Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine analyzes Palin’s conception of patriotism:
As part of her standard stump speech, Palin routinely questions Obama’s patriotism with a particular religious twist. He does not show pride in America, she states. He does not see America as a “shining city on a hill,” she says. She goes on to say that she has this phrase from a speech of President Reagan’s.
This last piece of rhetoric is extremely revealing of Palin’s political theology. Let’s start with the origins. It’s true that Reagan used the phrase in several speeches, but Palin seems unaware that the origins of the phrase lie in the Gospel of Matthew (5:14: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”) and that its use in connection with the American Experience dates to the great speech of John Winthrop, delivered to Puritan colonists before they were to set ashore in New England in 1630: “For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”
If we carefully parse Winthrop’s words, we see that they have very nearly the opposite of the meaning that Palin assumes. Winthrop believed that his community was making a compact with their God, a solemn undertaking to build a new society on the virgin soil of America true to the models provided in scripture. The “city upon a hill” was aspirational, and it was backed by a stern warning about the costs of failure in the undertaking. For Palin, any expression of criticism was a rejection of the essentially sacred nature of America. But for the Calvinist colonists like Winthrop, introspection and self-criticism were the essential tools for achieving a holy project. Moreover, the idea of calling any inherently flawed human project, any state, a sacred object would violate the basic injunction against idolatry. Remember that Winthrop and his fellow colonists were leaving an England then descending into Civil War, and they were propelled to set sail because of their disgust with the corruption of society, and with the monarch’s theologically tenuous claims to divine guidance and right.
Read the full essay here.