no shining city

chapter one

the lie we have been told

The American church has been told a story about itself, and it has believed the story so long and so deeply that to question it now feels almost like questioning the faith itself. The story goes like this: that America was founded as a Christian nation, by Christian men, upon Christian principles; that it is a new Israel, a people in special covenant with God; that it is the shining city set upon a hill, the light of the world, God’s appointed instrument to carry truth and freedom to the nations.

It is a stirring story. It has been preached from ten thousand pulpits, printed on banners, woven into the hymns of the civil religion, and pressed upon children until they could not tell where love of God ended and love of country began. There is only one trouble with it. It is not true. And I do not mean that it is partly overstated, or true in spirit if not in fact. I mean that when you go to the actual history, the documents, the dates, the words the founders actually wrote and the things they actually did, the story comes apart in your hands.

And someone has profited from the story being believed. The politician finds it useful to wrap himself in a holiness the facts will not support, for a people who believe their nation is God’s nation will follow the man who claims to defend it almost anywhere. And the church, for its part, was glad to believe it, because it is a flattering thing to be told that your country is the chosen one and you are its keepers. So the lie was useful to the one and pleasant to the other, and between them it has been kept alive for generations.

The lie was useful to the politician and pleasant to the church, and between them it has been kept alive for generations.

Now I want to be very careful here, for I am about to say hard things about a country I am thankful for, and I do not want to be misheard. God has used America. He has used it as a refuge for the persecuted, as a wellspring of missions, as a guardian of certain liberties that much of the world has never known. To be grateful for the land of your birth is right; to pray for it is commanded; to love it is no sin. I am not asking you to despise your country. I am asking you to stop worshiping it. For somewhere along the way, in the heart of the American church, the country crept up into a place that was never meant for it, and began to receive a kind of devotion that belongs to God alone. It became an idol, and an idol is simply a good thing, or a neutral thing, set in the place of God. The flag beside the cross, and then, slowly, in front of it. The hope of the kingdom quietly transferred to the hope of the nation. The shining city of God relocated, in the imagination, to a particular stretch of real estate between two oceans.

What follows means to break that idol, and to break it the way idols are best broken, not with rage but with the truth. So we will walk through the real history, plainly and without flinching: what America actually was at its founding, what the Puritans actually tried to build, what the founders actually believed, and where the famous phrases actually came from. And when the idol lies in pieces, I think you will find that your gratitude for the country is still standing, and that your hope has been set free to rest where it always belonged.

chapter two

rome 2.0

Begin with what the founders actually built, because it was not Jerusalem. It was Rome. The men who framed the American republic were steeped, not first of all in the Hebrew prophets, but in the classical world of Greece and Rome. They had been educated on Cicero and Livy and Plutarch. They admired the Roman Republic above almost any government that had ever existed, and when they set out to build, they built consciously and deliberately upon the Roman model, borrowing its very furniture and its very language.

Consider the evidence, which is hidden in plain sight all around us. They named the upper house of their legislature the Senate, after the Roman senatus. They raised their government upon a hill they named the Capitol, after the Capitoline Hill of Rome. When the authors of the Federalist Papers wished to defend the new constitution, they signed their essays Publius, after a Roman statesman of the early Republic. They put the eagle upon their seal. They stamped their coins and their seal with Latin mottoes, e pluribus unum, out of many, one, and novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. The very architecture of their capital was raised in the style of Roman temples, all columns and domes and porticoes, so that to walk through Washington even today is to walk through a Rome built of American marble.¹

Their heroes were Roman heroes. George Washington was hailed as a new Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer-general who took up power only to lay it down again and return to his plow; and the officers who served under Washington named their society the Society of the Cincinnati after that same Roman. This was not an accident of style. It was a confession of intent. They were not trying to build the New Jerusalem. They were trying to build a better Rome.²

They were not trying to build the New Jerusalem. They were trying to build a better Rome.

