Month: August 2015

Vanity Fair, John Winthrop and “a city upon a hill”

Aimlessly leafing through the August issue of Vanity Fair, not even we at the HP could have been expecting to see John Winthrop’s name come up, but such is the power of myth.

In an article on the nature of the political debate over the middle class in America, the author (Michael Kinsley) referred to a speech the then-governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, gave in 1984 in which he lambasted then-President Reagan for ignoring the poor by talking about “two cities”, one rich, one poor. The author said this:

Cuomo’s ‘two cities’ imagery was a poke at Reagan, turning of of his favorite lines against him. In almost every speech he gave, it seemed, Reagan would refer to America as “a shining city upon a hill”, meaning an example for the rest of the world. Reagan got that from the Puritan preacher John Winthrop (though probably not directly). What Winthrop had in mind was a moral example, the but metaphor works on many levels.

Kinsley clearly did not get his information about John Winthrop directly from any historical source, as Winthrop was not a “preacher” at all, but a political leader who was elected many times to be the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony between its founding in 1630 and his death in 1649. It’s a little tricky, perhaps; the line “a city upon a hill” comes from a sermon Winthrop wrote while the Puritans were still on their sea voyage to the New World. The final section of that sermon is the section we set apart and study as the “City upon a Hill” speech.

Why would Winthrop write a sermon if he wasn’t a minister? Because the Puritans held four things very dear: reading the Bible, attending sermons, engaging in conference, and lay prophesying.

Each of these, in that order, was key to opening up one’s soul and consciousness enough to become aware of one’s own salvation (if it existed—but that’s another long story we cover here). The first two are clear; the third, conference, was just  talking with other people who were seeking religious light about what you read in the Bible and what you heard in sermons. The Puritans were extremely social, and their religion was founded on the idea that you must put your heads together—no one person could ever get as far in understanding God’s will as a group could. The Puritans needed and relied on each other for support during the difficult and, in England, the dangerous process of following their religion.

That’s exactly what Winthrop is talking about in the City on a Hill section of his sermon. Go read it here. It is an exhortation to the people to support and love and help each other, to put others first and self last.

So that is what conference meant to the people Winthrop was leading to America, and he was giving a sermon to them as part of conference. One of the striking innovations of the Puritan reform of Anglicanism was that every church got to hire its own minister. In most churches, there is a governing body—bishops, archbishops, pope, whoever it may be—that assigns a minister or priest to a church. The people have no say. But the Puritans said each congregation was independent—no overall, hierarchical governing body could tell it what to do. (That’s why in America they came to call themselves Congregationalists.) If a congregation could not agree on a minister, they went without one until they found one they could agree on. And if there was a shortage of good, reformed ministers, a congregation waited without one until one became available.

In the meantime, the deacons of the congregation preached and did everything the minister would except give communion. That was one of only two sacraments recognized by Puritans, and it had to be done by a minister. Having lay people lead the church was called lay prophesying. It could and did happen even after a minister was found, as members of the congregation were encouraged to share their light during and after church services.

The people crossing the Atlantic had not chosen a minister yet. So they asked their most important lay leader, John Winthrop, to preach them a sermon in the meantime. And he did such a masterful job that it has come down to us through the centuries. Once the people landed in Fall 1630, Winthrop and other lay leaders chose John Wilson to be the teacher of First Church in Boston. (Every Puritan church that could afford to pay them had both a teacher and a minister. Roughly, the minister was the administrative leader of the church who represented the church in meetings with other ministers and with the government; he also visited members of the congregation and gave them spiritual advice. The teacher was the scholar who wrote and preached sermons and published them, as well as other theological works.) Wilson served the church on his own until John Cotton was called as minister in 1632.

So that’s why Winthrop preached a sermon even though he wasn’t a minister. He was engaging in conference with other believers and lay prophesying. To go back to our Vanity Fair article, Winthrop was indeed talking about setting a good example in Massachusetts, but not in the pompous way implied in the article (“a moral example”). He wanted the people to treat each other well so that they would receive God’s blessing, and once they had done this, others would see the blessings that God gave to those who serve him and do the same. But most of all, when Winthrop said “we will be as a city upon a hill” he meant that any failures would be painfully visible to all—he might as well have said “we shall be as a city within a fishbowl”. All previous English colonies in North America had failed (Roanoke) or were failing (Plimoth [too small], Jamestown [small and wretched and chaotic]). The Massachusetts Bay Colony was being watched by all, particularly Spain and France, to see if it too would fail.

The stakes were high all around, then, when Winthrop gave his sermon; it became justly famous for urging people to find their best natures in a situation when people often did their worst. The least we can do is understand who Winthrop was and what he wanted for this new world.

The Tenth Amendment and a Bill of Rights wrap-up

It’s part the last of of our series on what’s in the Bill of Rights, and so of course we are discussing the Tenth Amendment. It’s the mirror image of the Ninth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Remember how the Ninth Amendment said that any right not listed in the previous eight Amendments of the Bill of Rights, or in the Constitution, is granted to the people? As we put it last time, a right has to be explicitly withheld by the Constitution for it to be unlawful. You can see why this was necessary to state: all the rights citizens have can’t be listed in any document; it could get to a thousand pages and still be incomplete. The Ninth Amendment keeps the federal government from getting tyrannical and withholding rights just because they are not specifically protected in the Constitution.

In mirror fashion, the Tenth Amendment says the opposite: every power of the federal government is listed in the Constitution. If a power is not “delegated to the United States by the Constitution”, it’s because the U.S. (federal government) does not have that power. The phrase “nor prohibited by it to the States” means powers given expressly to the state governments cannot be assumed by the federal government.

This is clearly meant to keep the bulk of the political powers and civil rights in this country in the hands of local governments (more directly controlled by the people) and individual citizens. It would seem to work perfectly to limit the federal government, if not for the lack of one word: expressly.

Originally, the Tenth Amendment said “The powers not expressly delegated to the United States”. This would mean powers literally described in the Constitution. You can read the Constitution and find them written there. When you take out the qualifier “expressly”, then you allow for interpretation of the Constitution rather than literal reading only. One might interpret the Constitution loosely, extrapolating meaning to grant the federal government powers that are not literally listed in the document.

This means that the Tenth Amendment does not override the “necessary and proper clause” in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which says that

The Congress shall have Power … To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

In other words, Congress (the federal government) can make any law it deems necessary to uphold and enforce the Constitution. There is a difference between a right and a law, of course: the NPC gives Congress the power to make any laws it sees fit, but not the right to violate the Constitution. Yet it is laws that more immediately impact individual citizens, and laws can violate our rights. Laws can be fought, but that can take many decades and sometimes many lives, and so the NPC has been held by some to negate the Tenth Amendment.

It’s a slightly hollow note to end our series on the Bill of Rights on, but it’s fitting that our final two posts sum up the fundamental, creational tension between local and federal rights that has shaped, damaged, and ennobled our government, depending on the case you examine.

Now that we have the entire Bill of Rights in hand, how would we sum it up? We see a mix of rights so well-expressed that we take them for granted (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to a trial by jury), rights that have been so loosely interpreted and re-interpreted as to lose all meaning (the right to bear arms, freedom of speech and religion), rights that have taken a beating from the modern world (the right against unreasonable search and seizure, the right to be free from quartering), and rights that are so flat-out violated at all times that it’s hard to believe no one cares (the right to a speedy trial, no excessive bail).

The important thing to remember, perhaps, is that the Bill of Rights is elastic in one sense, demanding re-interpretation as times change, but inelastic in another: it requires an educated public to uphold and enforce it.