I wasn't in any way claiming that Winthrop was other than he is--he was a
man of his time rather than ours, and even to call him conservative in our
terms is anachronistic. However, the passage I quoted is from later in the
same sermon. There is a clearly-expressed sense of a common effort with
solicitude for each other, whatever the result--in contrast to the
policies, at least, of those who misquote him.

About half the population of Massachussets Bay went back to England when
the Commonwealth was established.

Mark


At 09:23 AM 6/12/2004, cris cheek wrote:
>Hi Mark,
>
>well your posting of John Winthrop's 'city on a hill' has certainly
>stirred up some debate;) I thank you for it, whilst I confess that I'd
>never read that passage so closely heretofore. I write from the old world.
> From Suffolk, which county provided the largest of those who sailed with
>the Massachusetts Bay Company that Winthrop was a leader of in 1630 (a
>decade after the Pilgrim Fathers from Plymouth that was just over a decade
>after the wreck of the 'Sea-Venture', also sailing from Plymouth to
>Virginia, blown off course to Bermuda and the subject of a fascinating
>alternative narrative in Linebaugh and Rediker's 'The Many-Headed Hydra
>which I would urge you to read).
>
>Winthrop's motivations for sailing to the 'new world' were mixed;
>presumably they who sailed alongside him were also, including long-term
>fallout from Tudor enclosures (possibly), pioneer spirit, business
>opportunism, the dystopian allure of tabula rasa, those whose land hunger
>was not satisfied . . .
>
>I quote from The Winthrop Fleet of 1630 by Charles Edward Banks
> published Boston 1930:
>
>'By the summer of 1629, Winthrop had practically decided to throw in his
>lot with the Massachusetts Bay Company. His reasons as stated in his
>family letters were the constantly increasing expenses of a grown and
>growing family with no prospects of additional income and the urgency of
>the stockholders in the Company that he undertake the leadership of the
>organization. 'If he lett pass this opportunitie,' he recorded on a personal
>memorandum, 'that talent which God hath bestowed uppon him for publicke
>service is like to be buried.' Whether this pessimistic view of his
>chances of development and success at home was justified is an
>unanswerable question, but it is clear that his decision was based on
>material rather than spiritual grounds. He said nothing that indicates
>his dissatisfaction with the Established Church.'
>
>That's of interest. John was the son of the 'lord' of a small estate. He
>studied law, enabling him to settle landlord-tenant dispute, collect rents
>and so forth. He was a land owner and land manager. But he'd also become a
>Puritan (I can't resist the image of Michael Clarke dancing to The Fall's
>'Hail the New Puritan' as I type that word) with its attendant pious
>baggage. I too have a secular mind (although there a Methodist boyhood),
>so whilst I can to an extent understand Christianity and Islam
>intellectually I cannot understand belief in one God (other than perhaps
>in a pantheist or animist sense) one iota. Anyway in Winthrop we have a
>Puritan Christian (with at least 11 servants) land-owning lawyer, who
>feared missing his opportunity to exercise leadership and as Christopher
>Hill writes 'believed that God was abandoning England'. Hmmm.
>
>Joseph Schafer argues that:
>
>'as the Church grew more politicized and hostile to Puritan ideas, it
>became clear to John that there was little or nothing he could do to
>reform the Church from within. He did not want to start a war that he
>could never win. Also, his son Henry became somewhat rebellious, and John
>began to worry that he might lose his children to the godless popular
>culture. At the age of forty-two, after a painful struggle, John decided
>that the only real choice was for him to take his family and move away
>from England. Rather than fighting political battles with the authorities,
>he would quietly move away to a new land where he could worship God freely
>and raise his children in an environment of faith. . . At that time, John
>Winthrop wrote an essay that laid out the main reasons why sincere
>Christians should consider moving to the New World. The first four reasons
>were: 1. To carry the gospel to the New World, to bring the fullness of
>the Gentiles into the kingdom of God. 2. To escape God's judgement that
>was coming upon the corrupt churches of Europe. 3. To help solve the
>problems of overpopulation and poverty in England, where human life was
>being devalued and people were regarded as less valuable than horses and
>sheep. 4. To obey the Great Commission and Genesis 1:28, which says, "Be
>fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it."'
>
>Mark if you have access to the other reasons I would dearly love to read
>those too. You know I begin not to read WInthrop's 'city on a hill' (don't
>you just love that indefinite article?) as running away from Winstanley's
>later vision of the communalist Digger Commonwealth, with earth as a
>common treasury for all. So I'll take that back. In particular when I read
>later from The Arbella Covenantor "A Modell of Christian Charity" (1630)
>
>'God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of
>the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor;