And here is the part that should give the Christian pause. The founders knew their Roman history well, and they meant to improve on it. They had studied where the Roman Republic went wrong, diagnosed the disease that had turned it into an empire and then a ruin, and engineered a cure. The separation of powers, the checks and balances, the careful division of authority so that no Caesar could ever again seize the whole: these were, they believed, the secret the Romans had missed, the flaw at last corrected. They thought they had cracked the code of the republic that the ancients could not crack.

But they had not. They had built another republic, and republics are mortal things. They rise, and they corrupt, and they fall, as surely as the men who run them are mortal and sinful. The American founders were brilliant men, and they built a remarkable machine, but it was a machine of the same kind as Rome’s, subject to the same disease, because the disease was never in the machinery. It was in the men. And no arrangement of offices and powers, however clever, has ever yet cured the human heart of what ails it.

The disease was never in the machinery. It was in the men.

So the first thing to see, as we break the idol, is this: America was not built as the kingdom of God. It was built as an improved Rome, with the philosophy of the Enlightenment bolted on, the rights theory of Locke, the separated powers of Montesquieu, fitted onto the old Roman frame. It is a noble machine. It is not the kingdom of God. And the men who built it never claimed it was; that claim was added later, by other hands, for other reasons.

chapter three

the puritans’ new israel

But the idol has an older root than the founding, and we must dig down to it. For more than a century before there was any United States, there came to these shores a people who did believe they were building something holy, and in their story we find both the origin of the shining city and a warning the church has never properly heeded.

The Puritans came to New England fleeing real persecution, and I will say plainly that the persecution they fled was wicked. No one should be hounded and jailed and ruined for the worship of God according to conscience, and what drove them across the ocean was a genuine cruelty. In fleeing it they showed real courage, and I will not say a word against them for crossing the sea. But watch closely what they did once they landed, for here the trouble begins.

They set out to build a new Israel. Not a metaphor; they meant it with a fair degree of literalness. They saw themselves as a covenant people, like the Israel of old, brought through the waters into a promised land. It was their governor, John Winthrop, who in 1630 preached the sermon that gave us the famous phrase, calling the colony a city upon a hill with the eyes of all the world upon it. They cast themselves as the new chosen nation in the new Canaan, and, in the darker logic of that same idea, they were capable of casting the peoples already in the land as the new Canaanites, to be driven out before the advancing covenant people.³

Now here is what the church must see in this, for it is the very heart of our subject. To try to build Israel, to take the unique, unrepeatable covenant God made with one ancient nation and to lay it upon a piece of New England soil and a company of English settlers, is not faith. It is the spirit of Babel. For what was Babel but men saying, let us build us a city, and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name? It is the impulse to construct the holy thing by human hands, to raise heaven up out of the earth by our own building, to seize for ourselves the city that God alone can give. The Puritans, for all their genuine piety, caught that spirit, the spirit that says we will build the kingdom here, ourselves, now.

It is the impulse to raise heaven up out of the earth by our own hands, to seize the city that God alone can give.

And the fruit of it was bitter, as the fruit of that spirit always is. A people who believe themselves a holy covenant nation, charged with keeping the land pure, will sooner or later turn to hunting impurity among themselves. It is no accident that this same world of New England Puritanism gave us, within a few generations, the horror of the Salem witch trials, neighbors accusing neighbors, the machinery of a holy commonwealth turned to the destroying of its own. I will not lay every Puritan sin at that one door, and there was much that was good and earnest among them. But the trials stand as a lasting warning of what happens when men set out to build God’s nation on the earth and to police its holiness with their own hands.⁴

The lesson is not that the Puritans were uniquely wicked; they were not. The lesson is that the attempt itself, the building of the new Israel, the raising of the shining city by human effort, is a counterfeit, and a dangerous one, however sincere the builders. We will see it again before we are done, for the same impulse that sent the Puritans to build a holy commonwealth would later send the American church across the oceans to remake the world in its own image. It is one spirit, wearing different clothes in different centuries. And it is not the Spirit of God.

chapter four

never a christian nation

Now we come to the plainest matter of fact in this whole study, and the one that most startles the believer who has never looked into it: the men who founded the United States were, for the most part, not Christians in any sense that the New Testament would recognize. The story that America was founded by devout believers upon devout belief does not survive a single honest afternoon in the historical record.

