Despite Fights about Its Merits, Idea of American Exceptionalism a Powerful Force through History
CNN’s religion editor, Dan Gilgoff, posts the first in a series of articles “exploring the concept of American exceptionalism.” In this first article, Gilgoff examines the long history of the idea that America is a special, even heavenly sanctioned, governmental experiment. “The Puritans never used the word ‘exceptionalism,’ Gilgoff writes. “But they came to see Boston as the new Jerusalem, a divinely ordained ‘city upon a hill,’ a phrase Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrop used in a sermon at sea en route from England in 1630.”