What America’s 250th Birthday Invites Us to Reconsider
“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
— Matthew 5:14
A Phrase Worth Pausing Over
As the United States approaches its 250th birthday this July, the airwaves, pulpits, and prayer gatherings of American Christianity are filling with a familiar phrase: “a city on a hill.” It will appear in patriotic sermons, national prayer initiatives, and denominational gatherings across the country. For many Christians, it will feel entirely natural — even inspired. It sounds biblical because it is biblical. It resonates because it has been repeated for generations.
But before we sing it, pray it, or preach it again, I want to suggest we stop and ask a question we rarely ask: What did Jesus actually mean by it? And does the way we use it today bear any resemblance to what he had in mind?
I ask this as an insider, not a critic from the outside. I come from a church tradition — the Assemblies of God — that has used this language to describe both the church’s calling and America’s national heritage. I have served for four decades in ministry in Boston, the very city where John Winthrop first gave those words to the American imagination in 1630. And full disclosure: I have used the phrase myself in an inspirational way, without giving it deeper thought. I have since become more cautious. This essay is an attempt to explain why — and to offer what I believe is a richer, more faithful vision in its place.
What Jesus Was Actually Saying
The image comes from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14–16. Jesus is speaking to his disciples — an unlikely group of people he is calling into a particular kind of life. “You are the light of the world,” he tells them. “A city on a hill cannot be hidden.”
Read in context, this is a breathtaking statement. Jesus has just finished describing the kind of people he is talking about: the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, those who hunger for justice, the merciful, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for doing right. These are the people he calls the light of the world. Not the powerful. Not the triumphant. The ones the world tends to overlook or push aside.
And the light they carry isn’t military strength or economic dominance. It’s the quality of their common life together — how they love enemies, how they treat the poor, how they pursue reconciliation, how they refuse to return evil for evil. That is the witness. That is what makes them visible.
Crucially, Jesus includes a warning. Salt can lose its saltiness and become worthless. A light can be hidden under a bowl. The calling comes with conditionality — genuine accountability for whether the community actually lives up to what it’s been called to be. There is no automatic chosenness here. There is a demanding invitation, and the real possibility of failure.
How the Image Got Borrowed
In 1630, John Winthrop delivered a sermon aboard the Arbella as it crossed the Atlantic toward the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop was a serious Christian and his use of the city on a hill image was explicitly covenantal — he was describing a community making solemn promises to God, modeling themselves on the covenant people of Israel. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” he wrote, “the eyes of all people are upon us.”
Even this application stretched the original. Jesus was addressing his disciples as a called-out community of the kingdom, not a colonial settlement. But Winthrop at least maintained the covenantal framework — the obligations, the accountability, the explicit relationship to God.
What happened over the following centuries was a gradual stripping away. The covenantal content faded. The religious obligations disappeared. What remained was the exceptionalism — the sense of special destiny and divine favor — without the accountability that originally went with it. By the time Ronald Reagan made “city on a hill” a signature of his rhetoric in the 1980s, it had been thoroughly transformed into a declaration of national greatness. The warning was gone. The demanding ethics of the Sermon on the Mount were gone. What was left was a gleaming self-image. In recent decades, this has become even more glaring, with mantras of “making America great again” but not defining what that greatness looks like from Jesus’ perspective.
This is how theological language becomes civil religion. Not through outright rejection, but through slow subtraction — until the words remain but the substance has quietly departed.
Why This Costs Us Something
The misapplication is not merely an academic problem. It carries real consequences for how American Christians understand themselves and their calling.
First, it conflates two fundamentally different things: the church and the nation-state. Jesus was not addressing a government. He was not describing a political arrangement. He was calling a community of disciples into a particular way of life. When we transfer that language to the United States, we blur a distinction that matters enormously — between the kingdom of God and any earthly nation, however good its aspirations.
Second, it smuggles in chosenness without obligation. In the biblical frame, being visible carries risk. The light can be hidden, the salt can spoil. American civil religion tends to use the image as a declaration of what America already is, rather than as a challenge to what it might become. That shift from aspiration to assertion is the move where things go wrong.
