Several American leaders have cited Matthew 5:14—including President-elect John F. Kennedy in a 1961 address to the Massachusetts legislature. But the phrase “City On A Hill” may be most prominently connected with President Ronald Reagan. In a presidential debate on September 21, 1980, for example, Reagan said:

“I’ve always believed that this land was placed here between the two great oceans by some divine plan. That it was placed here to be found by a special kind of people—people who had a special love for freedom and who had the courage to uproot themselves and leave hearth and homeland, and came to what, in the beginning, was the most undeveloped wilderness possible. We came from one hundred different corners of the earth. We spoke a multitude of tongues.… [And] we built a new breed of human called an American—a proud, an independent, and a most compassionate individual, for the most part. Two hundred years ago, Tom Paine, when the thirteen tiny colonies were trying to become a nation, said, we have it in our power to begin the world over again.… I believe the people of this country can [solve the problems we’ve discussed tonight], and together, we can begin the world over again. We can meet our destiny—and that destiny is to build a land here that will be, for all mankind, a shining city on a hill. I think we ought to get at it.”

President Reagan returned to the theme in his Farewell Address in January 1989:

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“The past few days I’ve thought a bit of the ‘Shining City On A Hill,’ I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.”