‘City on a Hill’

Cynthia Harrison’s “The ‘City on a Hill’ Cliche” (Op-Ed Page, Jan. 21) is generally accurate in its criticism of the misuses by President Reagan and other conservatives of evocations of the American Puritans.

In criticizing the Puritans’ excesses, however, Harrison might have noted that over 150 years passed between the time John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” expressed the communal ideals of the first generation of English settlers in Massachusetts in 1630 and the time when those ideals degenerated in to the paranoia of the Salem witch trials.

More importantly, Harrison could have further emphasized the hypocrisy of Reaganite conservatives, who rationalize militarism, greed, and indifference to the plight of the poor and homeless at the same time they mouth tributes to “the moral values of our Founding Fathers.”

If President Bush wants to be more faithful than his predecessor to Puritan ideals, he might well study this text from Winthrop: “No man is made more honorable than another or more wealthy, etc., out of any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of his creator and the common good of the creature, man. . . . The moral law requires two things: first, that every man afford his help to another in every want or distress; secondly, that he performed this out of the same affection which makes him careful of his own goods. . . . The Gospel commands love to an enemy. Proof: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; love your enemies, do good to them that hate you.” Matthew: 5-44.

DONALD LAZERE

San Luis Obispo