The American Jeremiad

The first american president to cite John Winthrop’s sermon was not Ronald Reagan. It was John F. Kennedy, who also happened to be the first Catholic president. This is not a coincidence. Since the nineteenth century, the claim that a “true history” of America started in New England—and nowhere else—offered a national purpose and identity wrapped up in Protestantism. The Pilgrims and Puritans had been touted as the origin of the nation in a bid to erase the history of slavery (sidelined off to the South) and celebrate civil and religious freedom, simultaneously condemning the absolutism, violence, and