Many of the most prominent founders were not orthodox Christians at all, but men of the Enlightenment, Deists and rationalists and Unitarians, who believed in a distant Creator and admired the morality of Jesus while flatly denying His divinity, His miracles, and His resurrection. They did not, in the main, believe the gospel. They believed in reason, in nature’s God, in a tidy clockwork universe wound up and left to run.

Take Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. In his retirement Jefferson sat down with copies of the Gospels and a razor, and he literally cut out, sliced out with a blade, every miracle, every supernatural claim, every assertion of the divinity of Christ, and pasted together what was left into his own private volume. He kept the moral teachings and discarded the Son of God. In Jefferson’s gospel there is no water turned to wine, no healing of the blind, no raising of Lazarus, and at the end no resurrection; the stone is rolled across the tomb and the book simply stops. He called it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is the work of a man who admired Jesus as a teacher of ethics and rejected Him utterly as the risen Lord. This is the author of the Declaration, not a Christian, but a man who took a knife to the Word of God and cut out everything that made it good news.⁵

The author of the Declaration took a knife to the Word of God and cut out everything that made it good news.

But here is the deepest proof of all, and it does not rest on the private beliefs of any one man; it is written into the very architecture of the republic, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. If God had been founding a nation for Himself, He would not have built it the way America was built. We know this, because we have the one and only record of God actually founding a nation for Himself, and it looks nothing like the United States. When God established Israel, He did not hand them a religious liberty in which every man might worship as he pleased. He gave them a theocracy. He was their King. He gave them His law directly, commanded one exclusive worship of Himself alone, and forbade the gods of the nations on pain of death. There was no separation of the sacred from the civil, because He was Lord of both. That is what it looks like when God founds a nation.

Now look at what the founders built, and see how far it stands from that. They built religious liberty, so that a man might be a Christian or a Deist or a Jew or nothing at all and stand equal before the law. They built a wall between church and state, so that no one faith could command the nation’s worship. They wrote that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Whatever else you say about those arrangements, and there is much good to be said for them as a way of ordering a fallen and mixed society, they are the exact opposite of the way God ordered His own nation. A country founded to be God’s own would be a theocracy under His law, not a marketplace of religions under a neutral state. The founders, wise in their way, built the second thing and not the first, and in doing so they told us plainly what they were and were not building. They were not raising a new Israel. They knew better than the preachers who came after them and claimed they had.⁶

When God founded a nation for Himself, He gave a theocracy, not a religious liberty. America was built as the opposite. That is the tell.

And do not mistake this for a complaint against religious liberty. It is a mercy, in a fallen world, that the sword of the state is not handed to any church, our own included, for we have already seen at Salem what churches do with that sword. God Himself does not compel the worship He is owed in this age. He grants men a real freedom to refuse Him, to walk away, to build their clockwork universe and live as though He were not there. That freedom is genuine, and America’s founders, in their way, mirrored it. But mark this well, for it is the thing the whole civil religion forgets: that freedom to refuse God is a feature of this present age only, and it has an end. God gives men the liberty to reject Him now. He will not give it forever.

There is the end of all religious liberty, and it is not a ballot and not a marketplace of faiths. Every knee. Every tongue. The atheist’s and the Deist’s and the Caesar’s alongside the saint’s. On that day there is no separation of church and state, no freedom to refuse, no neutral ground to stand on; there is one King, openly, and every creature bowing, some in glad worship and some in the terror of a knee forced down at last before the Lord they spurned. That is the only truly Christian nation there will ever be, and no human hand will build it, and it does not arrive by an election. It arrives by the return of the King. America, with its liberties and its wall of separation, was never that nation and was never meant to be. It was a wise arrangement for governing sinners in the meantime, which is a good and useful thing, and an entirely different thing from the kingdom of God.

