In my former church, the minister finished each baptism with an old Huguenot prayer. Holding a child over the water, he’d gaze at the newly baptized and say, 

This story, told again and again, is a history. It follows recurring scriptural commands to remember and retell. “Remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness” (Deuteronomy 8:2). “Remember and do not forget” (9:7). “Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you” (32:7). 

Christians carry that remembrance into the life of Jesus. On the altar of my childhood church, a single line proclaimed, “Do this in remembrance of me.” Each sacrament is more than a memorial, but never less. The dip of water and the breaking of bread call to mind the past and make it present again. We remember by participating in the story each week. 

Remembering may be a sacred act, but it is also mundane. History, as the historian Carl Becker once explained, is nothing other than “the memory of things said and done.” Every morning, memory helps us figure out what we are doing and why. Even the simplest act of paying a bill requires the memory of having incurred a debt, including records to remind us what we owe. Without “the memory of things said and done,” Becker writes, we would be “a lost soul”; our “today would be aimless” and our “tomorrow without significance.” 

This is true personally, but also collectively. Society, too, proceeds through its memory of the past. Pulling from this bit of information and that—some true, some not—we construct stories about ourselves, our communities, our nation. Without history, we’d be lost. 

But which history? Whose stories? Which account best represents the past and points us forward? Answering such questions requires a great deal of discernment. And the stakes are high. Christians, like all citizens, have a duty to discern. 

Yet Christians, unlike some others, must hold two histories together: the grand story of their redemption and the more local story of their society. As citizens, we participate in the history of our nation, but as disciples of Christ, we ground ourselves in a deeper story of the world. One is not the other. And the Christian duty of discerning history involves handling their relation well. Any attempt to collapse the difference threatens the foundations of the church. 

The Shape of History 

In discerning the histories on offer, each of us sorts through information and molds it into a particular shape. In a history textbook, we find the simplest form: a timeline. Straight and flat, without beginning or end, it divides time evenly and shows only chronology. Timelines are useful, but they present history as empty, open, and meaningless. No plot, just plodding. No one actually lives that way. Histories are stories, and timelines tell no tales. 

Instead, histories employ rising and falling actions, turning points, a climax. Some people picture history as progressing like a slanted slope. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In such a tale, we are headed somewhere. Setbacks are temporary. Justice is coming. 

Others, in contrast, see history as forever bending backward on itself, an ever-repeating cycle. Each semblance of progress always comes undone. History recurs—a wheel, a cycle, a circle of return. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” 

Is history a line, a slope, a circle, an arc? We have to discern not just which story we inhabit but also how that story gets told—where it places a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

Consider this story on offer: the United States is a chosen nation, set apart by God to play a unique role in the history of the world. That story begins with Pilgrims founding America in faithfulness to God. Their descendants, shaped by Christianity, eventually declared independence and set up a biblical constitution. With divine inspiration, the country flourished. Yet recent times have threatened Christian underpinnings and weakened us. In order to recover, Christians must take charge of the nation’s institutions. Liberty requires faith, and the faith of the founders—recently threatened by liberal secularists—has rebounded. Christians are now taking their rightful place in the seats of power, making America great again. 

That’s a story. It’s a history. It offers a version of the past that orients us with purpose in the present. And to many it’s compelling. It woos the imagination because it has a clear beginning, a difficult middle, and a triumphant end: the return to glory of Christian power in America. It has heroes and villains. The arc of return—from faith (Pilgrims/Puritans/founders) to flourishing (America through the 1950s) to fall (the sexual revolution, secularists, liberals) and back to faith (the rise of evangelical power under Trump)—maps a pattern found in popular films and even in the grand Christian narrative of creation, fall, redemption, consummation. The story of Christian nationalism draws people through a pattern they recognize and love. Whether it is true seems almost irrelevant. 

Almost irrelevant. Fabricated myths of the past may compel the imagination, but ultimately they mislead. If the point of history is to orient ourselves through our memory of things said and done, then misremembering the past will mean failing to find our way forward in the present. “The appropriate trick for any age,” Becker wrote, “is not a malicious invention designed to take anyone in, but an unconscious and necessary effort on the part of ‘society’ to understand what it is doing in the light of what it has done and what it hopes to do.” 

American History Has a Type 

Christian nationalists often begin their histories with the coming of the Pilgrims, so it may be useful to look at William Bradford, the earliest Pilgrim. Like Christian nationalists today, Bradford saw his political efforts as part of redemption history. Attempting to get at “the very root and rise” of the Pilgrims, he starts with “the first breaking out of the light of the gospel in our honorable nation of England.” From there, he narrates decades of persecution—a tale in which the truly pious were harrowed and chased from the land, first to Holland and then to Plymouth. 

What happens next? Bradford’s history peters out. Having fled the wickedness of a sinful culture and a fallen church, Pilgrims fall into awful sins. Bradford does not look away. He records licentious ministers who come and go, sexual misconduct beastly and banal, endless debts and self-seeking colonists, a people who eventually move apart. The last entries in Bradford’s history are headings for two years—1647 and 1648—both left blank. Bradford’s history loses coherence. 

