In Search of the City on a Hill

On October 11, 2011, George Stephanopoulos, former Clinton adviser and current anchor of ABC's Good Morning America, hosted an event in Philadelphia cosponsored by the Ford Foundation and Georgetown University. He called the forum "A More Perfect Union: A Dialogue on American Values." The forum's ten participants included Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, oldest daughter of Robert Kennedy. Townsend served as the first female lieutenant governor of Maryland, and she currently works as a lawyer, author, teacher, and social activist. Stephanopoulos posed a series of questions to Townsend before the event and posted her answers on his blog at ABC News.

Asked if she believed that "Americans hold a set of shared values," Townsend named "respect" and "responsibility" as essential to the character formation of any child. And for nurturing public life, she added the ideal of "individualism." By individualism, she quickly clarified, she did not mean the radical autonomy promoted by Ayn Rand, but rather "faith in a fair society so that people who study diligently, work hard, are honorable and truthful, and play by the rules can rely on a secure future for themselves and their family." "You can't succeed simply by coming from the right family or religion or ethnic group," she cautioned, perhaps thinking of her own Irish Catholic roots. This enduring vision of a "fair society" comprised the "civic faith" that "makes America exceptional, a shining city on a hill." At the end of this online Q&A Townsend invoked the famous biblical metaphor. "The vision of a city on a hill inspired both John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan," she recalled. "It wasn't an 'I' on a hill, but a city, with an inclusive, effective government and lots of different people working at many different jobs while caring for our parents, our children, and those too sick to care for themselves."¹

A regular online contributor for the Atlantic, Townsend invoked the city on a hill back in June to contrast her father's communitarian values with Ronald Reagan's defense of individualism. She wrote approvingly of Reagan's record of "public engagement" and his vision of the "shining city." But, she regretted, "Reagan is remembered . . . not for any detailed description of how to actually build that city, but for his anti-government rhetoric. He conflated freedom with unfettered markets, and his legacy was a glorification of private wealth over the public good."²

Townsend's book Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way (Grand Central Publishing, 2007) traces the modern progressivism she admires back to theEnglish Puritans and specifically to John Winthrop and his "Model of Christian Charity." (For those of you who took an American history survey course decades ago, John Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He sailed from England to the New World in the spring of 1630 aboard the Arbella and during the voyage wrote a discourse known popularly as the "Model of Christian Charity." The document remained unpublished, unquoted, and virtually unknown among the Winthrop family papers for nearly 200 years.) Townsend's understanding of the governor's shipboard discourse seems secondhand at best, but the lesson she draws from his lay sermon is telling: "The Puritans were not looking to retreat from the world. They were looking to fulfill it." She praises them for their "extroverted" vision of social justice, manifest in their concern for the "common good." Winthrop's words were "those of the Hebrew prophets." "The sins the Puritans sought to purify the church of," she continues, overlooking matters of doctrine, forms of worship, and church governance, "were selfishness, greed, and neglect of the less fortunate." She then quotes Winthrop's famous plea to his fellow colonists: "We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together."³ Townsend was raised a Catholic, and yet she finds it possible to praise these Puritans for launching the "tradition of protest" that in her judgment makes America what it is, along with the ideal of equality added by the First Great...