THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 |C9
‘FOR WE MUSTconsider that
we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon
us. So that if we shall deal falsely
with our God in this work we
have undertaken, and so cause
Him to withdraw His present
help from us, we shall be made a
story and a by-word through the
world.” So remarked John Win-
throp in “A Model of Christian
Charity,” a sermon given in 1630
aboard the Arbella as it sailed to
the New World. Winthrop, the
great Puritan leader and early
governor of the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, understood from
the start that America was to
be a monumental experiment
in freedom for the rest of the
world to observe and follow.
That, in any case, is what
political commentators,
politicians and historians have
led us to believe over the past
half century. The words “city
upon a hill” showed up most
famously in Ronald Reagan’s
1989 farewell address. “The
phrase comes from John
Winthrop,” Reagan said, “who
wrote it to describe the America
he imagined.” Wrong on two
counts. The phrase comes from
Jesus: “Ye are the light of the
world. A city that is set on an
hill cannot be hid” (Matthew
5:14). And Winthrop had no
notion of America as a nation.
In his 2012 study “In Search
of the City on a Hill,” Richard M.
Gamble documented the curious
life of this biblical phrase in
American politics. It lay almost
completely forgotten from thetime Winthrop first used it until
1930, when a slightly fuller
version of the quotation was
carved on a monument in
Boston Common to commemo-
rate the city’s 300th anniversary.
Three decades later, in January
1961, President-elect John F.
Kennedy, perhaps having seen
the engraved monument, used
Winthrop’s sermon in a speech
in Boston bidding farewell to
his home state. Since then the
phrase, usually attributed to
Winthrop rather than Jesus, has
become an easy rhetorical device
for any American pundit or
officeholder wishing to convey
the notion that America has a
transcendent mission to model
and spread political freedom
around the globe—the chief
version of an idea commonly
termed “American exceptionalism.”
In 2018, Daniel T. Rodgers
expanded on Mr. Gamble’s analy-
sis with“As a City on a Hill:
The Story of America’s Most
Famous Lay Sermon” (Prince-
ton, 355 pages, $29.95).Mr.
Rodgers, an emeritus professor
of history at Princeton Univer-
sity, offers tantalizing but incon-
clusive evidence that Winthrop’s
“sermon” was never preached,
on or off the Arbella, and em-
phasizes the ways in which Win-
throp’s words contributed to the
“invented foundation” of Ameri-
can nationalism. Now Abram C.
Van Engen has published“City
on a Hill: A History of Ameri-
can Exceptionalism” (Yale,
379 pages, $30). Mr. Van Engen’s
study is a hefty work of scholar-ship, involving a close exegesis
of Winthrop’s sermon and other
related texts, an account of the
antiquarians unwittingly respon-
sible for preserving his sermon
and the scholarly debate over
the extent to which American
culture is a product of New
England Puritanism.
Mr. Van Engen, an associate
professor of English at Washing-
ton University in St. Louis, raisestwo main objections to the mod-
ern political use of Winthrop’s
famous sermon. He insists, first,
that Winthrop’s “city” was not a
nation or any other kind of
worldly polity, but the church,
as he understood it. “For most
of American history,” the author
observes, “when people heard the
words ‘city on a hill,’ they were
discussing discipleship, not citi-
zenship.” Winthrop meant to ex-
hort his fellow dissenting Puritans
to a life of love and solicitude,
not to impress upon them a sense
of their historical importance as
founders of a new nation.
I take his point, but Mr. Van
Engen judges political rhetoric
too fastidiously. Political
pronouncements are not
elucidations of ancient texts but
evocations of images and senti-ments. Hermeneutic slapdashery
is a part of the game. I wonder,
in any case, if the interpretive
jump from Winthrop’s “city” to
American exceptionalism is
really so great. Let’s assume for
the moment, pace Mr. Rodgers’s
argument, that Winthrop did in
fact preach “A Model of Chris-
tian Charity,” or relayed some
part of it, to his fellow emi-
grants. If so, he addressed it to
some of the New World’s earliest
inhabitants and warned them
not to make a mess of things
because if they did the world
would scorn the whole enter-
prise. That strikes me as concep-
tually related to modern Amer-
ica’s self-appointed but noble
mission in the world. If I were
a politician, I’d use it.
Mr. Van Engen objects,
second, to the assumptions, as
he sees them, behind the misuse
of Winthrop’s sermon. His book
chronicles the ways in which
intellectuals and historians—
Alexis de Tocqueville, Max
Weber, the historian Perry
Miller, the literary critic Sacvan
Bercovitch—have portrayed the
United States as having begun
with the Puritans of New
England. I find Mr. Van Engen’s
analysis of these figures and
their works engaging and
substantive. He is a careful
scholar and does not offer facile
summaries (his demolition of
Bercovitch is deftly done).