Ten years after Bradford founded Plymouth, another people arrived: the Puritans. They were decidedly not Pilgrims, and they told a different tale. Perhaps the most famous declaration of the Puritans comes from the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop, who proclaimed in a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity” that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” At the time, this declaration made no impression. The sermon was never noted, never printed, never mentioned in the earliest biographies of Winthrop. It was discovered in 1838, two centuries after Winthrop delivered it, and disappeared again. It was only after World War II that this forgotten declaration came to newfound fame. A rising politician, Ronald Reagan, picked it out of history and made it the cornerstone of America’s postwar ascendancy. Reagan created a usable history from the forgotten rhetoric of America’s Puritan past. 

America as a shining “city on a hill” sounds a good deal like the aspirations of Pilgrim William Bradford. The story shares the same grandeur: a cosmic Christian story that situates political history. But the story Winthrop told was never one of isolation or separation. Instead, it was all about continuity and reform. Unlike Pilgrims, Puritans insisted they never left the Church of England. They would attempt to model a different way as joint members of a much broader Reformation. The most important word in Winthrop’s line is the littlest: “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” There were others. In fact, Winthrop mentioned others in his sermon. They would not pretend to be God’s specially appointed people building a New Israel. That view they explicitly rejected. 

In telling a different history, Puritans repeatedly invoked and deployed the art of typology. 

Typology emerges in that other tiny word: “as.” We shall be as a city upon a hill. Like one. In comparison. Building from models. In comparing and adding, in using parallels and patterns, the Puritans hoped to progress through an act of return. They saw history, in that sense, as a spiral. 

To understand how the spiral of typology forms, start with the way it united Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament offers a prefigurement, a type, which is then fulfilled by its anti-type in the New. For example, Abraham nearly sacrifices his son Isaac. That’s the type. The anti-type is Christ, the Son of God, sacrificed for the sake of all. Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale (type) become Christ’s three days in hell (the anti-type). Recurrence adds to the past, fulfilling it. History expands through repetition. It takes the shape of a widening spiral. 

But typological thinking could extend beyond Scripture itself. Each expansion of the kingdom of God was a repetition and further fulfillment of redemption history. The Puritans described themselves—and the entire Reformation—as a return to the patterns of the early church, the true church. They were stripping away “men’s inventions” (all the corruptions of Catholicism) to restore the pure, primitive church of the first days after Christ. In getting back to those origins, they were moving history forward. A return that progressed. History as spiral. 

Yet Puritans did not present their American experiment as an isolated culmination of sacred history, nor did they think their churches had a unique or exceptional role to play in human history. There were far more Puritans back in England working for the Reformation. In fact, the Puritans in America frequently had to defend themselves against charges that they had abandoned the cause. As a result, American Puritans kept announcing their connection to England. America was a sideshow, a model for elsewhere. 

This changed most dramatically in the American Revolution. In the years leading up to war, New England preachers baptized the Puritans and resituated them in a new tale. They became Founders of America, and not just any America, but God’s New Israel. In this story, America became the chosen land, the singular nation selected and blessed to lead in the coming of the kingdom of God. “By 1760,” the Christian historian Nathan Hatch explains, “New England clergymen appear to have lost a clear distinction between the kingdom of God and the goals of their own political community.” 

In that way, Revolutionary-era preachers changed the nature of typology. Puritans had used biblical history for analogy. They hoped to be like this or that story from Scripture. During the Revolution, however, Puritans became an extension of Scripture. Preachers divinized political history. 

History takes strange turns. Plots shift. The irony of those New England pulpit sermons is who and how they served. Preachers during the Revolution turned politics into a sacred cause, even as the most influential politicians—like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the majority of those who signed the Declaration—would never pass any basic test of Christian orthodoxy. Preachers knit a Christian history for politicians. And whenever it seems convenient, American politicians have reached for that garment and donned it. 

A Nation in Search of a History 

In the wake of the American Revolution, the writing of history became increasingly important. Thirteen different colonies suddenly needed to find a shared identity. Until their victory, these colonies had separate currencies, governments, economies, and cultures. What would bind them together? The answer, in short order, became history. Textbooks rolled off the presses, trying to find a common origin and a national tale. 

Most of the writers and publishers hailed from New England. As a result, even though Virginia had a larger economy and boasted four of the first five presidents, the histories of the nation centred on New England. Regional pride explains some of this, but equally important was the tale New England origins could be used to tell—one that would sideline the reality of slavery and elevate a rhetoric of freedom. If histories of America had started in Virginia, it would be far harder to ignore the enslaved. Jamestown began in 1609 and Plymouth in 1620. But when it came time to announce an origin, Jamestown was deliberately moved aside. Virginia would be part of finding America, not founding it. 

