the phrase “A city upon a hill” from John Winthrop, who borrowed it from the Sermon on the Mount.

13 “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.

15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

(Matthew 5:13–16, ESV)

A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Winthrop said it to a boatload of Puritans before they’d even landed, and here is the part people forget: it wasn’t a boast. It was a warning. The eyes of all people are upon us. If we deal badly, we become a story and a byword through the world. He was telling them that being watched is a burden before it is an honor. Reagan understood that. When he called us the shining city, he wasn’t puffing out his chest. He was telling us that the light we throw off lands on other people, whether we mean it to or not, and we had better mind what kind of light it is.

Now, here is what makes ours the shining city and not just another lamp. Go back and look at the revolutions. Ours in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949. Four revolutions, four attempts to tear down the old order and build something new. And here is the thing I need you to sit with: only one of them ended in liberty. Only one.

The French stormed the Bastille shouting about the rights of man, and within five years, they had the Terror, the guillotine running like a factory, Robespierre feeding his own friends to the blade until the blade came for him too. They wanted to remake mankind, and when mankind wouldn’t cooperate, they started shortening people by a head. The Russians promised bread, peace, and land, and they delivered famine, the Cheka, the Gulag, and a man named Stalin who murdered more of his own people than Hitler managed to murder of anyone. The Chinese promised the workers a paradise and gave them Mao, the Great Leap Forward that starved forty million human beings, and the Cultural Revolution that turned children into informants against their own parents. Terror. Mass murder. Dictatorship. Every single time.

And ours? Ours ended with a man on a horse who could have been king and refused. George Washington won the war, held all the power a man could hold, and gave it back. He went home to Mount Vernon and grew his crops. The whole world could not believe it, because the whole world had never seen it. Every other revolution produced a strongman. Ours produced a farmer who wanted to go home.

Why the difference? Because we didn’t set out to remake man. That’s the whole thing right there. The French, the Russians, and the Chinese all believed they could perfect human nature if they just broke enough eggs. Our founders believed the opposite. They believed man was fallen, that power corrupts, that no one — no king, no assembly, no vanguard of the proletariat — could be trusted with unchecked authority. So they built a system that assumes the worst about us and protects us from each other and from ourselves. They didn’t dedicate the nation to a perfect man. They dedicated it to a proposition. That all men are created equal. Endowed by their Creator. Not by the state, not by the party, not by the revolution — by their Creator, which means no revolution can take those rights away, because no revolution granted them in the first place.

That is why people are willing to die to get here — and I mean die. They cross deserts. They pile into boats that have no business on open water. They wait years in line for a piece of paper. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is dying to break into Russia. Nobody is stacking themselves into a shipping container to reach the People’s Republic of China. The traffic runs in one direction, and it has for two hundred and fifty years, and that one fact tells you everything the propagandists on the left and the isolationists on the right don’t want you to know. The poor of the earth, the persecuted of the earth, the ambitious of the earth — they vote with their feet, and they vote for us. A refugee understands what a tenured professor cannot: that this is the best there is, because he has seen the alternatives up close, and the professor has only read about them in a book he misunderstood.

It is why we, as Americans, slip away from our Founders’ vision when we start elevating men without question. It is why we should, as Americans, hold our own sides accountable. The other revolutions turned into cults of personality. We must resist the temptation to do that here. We must be faithful to the mission, not the men in charge — honor them and pray for them, but question them and do not put your trust in them.

And now I have to say the hard part, the part that costs me listeners and readers. Being the shining city is not a participation trophy. It is a job. The light lands on other people whether we like it or not, and so does the darkness when we pull the light away. There is a crowd on my own side right now that says we should tend our own garden and let the world burn. Retreat. Come home. Give up on the American experiment as it extends into the world. And I understand the exhaustion behind it, I do. But a city on a hill cannot decide to stop being on the hill. It can only decide whether to shine or to go dark. When we lead the free world, tyrants calculate. When we retreat, they move. That is not charity. As I have previously written, it is the cheapest insurance policy in the history of mankind, and we abandon it the way a fool cancels his fire insurance just as the season for forest fires begins.

We did not earn the right to quit. We earned the obligation to lead, and we earned it the moment we wrote down that all men are created equal and then, imperfectly, at horrific cost, often a cost borne amongst ourselves, across two and a half centuries, actually tried to live up to it. No other nation ever staked its whole existence on a sentence like that. That sentence is the light. That sentence is the hill.

So keep the light on. The eyes of all people really are upon us. They always have been. Let’s not deal falsely and become a byword throughout the world. Let’s be what Winthrop hoped, what Reagan believed, and what a farmer from Virginia proved a man could be when he had every reason to be a king and chose instead to go home. The shining city on the hill, still shining and still ours to keep.