And the cherished stories offered to prove otherwise tend to dissolve when you press on them. The famous image of George Washington kneeling in prayer in the snow at Valley Forge, which hangs in so many churches and adorns so many calendars, is legend, not history; there is no reliable record that it ever happened, and it was popularized by a storyteller well after Washington’s death. Washington was a man of careful public religiosity and notably reticent private faith, who pointedly avoided the language of orthodox Christianity even on his deathbed. The devout founder of the pious tale is, on examination, very hard to find.⁷

And what of the phrases everyone quotes? One nation under God, they say, surely that is from the founding. It is not. The Pledge of Allegiance itself was not written until 1892, more than a century after the founding, and it was composed by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister who was also a socialist; and the words under God were not in it. Those two words were added only in 1954, within living memory, by an act of Congress signed in the depths of the Cold War, for the express purpose of distinguishing God-fearing America from the godless communism of the Soviet Union. The national motto In God We Trust, though it had appeared on some coins since the Civil War, was made the official motto of the United States only in 1956, in that very same Cold War season. The phrases the church points to as proof of a Christian founding are, on inspection, twentieth-century political inventions, not eighteenth-century confessions of faith.⁸

So let the fact stand plainly, for the breaking of the idol depends upon it: America was not a Christian nation by any stretch of the imagination. The closest thing that can honestly be said is that there were, for long stretches, a great many Christians in it, and that is true, and not nothing. But that is a very different claim, and the whole idol is built on blurring the two. A nation is not Christian because many of its people are, any more than a building is a church because Christians happen to work inside it. The founders did not establish a Christian state; several of them would have been horrified at the thought, and wrote so. The Christian nation was assembled later, out of selective quotation and invented tradition and Cold War politics, and sold to a church that wanted to buy it. It is a comfortable story. It is not a true one.

chapter five

no system will save you

Having seen that the nation is not the kingdom, turn now to the economic systems men build within their nations, for here too the Christian is forever being asked to pledge allegiance, to baptize one arrangement as God’s own and to damn the other as the devil’s. Capitalism or socialism: choose your savior. And here too I want to be honest on both sides, and refuse to hand you the easy partisan answer, because the truth does not sit as neatly on either side as the partisans wish.

There is real biblical truth woven into the case for capitalism, and we should say so. The Scripture honors work and the fruit of one’s labor; it warns plainly that if any would not work, neither should he eat. It assumes the right to property, for the commandment Thou shalt not steal means nothing if a man may not truly own what is his, and Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house assumes the house is genuinely the neighbour’s. Personal responsibility, honest industry, the dignity of earning, these are not inventions of greedy men; they are written into the Word.

But there is real biblical truth woven into the other side as well, and the honest Christian must say that too. For the same Scripture commands, again and again, the care of the widow and the orphan, the poor and the stranger, and not merely as private sentiment but as a binding social structure. The law of Moses commanded the farmer to leave the corners of his field unharvested and the gleanings ungathered, that the poor might come and take them. It commanded the forgiveness of debts every seventh year, and in the year of Jubilee the return of the land to the families who had lost it, a sweeping, built-in leveling against the permanent piling-up of wealth in a few hands. Bear ye one another’s burdens, says the apostle, and so fulfil the law of Christ. There is a deep communal obligation in the Scripture, a holding of goods loosely and a sharing toward need, that the worshipers of the free market would rather not look at directly.

So the Scripture protects property and commands radical generosity; it honors work and obligates the care of those who cannot work; it treats the man as responsible before God and treats the community as a body whose members belong to one another. Neither modern system captures that, because each modern system has seized one half of the truth and called it the whole. And so the Christian cannot, in honesty, baptize either one. He can find his own convictions echoed in pieces of both, and he can recognize the idolatry lurking in the pure form of each.

And the systems share a common fate, which is the deepest thing to be said about them: both of them fall. History shows it plainly. Socialism tends to fall faster, for it levels a whole people down toward poverty with remarkable speed, choking the very industry that feeds a nation until the shelves are bare. Capitalism lasts longer, but it falls too, for left to run without restraint it concentrates wealth into fewer and fewer hands, until the disparity grows so monstrous that the many rise against the few and the whole order is overturned in revolution, as the old aristocracies of Europe learned to their sorrow. The one collapses quickly into shared poverty; the other festers slowly toward upheaval. But both collapse.

Godless capitalism is just as evil as godless socialism.

And why? Why does every economic system devised by man eventually crumble? For the same reason every government does. Because no system can regenerate a human heart. You may arrange the incentives however you please; you may distribute the goods by the market or by the state; but greed, envy, sloth, and cruelty are not created by the wrong economic arrangement and cannot be cured by the right one. They live in the human heart, and they travel intact into every system man builds. The fall was never in the structure. It was in us. And no structure, capitalist or socialist or any other, has ever once cast the sin out of the men who live inside it. That is a work only the gospel does, one heart at a time, and it is not the work of any government or any market, and never will be.

chapter six

money and power

Now I must tell you plainly where I stand on the politics of all this, and I will mark it clearly as my own conviction, not as a command of God binding upon you. You are free to disagree with everything in this chapter and lose nothing of your standing with the Lord or with me.

Here it is, then, without ornament. I have come to believe that politics, as it is actually practiced, is very largely about money and power, and that the men and women who climb to the top of it are, in the main, corrupt, whatever flag or slogan they wave. I do not say this of one party. I say it of the whole enterprise. The two great parties perform a fierce and noisy combat for the crowds, and behind the curtain they feed at the same trough; they quarrel loudly over the things that divide their voters and agree quietly on the things that serve their donors, and the show of fierce opposition conceals a deep shared appetite for the same money and the same power. I hold this as my honest opinion, and I will not pretend to a reverence for the process that I do not feel.

And from that conviction follows another, which I also offer as opinion and not as law: that for most believers, most of the time, the energy poured into the political contest is energy largely wasted. I do not say it is sinful to vote; it is not. I do not say it is sinful to abstain; it is not. The Scripture binds the conscience to neither, and any man who tells you that you must vote, or that you must vote as he does, to be a faithful Christian has added to the Word of God a commandment that is not there. On this you are free. But I will tell you that I do not have the heart, nor the energy, nor the fortitude to spend my life agitated over what is decided in distant capitals by corrupt men I cannot control. I would rather spend it on my neighbor, my family, the people God has actually set within my reach.

Any man who tells you that you must vote, or must vote as he does, to be a faithful Christian has added to the Word a commandment that is not there.

But there is something deeper here than my own temperament, and I want to name it, because it is the real reason a great many of the wisest Bible teachers I have ever learned from refused to engage in partisan politics at all. These were men preaching through the middle of the last century and before, through decades every bit as turbulent as our own, with just as much going wrong in the country and just as much to be alarmed about. They did not pretend the moral degradation around them was not happening; they named it plainly, and they grieved it. But they named it as what it was, the ordinary rot of an ordinary fallen nation, no more the special property of their moment than of any other, and they would not be dragged from the pulpit into the partisan fight over it. They knew something it has taken me years to see.

Here is the thing they knew. The moment a Christian plants his feet inside a political party, or inside an ideology, he has already lost something, before he has cast a single vote or won a single argument. For he has taken up a second loyalty alongside his loyalty to Christ, and the two will not stay equal for long; the party will begin, quietly, to tell him what to think, and to sort his brothers into friends and enemies by a line that is not the line of the cross. And once that has happened, the Word is no longer his master; the coalition is, and he will bend the Scripture to fit the platform without ever noticing he has done it. And the enemy of our souls knows all of this far better than we do, and uses it with terrible skill. He takes the whole Babylonian machinery of politics, systems the Christian has no mandate to build or capture in the first place, our only charge being to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to obey the authorities so far as they do not command against God, and he uses it to divide the people of God against one another and to swallow their time and their heat and their affection. He gets brother furious with brother over the passing quarrels of a passing empire, and while we are so occupied, arguing and fearing and campaigning, the actual work we were given goes undone. The Great Commission does not get carried out by a church that has spent itself fighting over the furniture of Babylon.

