Blast From the Past: John Winthrop

by Michael Sean Winters

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October 22, 2010

Earlier this morning, in my post about Michael Gerson's article, I mentioned John Winthrop's "city on a hill" metaphor to which Ronald Reagan added the adjective "shining."

Of course, that city would not have been very "shining" for us Catholics if Winthrop had his way. Here, from 1629, he explains why so many of his fellow Puritans were prepared to set out for Massachusetts Bay:

It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospell into those parts of the world, to helpe on the comminge of the fullnesse of the Gentiles, and to raise a Bulwarke against the kingdome of Ante-Christ which the Jesuites labour to reare up in those parts.

So, the anti-Catholic, pro-Protestant biases of American culture are as old as American culture itself.