Yet it’s never clear what all
the fuss is about. Why are we
mistaken to think of America as,
in chief respects, an outgrowthof 17th-century Puritanism? Mr.
Van Engen more than once raises
the chronological objection: The
Spanish in Florida, the settlers of
Jamestown and of course Native
Americans were all present in
North America before the
Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in- Well, OK. But surely it’s too
obvious to argue that Plymouth
was the first Anglophone colony
to survive in the New World,
and that New England went on
to exercise an unrivaled cultural
and economic influence over
the rest of the nation.
I’m even more puzzled by
the book’s penultimate chapter,
an insightful essay on Donald
Trump’s nonuse of Winthrop’s
lines and concomitant rejection
of American exceptionalism.
Unlike other politicians, liberal
and conservative, Mr. Trump
almost never speaks of America’s
Puritan origins or its unique role
in the world. “He has offered no
story or memory of the nation
at all, apart from a vague notion
of lost greatness.” The president
speaks instead of American
“sovereignty,” a word his presi-
dential precursors almost never
used about the United States. It’s
an excellent point, but it is plain
from Mr. Van Engen’s language
that we are not to deduce from
it that Mr. Trump’s vision of the
world is the truer one. We’re left
to conclude that all those politi-
cians who badly misinterpreted
John Winthrop’s sermon none-
theless had the better argument.
The Gipper, though technically
wrong, was basically right.
From Church to City to Nation, a Beacon of Freedom
THIS WEEK
As a City on a Hill
By Daniel T. RodgersCity on a Hill
America By Abram C. Van Engen
as a
noble
experi-
ment,
from the
very
first.BYALEXBEAMI
N 'KINGDOM OF NAUVOO,’historian
Benjamin E. Park has a wild story to
tell. The Mormons’ sojourn in Nauvoo,
Ill., along the banks of the Mississippi
River, is one of the grand,
underappreciated sagas in American history.
In just six years, the Latter-day Saints, as they
called themselves—guided by their charismatic,
bumptious leader, Joseph Smith—built a
thriving metropolis in a mosquito-infested
swamp that grew to be bigger than Chicago.
On the one hand, Nauvoo, where the
Mormons sought shelter after fleeing Ohio
and Missouri, was yet another place where
the church came to grief. Aggrieved by the
Mormons’ political machinations and shocked
by reports of widespread polygamy, the anti-
Mormon “old settlers” of western Illinois
murdered Smith in 1844 and drove his
followers out of Illinois two years later.
But Nauvoo was also the cornerstone of
Mormon greatness. After Smith’s death, his
successor, Brigham Young, led 15,000 Latter-
day Saints westward to a manifest destiny in
the Great Salt Lake Basin. As Mr. Park explains
it, the embittered Mormons abandoned the
American experiment and fled to the then-POLITICS
BARTON
SWAIMGETTY IMAGES; ON C7: ALAMY
Kingdom of Nauvoo
By Benjamin E. Park
Liveright, 324 pages, $28.95quite-wild West, “outside America’s control.”
Fifty years later, after operating a de facto
Mormon republic in and around the Utah
Territory, church members rejoined the United
States in 1896 as the state of Utah, and the rest
is history. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints now claims more than 16 million
members world-wide and is a potent economic
and political force in the country that once
anathematized them.
Mr. Park is a smooth writer and a careful
historian—at times, too careful—who is blessed
here with an overabundance of fascinating
material. Not only did Smith confect a vibrant
city from a swamp; he conjured up many of
Mormonism’s best known, and most notorious,
doctrines in just a few years. In Nauvoo, he
introduced “vicarious baptisms” of the dead, a
rite that Mormons practice to this day, even on
deceased gentiles, their term for non-Mormons.
He also devised the “endowment” ritual to
initiate members—featuring a re-enactment
of the Adam and Eve story from the Book of
Genesis—and it is still performed in Mormon
temples.
It was in Nauvoo that Smith introduced and
practiced the most controversial teaching of
all: polygamy. By 1846, just three years after his
secret “revelation” calling for plural marriage,
about 200 men and 700 women had multiple
spouses. Mormon historians have finally come
to grips with polygamy in the past quarter-
century, and Mr. Park isn’t bringing much new
to the table here. If anything, he sounds
slightly protective at times. Early in the book,
he explains that, by practicing polygamy,
Smith and Young “were, like
many of their gentile
contemporaries,struggling to find ways to bring order to their
lives.”