Consider, too, how little the machinery finally restrains the men who run it, when the pressure is great enough. We are taught to revere the Constitution as a kind of holy and unbreakable charter, but when the true crisis came, the paper bent to the man and the moment. In the convulsion of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the ancient right of habeas corpus, jailed citizens without trial, silenced and imprisoned hostile journalists, and wielded a power that strained or broke the very Constitution he had sworn to keep. I do not raise this to condemn Lincoln; one can, and should, argue that the terrible necessity of the hour and the horrors of slavery justified it, and that what he did needed doing. I raise it to show you the truth about the machine: that when the stakes are high enough, the celebrated checks and balances give way, and power does what power judges it must. The system is not the savior it is sold as. It never was.⁹

What, then, is the Christian’s posture toward the governing powers? It is the one the Scripture actually gives, and it is neither rebellion nor worship. We are to submit to the governing authorities, as Paul writes in Romans 13, honoring them and living peaceably under them as those whom God has, in His providence, allowed to hold the sword. But that submission has one limit, and it is a bright one: when the authority commands what God forbids, or forbids what God commands, then we ought to obey God rather than men, and not the law of the land but the plain Word of God is the line that marks where submission ends.

Short of that line, we are quiet and peaceable subjects of whatever Babylon we happen to live in. At that line, we obey God and take the consequences. For in the end, the rise and fall of rulers is not finally in the hands of voters or donors or generals at all. He changeth the times and the seasons; he removeth kings, and setteth up kings. God raises rulers up, and God brings them down, and He has been doing so since long before there were ballots and will go on doing so long after. We may engage the process or decline it, as conscience and wisdom lead, but we need not pin our hopes to it, nor lie awake in terror over it, for the One who governs the nations has never once lost His grip on a single one of them.

chapter seven

the savior complex

There is one more place the idol does its damage, and it is the one the church is least willing to examine, because it wears the costume of obedience and good works. It is what we might call the savior complex of the American church, the deep, often unspoken assumption that we are the ones who carry the light, that it falls to us to go out and save the world and set it right and remake it in our own image.

Hear me very carefully here, for this is easy to misunderstand, and I am not saying what the careless reader may fear I am saying. I am not against missions. I am not against evangelism. I am wholly for the carrying of the gospel to every tribe and tongue and nation, for that is the very command of Christ. And this is not a matter of race; let no one twist it into one. What I am against is the pride beneath so much of it, the assumption that to bring people the gospel we must also bring them America, our clothes, our customs, our individualism, our politics, our whole cultural furniture, as though the kingdom of God came wrapped in the flag and a people could not be saved without first being made to look like us.

We are witnesses, not saviors. We point to the Light; we are not the Light.

For God is the Savior, and the church is not. We are witnesses, not saviors; we point to the Light, we are not the Light. And when the church forgets this, when it goes out into the world believing itself to be the shining city carrying salvation to the dark places, it ceases to be a humble witness and becomes something closer to a colonizer with a Bible under its arm. There is a searching study on this very subject, When Helping Hurts, documenting with painful honesty how a great deal of well-meaning Western and American church help has in fact harmed the very people it meant to serve, because it flowed from a posture of superiority rather than partnership, doing things for people in a way that wounded their dignity and bred dependency, treating the poor as projects to be fixed rather than image-bearers to be walked alongside. And underneath it ran the old pride: we have it figured out, we are the answer, we will go and save them.¹⁰

Now someone will raise the old accusation at this point, but look at the wickedness Christianity has done in the world, the Crusades, the Inquisition, blood in the name of Christ. And honesty requires a careful word here. The great organized bloodlettings most often thrown at the faith, the Crusades and the Inquisition, were predominantly the work of the Roman Catholic system, and a man should know that Protestantism is a distinct stream, which did not even exist for most of that history, the Reformation not coming until 1517, centuries after the Crusades began. That is a fair and factual distinction, and it is right to draw it. But honesty cuts both ways, and I will not use it to whitewash my own house: Protestantism has its own sins to own, and we have already named one of them in the Salem trials. The point is not that one branch is spotless and the other stained. The point is that wherever the church has reached for the sword, or for the power to compel, or for the throne of the savior, it has fallen, Catholic and Protestant alike, because it grasped at a role that was never given to it.¹¹

