A Model of Christian Charity Study Guide

Born to landowning merchant parents in Suffolk, England, John Winthrop spent much of his life torn between his deep spiritual interests and his calling as a lawyer and Lord of the family home in Groton. Trained at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his father was an administrator, Winthrop showed a precocious understanding of theology. But he never pursued a life in the established church, instead preferring rather rebellious Puritanical views. He married the first of his three wives at age 18, with children soon to follow. Like all Christians who were hostile to Catholicism, Winthrop was deeply skeptical of Charles I’s (r. 1625) anti-Reformation attitudes. In 1628, Winthrop was elected by the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Company to take a group of colonists to Massachusetts, and in 1630, he led over 700 colonists in a convoy. Aboard the Arabella, as a lay (i.e., unlicensed) preacher, he may have delivered his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” He was so popular a leader that he was elected Governor of that colony 18 times before his death in 1649. As a writer, though, he was famous only after his death. He kept an extremely detailed journal of his years in Massachusetts, which was later published as a valuable glimpse into colonial America. His “A Model of Christian Charity” came out posthumously, over 200 years later, and has since become one of the founding documents in the history of America, quoted by presidents from Kennedy to Reagan to Obama.

The colonial land-grab in New England is the dominant historical setting for Winthrop’s sermon. Winthrop, leading over 700 colonists to Massachusetts, wrote at the onset of a boom in England’s colonial expansion. Sponsored by King James, explorers like John Smith had published influential and tantalizing accounts of the opportunities afforded by the new world. In the wake of such encouragement (some would call it propaganda), the Crown chartered a company to populate the Massachusetts Bay (of which Winthrop would serve as governor many terms until his death), a colony encompassing much of present-day Massachusetts. Any colony at this time would have been a mutually beneficial arrangement both for England and for the expatriates who volunteered to populate it, the former being supplied with goods, taxes, and land, and the latter with freedoms unavailable under home rule—namely, religious freedoms. To this end, another important context for “A Model of Christian Charity” was England’s religious climate. Charles I had recently succeeded his father, James I and VI. Though the established Church of England was Protestant in name, Charles married a Roman Catholic and upheld Catholic-leaning religious policies that limited the rights of non-conformists such as Winthrop’s Puritan sect. Dissenters, despising what they saw as outlandish excess in the Catholic Church, felt Charles’s reign to be oppressive. Consequently, the chance to start afresh in a new land, far from the religious hold of the monarch, was especially appealing to dissenting groups like Winthrop’s. In the decades since Henry VIII’s Protestant reforms, the Church had nudged its way back into Catholic policies and, under Mary Stuart, even Protestant persecution. So the English were no strangers to wavering in the Protestant-Catholic struggle. (Indeed, Charles would soon be deposed by the fiercely Puritanical Oliver Cromwell.) But it was only now, with the new promise of colonial expansion, that staunch non-Catholics had a blank-slate chance to shape their lives entirely by the contours of their religious doctrine. This was the chance Winthrop’s group seized upon in leaving England for a strange new land.

As a work of utopian idealism, Winthrop’s sermon may have been influenced by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a work that laid the groundwork for an ideal society in reaction to the religious turmoil of More’s era. But unlike Winthrop, More was a staunch Catholic; closer to Winthrop’s views (though far more didactic in tone) was the Swiss reformer John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), the seminal (and severe) Protestant guidebook for all things spiritual and civic. Winthrop’s optimism about the promise of a geographical blank slate recalls the explorer John Smith’s Description of New England (1616), which argued that the new world promised unprecedented levels of self-realization. Winthrop’s belief in the unity and interdependence of human beings bears a striking resemblance to the English churchman John Donne’s poem “No Man is an Island” (1624); the American poet Walt Whitman echoes similar thoughts in his celebratory “Song of Myself” (1855). Winthrop and Whitman’s fixation on connectedness, bridging some 130 years, suggests it as a fundamental theme in American literature. Conventionally for the time, Winthrop’s main literary fodder is the Bible—especially Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Matthew—but only recently had the King James Version (1611) become the standard edition for clergy and lay readers alike. Winthrop’s sermon comes from the first generation of writings to make use of this important translation. Winthrop’s sermon, though still unpublished by the Founding Fathers’ time, must also be seen as a foundational American text alongside not only The Declaration of Independence (1776) but also contemporary works such as the Mayflower colonist William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and Winthrop’s own magnum opus, The History of New England—both important narrative documentaries of early Massachusetts from 1630 to 1650.