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Promise to His Plantation.” If that Winthrop-Cotton double bill is true, the only thing that would make the program a more exceptional event in the history of American exceptionalism is if Theodore Roosevelt showed up to conduct a brassy version of “America the Beautiful” performed by the United States Marine Corps Band.
    Wherever Winthrop wrote or delivered “Christian Charity,” it is up for debate. This isn’t: at the time, nobody cared. Winthrop’s biographer, Francis J. Bremer, notes that
    not a single individual recorded in letter, diary, or other source having heard Winthrop deliver the sermon. The only contemporary reference to the sermon that survives is the Reverend Henry Jessey’s request that John Winthrop Jr. send him copies of a number of papers relating to the colony, including “the Model of Charity.” Whereas Cotton’s farewell was published soon after it was delivered, “Christian Charity” was not. Indeed, only one contemporary manuscript copy of Winthrop’s work survives, and it is not in his handwriting.
    When Bremer says the sermon is not mentioned in any diary, he is including Winthrop’s own journal. No I killed with my charity bit on the Lido Deck tonight to be found.
    Bremer and others contend that Winthrop’s sermon didn’t make much of a splash at the time because the governor wasn’t saying anything the average Puritan hadn’t heard in many a fortnight.
    Reading Cotton’s “God’s Promise to His Plantation” alone hints that dissenting English Protestants had plenty of we’re-God’s-special-chosen-people talk to go around. So maybe Winthrop co-opting the image of a city on a hill from the Gospel of Matthew was just one more metaphor for the pile. Maybe that was the hill the city would be built on—a teetering stack of self-congratulatory biblical comparisons.
    “Christian Charity” begins: “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.”
    Winthrop couldn’t know that overturning what he just said would become the definition of the American dream. Compare his hard, cold fact that “some must be rich, some poor” to the shocking second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, written 146 years later: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” By 1776, the Creator seems to have learned to delegate some of His authority to His creations.
    In 1630, however, the truth that all men are created equal is far from self-evident. Winthrop is saying the opposite—that God created all men unequal. To Winthrop, this is a good thing, especially since he’s in charge. The beauty of this inequity, he claims, is “that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.” To a modern reader, this social theory smacks of “I need you to mow my lawn and you need me not to report you to Immigration.” But to Winthrop, the societal food chain is more sentimental. More than anything, “A Model of Christian Charity” is a declaration of de pendence.
    One of his shipmates on the Arbella, budding poet Anne Bradstreet, would echo Winthrop’s sentiment later on to the extent that it might be proof that someone on the boat actually heard him. She wrote, “As it is with countries, so it is with men: there was never yet any one man that had all excellences,” and so “he stands in need of something which another man hath. . . . God will have us beholden one to another.”
    Because of the “city upon a hill” sound bite, “A Model of Christian Charity” is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian