What did John Winthrop mean when he spoke of his "ciy upon a hill"?

Question

To what extent were the Puritans successful in building that city? How and why did the market economy threaten and ultimately transform their city?

Answer 1

Staisil is right on the money--the Puritans were trying to create a perfect, godly society. The only problem is, human beings aren't perfect.

They did establish a theocratic form of participative government; one had to be a church member (of a Puritan congregation, of course, and male) in order to vote or hold office.

Since the Puritans looked on material wealth as a sign of God's blessing, and the doctrine of predestination meant that you were either already damned or were already going to heaven, you can easily see how sharp business practices could grow up like weeds. After all, if you were one of God's Elect and predestined for heaven anyway, it didn't matter if you cheated a neighbor or swindled on a few deals-- and if you'd been blessed by worldly wealth, then obviously you were one of the Elect--so the reasoning often went.

And so the ideal of a society of morally upright saints was seriously eroded, and often led to merely the outward show of piety and rectitude.

Thus, as is the common fate of many idealistic social experiments, the flawed humans who made up the society acted as flawed humans always do, and the "city on a hill" envisioned by the earliest Puritans soon became just as corrupt, in its own way, as the places they left. If anything, the contrast between the piety they exhibited and their sometimes questionable day-to-day dealings with others laid them open to the charge of hypocrisy.

Answer 2

The phrase is derived from the Sermon On the Mount by Jesus. Puritans wanted to keep their perfect order. They believed they had a special agreement with God.

Answer 3

actually John Winthrop did not mean nothing with that speech.
he had very bad health conditions at that time, he was eating mushrooms and consequence were diarrhoea and metaphoric speech