What we get wrong about ‘a city on hill’

How fares America in the eyes of the world?

Not well.

In the Pew Research Center’s most recent multinational poll, almost as many respondents (43 percent) held an unfavorable view of the United States as a favorable one (50 percent). Many more people think it is “bad” that American ideas and customs are spreading into their country than “good.” American ideas about democracy are disliked more than they are admired, not only in autocratic societies but also in the world’s other democracies. And the negatives are growing.

These trends should make Americans uneasy. But many Americans will be upset for the wrong reason: because they have imbibed a historical myth about the United States. That myth — that America was specially chosen to be the moral leader of the world — has contributed to an unrealistic and self-absorbed sense of themselves and the world around them.

The myth allegedly originated on the flagship of the Puritan expedition to New England where, in words which would become a household expression centuries later, Gov. John Winthrop exhorted his fellow voyagers that they would be “as a city upon a hill” in America. The “eyes of all people” would be upon them; they would be a magnet for the world’s imagination. Moral leadership of the globe, Winthrop is said to have announced, belonged to Americans by their very birthright.

Although it is widely known now, the story is a fable invented centuries after the fact. And it is a myth that distorts Winthrop’s words in ways that are crucial to remember when so much of the world has doubts about the United States. ...