When William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower in 1620, he borrowed his New World proclamation from the Prophet Jeremiah: “Come let us declare in Zion the Word of God.” For Bradford, Michael Oren writes in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, Zion “was not the old Promised Land of Canaan but its new incarnation, America.”
William Bennett made a similar point in Our Sacred Honor: “Like the Jerusalem of old, America’s ‘New Jerusalem’ was to become God’s promised land to the oppressed—an example to all humankind.”
