City Upon a Hill
John Winthrop states in his famous Christian sermon, “We shall be as a city upon a hill.” He was actually referring to the metaphor of Salt and Light in the Sermon on the Mount from the Book of Matthew in the Bible. It was meant to inspire within the Puritans a sense of duty to be the pious and devoutly holy people that God had intended them to be. Winthrop wanted the Puritans to come into a covenant with God, in order to purify Christianity in the New World, hopefully in order to inspire those in England to repent, change their ways, and to reform their old churches from the model that the Puritans had set.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony reached this objective, but perhaps not in the way that they intended. What Winthrop meant by this statement was that the world would watch the experimental colony under a microscope. They certainly were watched and scrutinized by everyone. However, they eventually all ended up looking like a group of self-absorbed, religious zealots that were only concerned with the fate of their own colony. They sought perfect order and harmony within their communities, which only led to ostracizing those who did not comply with their ideas. For example, no one was allowed to live alone (for fear of inviting sin into their lives) and church attendance was mandatory.
The Massachusetts Bay Colonies survived by being devoutly religious and only concerned with the way that their religious colony functioned. They punished those that not only disobeyed God’s commands, but even those religious leaders who were supposedly ordained by God.