>some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection.
>First, to hold conformity with rest of His works, ... Secondly, that He
>might have the more occasion to manifest the work of His spirit, ...
>Thirdly, that every man might have need of other, ... All men thus (by
>divine providence) ranked into two sorts, rich and poor, under the first
>are comprehended all such as are able to live comfortably by their own
>means duly improved, and all others are poor, according to the former
>distribution. There are two rules whereby we are to walk, one toward
>another; justice and mercy. ... There is likewise a double law by which we
>are regulated in our conversation, one towards another; in both the former
>respects, the law of nature and the law of grace, or the moral law of the
>Gospel. (1) For the persons, we are a company professing ourselves fellow
>members of Christ; (2) the care of the public must oversway all private
>respects by which not only conscience but mere civil policy doth bind us;
>(3) the end is to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord, the
>comfort and increase of the body of Christ whereof we are members; (4) for
>the means whereby this must be effected, they are twofold: a conformity
>with the work and the end we aim at. ... Thus stands the cause between God
>and us: we are entered into covenant with Him for this work; we have taken
>out a commission, the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles,
>... if we shall neglect the observation of these articles ... the Lord
>will surely break out in wrath against us. ... Therefore, let us choose
>life, that we, and our seed may live; by obeying. His voice and cleaving
>to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity.'
>
>His economics looks less like a commonwealth then, more a version of
>trickle-down. Certainly not a form of socialism. The basis upon which the
>rich and the poor 'walk, one toward another' are the dispensations of
>justice and mercy assembled under the aegis of 'the law of nature and the
>law of grace, or the moral law of the Gospel'. If one doesn't share that
>God one is evidently in trouble. His model doesn't account for equity in
>the sense of any dissolution of the boundary between rich and poor. It is
>already a profoundly and radically conservative vision.
>
>Combine that with Winthrop's apparent authoritarian tropes, made against
>him by his peers and the ingredients are present for some justifications
>based upon access to the counsel of God that rudely mirror the equating
>between Sovereign between King and Godhead l8r clung to by Charles as the
>Civil War broke out.
>
>Furthermore I don't get any sense of city as in conurbation from Winthrop.
>He's a country boy and he formulates community along the lines of English
>rural classes in the 16th and 17th centuries.
>
>love and love
>cris
>
>
>On 10 Jun 2004, at 18:14, Mark Weiss wrote:
>
>>In the morass of pious hypocricy with which we're all being bathed, at
>>least in the US, one speaker after another has quoted John Winthrop's great
>>sermon aboard the Arabella, flagship of the Puritan fleet, as it lay at
>>anchor in what would become Boston harbor. There's a long tradition behind
>>this, and behind the conflation of what Winthrop actually meant (it's right
>>there in the words) and the rhetoric of the New Jerusalem, so that the city
>>upon a hill has become the shining city upon the hill. Winthrop used the
>>phrase not as a hope but a warning--that there will be no place to hide. I
>>present the pertinent paragraph below. If we get past the god stuff what's
>>left doesn't read much like the commonwealth that Reagan or his heirs, all
>>of them first-class sons-of-bitches, had in mind--in fact, it sounds a lot
>>more like Eurosocialism. Winthrop, by the way, was one of the architects of
>>American genocide. But hell, he wrote well.
>>
>>Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity,
>>is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk
>>humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work,
>>as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be
>>willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of
>>others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all
>>meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each
>>other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together,
>>labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and
>>community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the
>>unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and
>>delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing
>>upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom,
>>power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We
>>shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able
>>to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and
>>glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it
>>like that of New England." For we must consider 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. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the
>>ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of
>>many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into
>>curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.
>>
>>
>>Mark