Really? Outside the Mormon Church,
polygamy was almost nonexistent. And why
the secrecy and the relentless lying, to
Mormons and gentiles alike, about polygamy’s
existence? When we read that Smith married
about a dozen wives in six months, and that
“most of these new brides were young and
single,” a more lubricious explanation comes
to mind. Mr. Park writes of Smith that
“critics...arguedthat he merely invented
religious justification for his personal pro-
clivities.” Sometimes the critics are right.
Women have always played a complicated
role in Mormonism. Mr. Park adeptly describes
Smith’s cautious acceptance of female authority
on the frontier and Brigham Young’s
reactionary rejection of it. “I don’t want the
advice or counsel of any woman—they would
lead us down to hell,” Young proclaimed less
than a year after Smith’s death. The Mormon
Church has treated African-Americans even
more equivocally, and Mr. Park is sharp and
unsparing in his account of the church’s initial
acceptance, and later humiliation, of its very
few black members during the Nauvoo era and
its aftermath. He credits Smith with an
“inclusive racial vision,” undone by Young’s
“policy of white supremacy.”
Mr. Park exploits new material on Smith’s
so-called Council of Fifty, a secret, all-male
committee whose remit was to support his
wackadoodle presidential campaign of 1844.
Oh, yes, and “to rule the world,” as Mr. Park
summarizes its grand ambition. The church
kept the council’s minutes under lock and key
for 172 years, until 2016. Why? Probably, in
part, because they were seditious. The Council
of Fifty was to be a theocratic “shadow
government,” Mr. Park says, with a “new form
of divine governance.” The council appointed a
committee to draft a new constitution for the
putative “Aristarchy,” a government by “the
wisest & best,” in Smith’s phrase.
Another reason for concealing the council’s
minutes for so long might have been its sheer
ridiculousness, painful to a faith that wants its
history to be taken seriously. The idea that
Smith “plotted to take over American politics”
and set himself up as “king of God’s empire,”
as Mr. Park puts it, testifies to Smith’s manicdigressions during the Nauvoo period. More
than once, Mr. Park uses the adjective
“reckless” to describe Smith’s actions.
It’s hard to write about Joseph Smith. He
was both a charismatic leader and a figure of
Trumpian excess. He often preached one thing
—“No man shall have but one wife”—and did
another. Too often, Mr. Park seems to be pull-
ing his punches when describing him. Tracing
the Latter-day Saints’ pre-Nauvoo peregrina-
tions, Mr. Park tells us that “the Mormons of
Kirtland were forced to flee Ohio.” He neglects
to mention that Joseph Smith fled in the dead
of night after his “anti-bank bank,” called the
Kirtland Safety Society, collapsed, impoverish-
ing both Mormon and gentile investors.When the mortally wounded Smith—injured
by gunshots, pursued by a mob—plummeted
from his second-story cell window at the Car-
thage, Ill., jail, Mr. Park writes: “He exclaimed
to heaven above as he fell through the window
to the earth below.” But the real story is richer.
Smith’s biographer Richard Bushman tells us
that, before falling, Smith “raised his arms in
the Masonic sign of distress.” His last words
were“OLordmyGod...”—the beginning of
the Masonic call for help. (“O Lord my God is
there no help for the widow’s son?”) Mr. Park
earlier explains Smith’s self-serving embrace
of Freemasonry in some detail, but he fails
to mention Smith’s desperate appeal in the
closing seconds of his life.
Mr. Park’s larger project in this book is to
depict the Mormons not as “a cult on the margins
of American life” but as a “beleaguered religious
minority” betrayed by American democracy,
which had failed to honor its promise of reli-
gious freedom and pluralistic tolerance. That is
a pretty low bar. American democracy has failed
lots of people; just ask African-Americans or
Native Americans, among others. The Mormons
really aren’t so special in this regard.
What is special is how the Mormons
transformed their persecutions in
Ohio, Missouri and Illinois into
spectacular worldly and denom-
inational success. Mr. Park
suggests that the Mormon
hegirato Utah was a secession
that worked, decades before the
bloody, failed attempt by the
Confederate States of America.
He’s right. Against insuperable
odds, the Mormons did not
merely survive; they prevailed.
Their great turn in fortune
began in an unknown town
on the Mississippi River.Mr. Beam is the author of
“American Crucifixion:
The Murder of Joseph Smith and
the Fate of the Mormon Church.”The City Before Salt Lake
In the 1840s, Joseph Smith and
his followers built a thriving
metropolis along the swampy
banks of the Mississippi River.
It did not end well.BOOKS
‘Governments must have originated from some place—if from heaven, they ought to pattern after heaven.’—CHARLES C. RICH, MORMON PIONEER, 1844
ALAS,
BABYLON
The ruins of
the Mormon
Temple in
Nauvoo, Ill.,
from a 19th-
century print.