In the American Conservative, Richard Gamble reexamines Ronald Reagan’s legacy, especially looking at his rhetoric of “a shining city on a hill” (an adaptation of the Sermon on the Mount, and puritan John Winthrop’s Modell of Christian Charity sermon) — the American promised land in a covenant with God.

Though he returned to these words often, Reagan never accused America of dealing falsely with God, and so God kept His part of the covenantal bargain. …

In Reagan’s rhetoric, America’s identity as the “city on a hill” Jesus spoke of in the Sermon on the Mount became a generic affirmation of optimism, material prosperity, and providential destiny. Nothing remained of the hilltop city as a metaphor for the church’s teaching ministry, no place, that is, for the normative interpretation of these words from Matthew’s gospel among Christians for centuries until they were co-opted by American politicians and their speechwriters.

Gamble questions whether Reagan’s rhetoric is conservative as we assume, quoting historians who say he preached “yet another version of sinless, progressive America that had more in common with Tom Paine and Woodrow Wilson than with Edmund Burke.” It’s a bit academic, but worth the read.