-We are thankful for our nation and simultaneously practice a hermeneutic of suspicion regarding any symbol that promotes one nation over another.
-We are opposed to Christian nationalism — a pervasive, real, and pernicious distortion of the kind of religion Jesus lived, taught, and died for. Jesus didn’t ride into Jerusalem on a stallion, but a donkey. He didn’t carry flags, but a hand towel and a basin of water.
-We are mindful that Jesus was crucified by people who waved flags.
-We are aware, as American Jesus followers, that we live in a country responsible for one of the largest genocides in human history. We are not suggesting that churches with flags in their sanctuaries are willfully downplaying such a travesty, but that the flag might be downplaying it, whether the church admits it or not.
-We hold that two things can be true at the same time: one can be grateful to those who’ve fought in wars on behalf of the nation’s flag, and one can question the validity of the wars they were sent to fight.
-We confess that we (us Americans) are more like the biblical empires of Babylon and Egypt (not to mention Solomon’s Israel), than we are any biblical “city on a hill.” Flying a nation’s flag in our places of worship risks misleading people into thinking we are the exception or that we are beyond critique.
-We are a faith community whose health is measured not by our willingness to uplift the country in which we live, but by our willingness to enrich the lives of the powerless. The only flag the powerless are waving is white, for surrender.
-We are willing to ask the Native Americans in our faith community whether they feel comfortable with the American flag being displayed in their sanctuary.
-We are careful to note Isaiah’s warning that “to God, nations count as nothingness and emptiness” (Is. 40:17).
-We are shaped by a commitment to healing, for all people. The bible ends with nations (Plura) being healed. (Rev. 21:24–26, 22:1–2). If Scripture’s own ending refuses to let a nation’s identity stand as ultimate, we could see how strange it is to insist a flag, representing one people group, stand in a worship space.
From Aristotle’s “natural slaves” to Aquinas’s baptizing hierarchy as divine order, to Constantine mixing cross and empire, to Stringfellow’s weird Curse of Ham interpretation, to Madison Grant’s racial pyramid, to a Constitution that wrote Black humanity into fractions — the thread is the same. Over and over, we’ve taken unjust hierarchies and declared them natural, or ordained, or “just the way it is.” Each person or institution making the same move, each using its authority to convince those not in authority that their lack of authority was God’s design. And then wrapping it all up in symbols (i.e., the flag).
Furthermore, flags in sanctuaries tempt our people not only to hold nation-power as sacred, but, strangely, to do so in the same room where they’re called to imagine an order of things deeper than nation-power. A nation built on the three-fifths clause, on stolen Native land, on defense secretaries leading Pentagon services quoting Scripture, on an anthem written by a slaveholder who prosecuted abolitionists even as he penned the words “land of the free” — has no claim to that room. The sanctuary is the space for flattening hierarchy, not sanctifying hierarchy.
Put flags up in your war rooms. Put them in your courtrooms if you must. If you have to, with humility, put them in the schoolrooms, but don’t put flags in the sanctuary.
—JF
(I used grammarly for grammar, and upon struggling to get all of these to fit within the “We …” format, I asked Claude for help. Idk what the proper etiquette will be moving forward with AI, but for now, the least I can do is let people know when/how I use it.)