Stories of Pilgrims as founders have flourished throughout American history, though the uses to which they have been put have varied. When President Reagan blended them with the Puritans—by declaring John Winthrop an “early Pilgrim” and moving his “city on a hill” to centre stage—the United States went from a city upon a hill to the city. This new history arose from abundant confidence. Reagan spoke against isolation. The US would be the leader of the free world. Despite the alteration of Winthrop’s original sermon, Reagan at least continued its sense of connection abroad. America must lead and serve, serve and lead. 

That vision had its own moral conundrums—veering into overconfidence and problematic interventions—but it was far different from recent Christian reconstructions of America. President Trump and his supporters today never speak of America as a “city upon a hill.” They have substituted fear for confidence. The histories they tell embody both the lofty grandeur and the deep-seated insecurity of William Bradford, who wrote Of Plymouth Plantation while overseeing the dissolution of his Christian society. If we are looking for parallels and patterns, this one seems fitting. 

Discerning the Narrative 

From the earliest days, Americans have been fighting over our national history, understanding that it orients civic identity and directs political priorities. Even as New Englanders dominated the writing of the nation’s history, Virginians called for their own stories to be told. Meanwhile, some in New England objected to portrayals of the Puritans as heroic founders of freedom, pointing out that the Puritans owned slaves and made a good deal of money on the slave trade. 

Those erased by official narratives have also always spoken up. At the very time Pilgrim settlement was being positioned as the national origin, a Pequot Christian minister named William Apess took to one of the most prominent lecterns in Boston to tell a very different tale: a story of Pilgrims seizing land and massacring Indians, burning a village filled with women, children, and the elderly. That happened. The burning was offered as an incense pleasing to God. By the lights of that history, America could only move forward by renouncing its past. 

Shortly after Apess spoke, Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” For Douglass and the enslaved men, women, and children for whom he spoke, the American “city” was no city of God. It was Babylon. True followers of God sought deliverance. 

To acknowledge is to remember. But what do we do with this memory of things said and done? As a nation each November, we celebrate Thanksgiving and link it to the Pilgrims. Pilgrims and Puritans, it is true, declared many official Days of Thanksgiving to praise God for blessings received. Yet just as often, Pilgrims and Puritans did something else: they held colony-wide Days of Fasting and Repentance. The government set apart time to collectively remember sins and repent. As a nation, we have kept one day and abandoned the other. 

Our job, as Christians, is not to forget. We need more history, not less. That means remembering to give thanks and remembering to repent. American history is not a tale solely of failure, oppression, and abuse; but neither is it a story only of freedom, achievement, and success. Only when we begin to see the multiplicity and complexity of history can we begin to understand how God moves in it and through it, and how we, in the present, can and should respond—righting wrongs and attempting to shine a light in dark places. 

What does that mean for Christians in power or seeking influence today? Biblical tales and types, as models, show that God wants justice and righteousness to reign. Christians can seek power to that end. But always—and only—to that end. It is right, as Christians, to be concerned about the affairs of this world. Throughout the Bible, God shows passionate care for the needs of our lives here and now—needs met by love and justice. As Christians, we must care who is president and what that means, not just for Christians but for all people, here and abroad, recognizing every person as made in the image of God. 

Yet if Christ makes anything clear in the Gospels, it is that his way is not the way of this world. “But Jesus called them to him and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’” (Matthew 20:25–28). Christ presents a God who asks simple questions: Did you feed me when I was hungry, or give me drink when I was thirsty? Did you welcome me when a stranger or clothe me when naked? When I was sick, did you take care of me? Did you visit me in prison? (Matthew 25:31–40) 

Such teachings offer clear continuity to Old Testament psalms and prophets. They were revolutionary—still stunningly so—in saying that the one and only true God of the universe cared little for power and a great deal for the poor, the widow, the orphan. Read Psalms 10 and 12, both written hundreds of years ago in an age when kings were considered divine. Then read them again as though they were written this morning. Who comes to mind? At whom do they point? 

Christians with power and influence can be a very good thing. But Christians come from a tradition, a history, that reminds us to distrust power. When people seek power—whether they are Christians or not—the starting point should be skepticism. Adam and Eve’s sin in Genesis 3 is the desire to take the place of God. Wherever power enters the picture, Christian discernment requires constant self-scrutiny, a humbling awareness of our weakness. No Christian can safely exercise power without a daily confession of sin. 

The humbling history of our own failures—leading to the sacrifice of Christ—returns us to the power of God. As Christians, we are reminded that whoever holds office, God reigns. Americans chose a president; Christians serve a sovereign. Discerning history, especially the history of this nation, means always distinguishing between discipleship and citizenship, between the body of Christ and our civic participation in the United States. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained, “The church must continually say to Christians, ‘Ye are a colony of heaven.’ True, man has a dual citizenry. He lives both in time and in eternity; both in heaven and on earth. But he owes his ultimate allegiance to God. It is this love of God and devotion to His will that casteth out fear.” 

“Little one, for you God made the world; for you, He was crucified on a Roman cross, and died; for you, He was raised from the dead to life.” That’s redemption history. That’s our primary citizenship. That’s the kingdom in which we live, and from which we participate in the civic life of our country—never equating the two. It is our duty, as the church, to keep telling this story until Christians make it their own.