Third — and most painfully — the rhetoric has historically served to paper over profound moral failures. The language of being a city on a hill coexisted for centuries with the enslavement of African Americans, the violent displacement of indigenous peoples, and racial injustice. A metaphor that survives that kind of dissonance without forcing genuine reckoning has been emptied of its prophetic content. It is functioning as myth, not truth-telling.
And when this mythology shapes our prayers, the problem deepens. What we pray forms us. If we are praying for America as God’s uniquely favored nation — rather than praying for the church to be a faithful, costly witness within America — we are asking for something quite different from what Jesus described. We may be, without intending to, praying for the reinforcement of national self-confidence rather than the repentance and transformation the actual Sermon on the Mount demands.
A Road Not Taken: Roger Williams
There is another early American figure worth recovering in this conversation, one who offers a different Christian vision for life together in a pluralist society.
Roger Williams arrived in Massachusetts in 1631 — just one year after Winthrop’s famous sermon. He was, if anything, more theologically intense than the Puritan establishment. But his convictions led him in a radically different direction. He rejected the conflation of civil and spiritual authority not because he didn’t care about God, but precisely because he did. He believed that forcing religious conformity through state power corrupted both the church and the civil order. The church must be free to be itself, which meant it could not be propped up by political power.
In 1636, Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay — exiled from the very colony Winthrop’s sermon was meant to inspire — and founded what became Rhode Island on a different set of principles: genuine religious liberty, separation of church and state, and a pluralism that welcomed Catholics, Jews, and Quakers when almost no one else would. He learned the Narragansett language, built relationships of genuine respect with indigenous peoples, and negotiated rather than simply displacing them.
Williams was not a secularist. He was a deeply committed Christian who believed that the integrity of Christian witness required the church to stand on its own — not on state power, not on national mythology, not on the conflation of the kingdom of God with any earthly political project.
He lost the argument in his own time. Winthrop’s vision, not Williams’, became the dominant template for American Christian identity. But Williams’ alternative has never entirely disappeared, and it may be more urgently needed now than ever. I find Williams’ vision compelling and one that needs to be recovered.
Recovering the Real Vision
None of this means that Christians cannot love their country, or hope for it, or work for its flourishing. There is a legitimate aspirational use of the city on a hill image — a challenge to live up to the best of our stated ideals, to be a society that genuinely protects the vulnerable and pursues justice. That is worth praying for and working toward.
But that is different from the assertion that America is already God’s chosen instrument — a claim that requires us to look away from too much, and that gives Christian identity over to national identity in ways that compromise both.
As the 250th anniversary approaches, the church has a choice. We can add our voices to the chorus of national self-congratulation, wrapping the flag in the Sermon on the Mount and calling it faithfulness. Or we can do something harder and more honest: ask whether we actually look like the people Jesus was describing. Whether our common life — across racial, economic, and political lines — is genuinely visible as something different from the culture around us.
Not a witness that baptizes whatever America already is, but one that embodies something the nation cannot produce on its own: the costly, humble, reconciling community that the Beatitudes describe.
A community that loves its enemies. That cares for those on the margins. That tells the truth about its own failures. That looks less like a superpower and more like the people Jesus was talking to on that hillside.
That is the city on a hill worth building.
For Reflection and Discussion
- When you hear the phrase “city on a hill” used in a patriotic or religious context — especially as the 250th anniversary approaches — what images and assumptions does it bring up for you? How does that compare to the community Jesus describes in the Beatitudes: the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, those who mourn?
- Jesus’ image of light and salt carries a warning alongside the calling — salt can lose its saltiness, light can be hidden. What would it look like for the American church to take that conditionality seriously? What might genuine accountability look like for us as a community of faith?
- Roger Williams and John Winthrop were both serious Christians wrestling with what faithful public life should look like. Which vision feels more familiar to you from your own tradition? Which one challenges you more, and why?
- Where do you see the church in America functioning as a genuine “city on a hill” in Jesus’ sense — costly, countercultural, visible through care for the vulnerable and the outsider? Where do you see us falling short, and what is the cost of that gap?
- Prayer forms us — what we ask for shapes what we see, what we expect, and what we’re willing to examine. Reflect honestly: are the prayers you pray for this nation more aligned with God’s agenda as revealed in Scripture, or with the interests and self-image of the culture we’re embedded in? What might it look like to reorient our prayers away from national self-interest and toward the kind of witness Jesus actually described?