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xvi | Overview arrived in a new “Promised Land” that would flow with “milk and honey” (cf. Exodus 3:8 Leviticus 20:24 Numbers 14:8 Joshua 5:6). American Puritans saw many parallels between the Israelites of the Old Testament and themselves. In the New World, there was a sense of spiritual and historical recapitulation as the Puritans sojourned on their own “errand into the wilderness,” an oft-used phrase alluding to the forty- year trek in the wilderness by the Israelites after their departure from Egypt as recorded in the Old Testament, as well as a prophetic journey into the wilderness detailed in Revelation 12:6–7 and understood by the Puritans as referring to themselves. American Puritan historian Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956) attributes the phrase to a 1670 election sermon by Samuel Danforth (1626–1674) titled “A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness,” but the book’s first essay with the same title fails to articulate the more significant biblical and prophetic Puritan identification with the phrase. As a result of a long war with Great Britain, American independence served as a catalyst for how Americans would view religion, war, and poli- tics in the future. The social and political reverberations from the American Revolution were long and loud. When, in 1836, American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his poem “Concord Hymn” (commemorating the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775) the words “the shot heard round the world,” his imagery was appropriate and realistic. For many citizens of the newly founded United States, American inde- pendence confirmed religious and political sentiments and ideas regarding the uniqueness of the American people and the Puritan experiment in the New World. Puritan and first governor of Massachusetts John Winthrop’s sermonic words, “We shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,” preached aboard a ship to newly arriving settlers in 1630, seemed as true in the days following the 1783 signing of the Treaty of Paris as they had a century and a half earlier. Winthrop was not alone in his thoughts and views. The biblical text for his sermon referenced the words of Jesus: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid- den” (Matthew 5:14 ESV). The United States’ religiously grounded framework functioned well into the 20th century and was articulated in the 19th century by Herman Melville. The author of Moby Dick and one of America’s greatest novelists declared, “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. God has predestined,