a model of christian charity · winthrop

John Winthrop's lay sermon of 1630, written for the Puritans sailing to Massachusetts, set out the covenant that would bind their colony: a community knit together in love, where rich and poor need each other, watched by the world as 'a city upon a hill'. It is the founding statement both of American exceptionalism and of communal obligation.

Read with the Mayflower Compact (1620) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.