Amid the Cold War in the 1950s, the Harvard intellectual historian Perry Miller pointed to an obscure 1630 sermon by the Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, A model of Christian charity, as the foundation for understanding America's ideals and principles. Before the Cold War, few scholars (and no politicians) had paid any attention to the sermon. In the book under review Abram Van Engen explores how and why one simple phrase in Winthrop's sermon – ‘we shall be as a city upon a hill’ – became the keystone to the myth of American exceptionalism in the twentieth century. The history of Winthrop's sermon, Van Engen argues, reveals the way national stories take shape and how they continue to inform competing visions of America.

Van Engen's first three chapters examine the origins of Winthrop's sermon and its meaning in its historical context. Because it was so obscure and no one published or preserved the original (Winthrop did not even mention it in his private diary), the earliest extant copy of the sermon, housed in the New York Historical Society, is a copy of the original manuscript and possibly a copy of a copy. ‘Winthrop's sermon was so thoroughly unknown’, Van Engen explains, ‘that no one even knew it was lost’ (p. 59). He turns to the 1560 Geneva Bible, which Winthrop used, to help explain the sermon's original meaning. In contrast to the seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Church which envisioned itself to be ‘the city’ on a hill, Puritans had a far more local and particular understanding of the meaning of the true Church. The central point of Winthrop's sermon was not the specific role of New England or America. Instead, it called for constructing models of Christian charity wherever the godly gathered and practised their faith freely. ‘Liberty’, for the Puritans, was not based on the modern conceptions of civil and religious freedom but rather on people's ability to do what they believed to be morally right without civil interference.

In chapters iv through vi, Van Engen describes how Winthrop's sermon languished in obscurity for nearly two hundred years before its discovery by nineteenth-century antiquarians seeking to elevate New England to a central role in America's history, while further diminishing the part that Native Americans had played.

Chapters vii through ix explore the changing nature and role of national identity in the early nineteenth century. A wide variety of observers, including Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835–40), Lyman Beecher's Plea for the West (1835), Emma Willard's history of the United States, or republic of America (1828) and George Bancroft's History of the United States (1834), offered an explanation of America's unique national identity. It was not Native Americans, Jamestown colonists or even Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans who played the central role in defining the emerging national narrative. Instead, this honour belonged to the Pilgrims who settled Plymouth. In a speech celebrating Plymouth's bicentennial in 1820, for instance, Daniel Webster venerated the Pilgrims as republicans who brought a coherent set of principles for both civil and religious life to America.

In chapters x to xii Van Engen discusses the critical role that antiquarians and historical societies had in further nurturing a national identity centring around an Anglo-Saxon lineage rooted in ‘Puritan blood’. Although the New England Historical Society printed Winthrop's sermon for the first time in 1838, the Mayflower Compact was still deemed to be more important because it was used to draw a straight line from the Pilgrims to the US Constitution. At this time, A model of Christian charity was just another Puritan sermon among the large number of documents being recovered and reprinted every year.

Chapters xiii through xvii unravel the various factors that helped to elevate Winthrop's sermon out of obscurity. Van Engen credits Perry Miller with making it the ur-text of American exceptionalism. As the United States fought the Cold War with the Soviets, Miller pointed to the radical community solidarity of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans as articulated in Winthrop's sermon as the heart of the nation's purpose. Although personally an atheist, Miller deeply admired the Puritans’ belief in God because they took ideas seriously and those beliefs informed their sense of communal purpose. To Miller, Winthrop's sermon provided an antidote to the consumerism, complacency, individualism and anti-intellectualism that he feared imperiled the nation. Unlike the Pilgrims, Miller argued, the Puritans were a united community of intellectually-gifted preachers and politicians who had a coherent ideology and a serious purpose. So intent was Miller on making Winthrop's sermon central to the Puritans’ mission and consequently the nation's founding that he even falsely claimed that the sermon had been printed in the 1630s. Almost overnight, Winthrop's sermon was canonised as one of the nation's key texts. For example, the 1979 edition of the influential Norton anthology of American literature made Winthrop's sermon its opening chapter. Meanwhile, numerous scholars, most importantly Sacvan Bercovitch, and politicians, starting with John F. Kennedy and especially Ronald Reagan, cited Winthrop's sermon to justify their particular understanding of American exceptionalism. According to Van Engen, Donald Trump's ‘America First’ thesis represents a categorical rejection of American exceptionalism for several reasons. Not only does he assume that all countries are the same, but America's greatness is merely defined by its material wealth, not its bedrock values, such as democracy, religious liberty, free enterprise, diversity, human dignity or self-government. To Trump, it is ‘a dangerous idea’ (p. 281) when America tries to make democracies out of countries with no experience or interest in embracing western ideas. Consequently, he insists that the whole world will improve if every nation maintains its sovereignty and becomes more, not less, self-interested. Van Engen concludes that it is unclear, however, if Trump's ‘America First’ thesis will end the popularity of Winthrop's sermon and mark the death of American exceptionalism.

A city on a hill is an impressive piece of scholarship. The work not only offers a sweeping intellectual history of the idea of American exceptionalism, but it also offers numerous astute insights into how and why its meaning changed over the past four centuries. Van Engen's explanation of the history of Winthrop's manuscript will likely require many historians to revise their use of the sermon in their lectures. His exploration of the crucial role that nineteenth-century antiquarians and historical societies played in developing a national narrative is also brilliant. Equally insightful are his chapters on the work of Miller and Bercovitch as well as his careful exegesis of Trump's rejection of American exceptionalism. In short, A city on a hill is an exceptional contribution to American history.