For we were never commissioned to force the world into the kingdom. We cannot legislate men into holiness, nor conquer them into faith, nor civilize them into salvation. The kingdom does not come by our building, our compelling, or our saving. It comes by the King, and He is coming. Our task in the meantime is far humbler and far lighter than the savior complex imagines: to live our own lives faithfully unto God, to be the best witness we can be in the small place He has set us, to love the actual neighbor in front of us, and to point, always to point, never to replace, toward the One who alone can save. We are not the saviors of the world. There is a Savior, and it is not us, and what a mercy that is.

chapter eight

the city comes down

And so we come to the end, and to the truth that gives this booklet its name. Through every chapter we have watched the same idol broken from a different side: the nation that is not the kingdom, the founders who were not saints, the systems that cannot save, the politics that is mostly money and power, the church that is not the world’s savior. And under all of it has run a single false belief: that there is, or can be, a shining city on a hill down here, built by human hands, holding the light for all the world. There is not. There never has been.

The phrase itself, you remember, the Puritans borrowed and the politicians have worn out, a city upon a hill. But the Lord Jesus, when He first spoke those words, did not lay them upon a nation at all. He spoke them in the days of His earthly ministry, to those who gathered around Him on the mountainside: ye are the light of the world, a city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Now we must be careful here, and honest. Those words were not first spoken to us, the church; much of the Lord’s earthly ministry was directed to Israel, to the Jews of His day, and the faithful teachers of the Word have long reminded us that while all Scripture is for us, not all of it was spoken to us. We must not snatch every verse out of its setting and pretend it was addressed to the church.

And yet all Scripture is profitable for us, and from these words we may surely draw the principle: that the light of God has always rested upon the people of God, and never upon a flag or a border. It was spoken to people, not to a country, and whatever else we say of it, this much is certain: it was never laid upon a nation, never upon an earthly kingdom, and most certainly never upon America. And the people of God are not the city itself, but only its lamps, shining in the dark and pointing beyond themselves to a city that has not yet come.

For here is where the true city is, and how it arrives, and mark well the direction, for it is the whole point. John saw it: and I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven. It comes down. We do not build it up. The shining city is not raised by Puritan covenant or by founders’ genius or by missionary labor or by the right vote in the right election. It descends, finished, from the hand of God, when the King Himself returns to bring it. Every human attempt to build that city from the ground up, the Puritans’ new Israel, the founders’ improved Rome, the church’s little America carried across the seas, is the tower of Babel raised again, the reach of human hands toward a heaven they can never grasp.

The tower never reaches the sky. The city always comes down.

So this is who we are, until that day: strangers and pilgrims, exiles in Babylon, with no continuing city here and our hearts set on the one that is to come. And this frees us, it frees us wonderfully. We do not have to save America. We do not have to remake the nations. We do not have to build the kingdom, nor be anyone’s savior, nor carry the weight of a world we were never strong enough to lift. Those burdens were never ours. They were always His.

What is left to us is small, and near, and within our reach, and it is enough. Live your life unto God. Be the best witness you can be in the little plot of ground He has given you. Submit to the authorities over you, except where they command against His Word, and live quiet and peaceable as much as you are able in whatever empire you find yourself. Love the neighbor in front of you. Tend your own family, your own household, your own circle, with all the faithfulness you have. Throw the seed of the gospel on every soil around you, and leave the harvest to God. And lift up your eyes, now and then, from the noise of the passing empire, to watch for the King who is coming and the city He is bringing with Him. For there is no shining city on a hill down here, not in any nation, not in any system, not built by any hand of man. But there is one coming down one day. And blessed is the pilgrim who has stopped trying to build it, and has simply set his face toward home.