On the second day of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in January 2020, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff invoked President Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” He rebuked Trump for conduct in office that threatened America’s historic role as a model of democracy to the world. “America is not just a country,” he warned, “but also an idea.” Schiff’s deployment of the words that Reagan borrowed from Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop show the surprising resilience of a metaphor that no Puritan 400 years ago could have imagined would be used to project American exceptionalism. Trump himself never used it to define “America First.”
Van Engen’s work joins a body of scholarship that has reconstructed the strange journey of the “city on a hill” from an obscure lay sermon to a mainstay of modern presidential rhetoric. Van Engen builds on Gamble’s In Search of the...