The Flag

Words to Know

Nationalism — putting loyalty to your own nation above other loyalties.

Sanctuary — the main room of a church, where worship happens.

Denarius — the Roman coin I was handed. It had the emperor’s face on it, and an inscription calling him divine.

Chosen nation — the idea that God has specially favored one country.

Let’s begin with a small observation.

Look around the sanctuary next Sunday and find the flag.

Then ask a question nobody asks: which country’s?

Because whichever one it is, there are Christians in the country next door with a different one in the same position, believing the same things about me, singing the same songs in a different language.

We cannot all be the chosen nation. The arithmetic does not allow it.

How this started. You already know the date.

You read about it in Unit Two, Lesson 18. It happened in the year 312, when a Roman general named Constantine, fighting a civil war for control of the empire, painted my sign on his soldiers’ shields and won a battle at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, on the 28th of October. ¹

That is the birth of the flag in the sanctuary: the day my execution became a military emblem.

But the year 312 does not explain a cloth flag of a particular modern country on a pole in an American room, and I am not going to pretend it does. There are seventeen centuries in between. The last hundred years of that stretch are dated, documented and easy to check, so let us do that.

First Europe, because the sign went to war for a very long time.

From 1095, when a pope preached the first crusade, men sewed cloth crosses onto their coats to show they had signed up, and went to kill under them. Blessing the weapons and the banners became an ordinary part of church ritual.

From the nineteenth century onwards German soldiers wore Gott mit uns — “God with us” — stamped on their belt buckles, through the First World War and into the Second.

In 1914 the armies on both sides marched out with chaplains, and churchmen in each country announced that God was with their nation. They were praying to the same God, in nearly the same words, for the destruction of each other’s sons. ²

Nobody had to argue for any of that. That is the part that should trouble you. It had become ordinary.

Now your own country, because that is your actual question.

American sanctuaries did not have national flags in them for most of American history. Here is how they arrived.

The wars put them there. During the First and Second World Wars, congregations hung service flags — a banner with a blue star for each member in uniform, and a gold star when one was killed — and posted honor rolls with the names on them. That is a tender and human thing, and it is how the national colors first came to stand at the front of a great many churches: not as politics, but as grief. Then the war ended, and the pole stayed. ³

Some churches added a second flag, a white one with a cross in the corner, which was designed for Sunday-school use in Brooklyn in 1897 and has a pledge of its own. ⁴

Then the government made the link official, and you can date it to the year.

In 1954, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

In 1956, Congress made “In God We Trust” the national motto, and from 1957 it was printed on the paper money in your wallet.

That was three acts of a legislature in four years, in the middle of the Cold War, when the official argument for American religion was that religion is what distinguished the country from atheist communism. Presidents said so. So did preachers. Church membership climbed through the decade, and going to church became a way of demonstrating that you were loyal. ⁵

Hold that still for a moment: your religion became a way of proving your patriotism. That is the flag in the sanctuary, and it is not from 312. It is from within living memory.

And it was organized, by people, with money, and I can name them.

Here you should want documents instead of adjectives, so here are five.

Spiritual Mobilization. A Congregationalist pastor in Los Angeles named James Fifield ran an organization through the 1940s and 1950s, funded by corporate leaders with oil and manufacturing money. It recruited ministers to preach that the free market was God’s own arrangement and the New Deal a sin against it. It mailed sermon material to ministers across the country, and ran a magazine and a radio program. ⁶

The prayer breakfast. A Norwegian-American minister named Abraham Vereide organized prayer groups among businessmen and politicians. In 1953 the first presidential prayer breakfast was held with President Eisenhower present. It has met every year since, and is now called the National Prayer Breakfast. ⁷

The crusades. Billy Graham’s enormous meetings, from 1949 onwards, preached against personal sin and also, out loud, against communism, with presidents on the platform. He became something like a national chaplain in exactly the years when being religious and being American were being deliberately fused. ⁸

Moral Majority. In 1979 a Baptist pastor named Jerry Falwell founded an organization to turn congregations into a voting bloc. Its instrument was direct mail: computerized lists, personalized letters, an enemy named in every one, and a reply envelope. It folded in 1989. ⁹

Christian Coalition. In 1989, after a presidential run, the broadcaster Pat Robertson founded an organization that distributed millions of voter guides through churches, scoring candidates for the congregation. ¹⁰

Five organizations, with founders, dates, funders and methods. “Nationalist religion” is not a mood. It is an industry with an accounting department.

Here is what I actually said about my own country’s independence.

This is worth your attention, because my situation is exactly the kind people use to claim me for their own cause.

My country was occupied. Foreign soldiers were in it. There were armed men in the hills who wanted them out, and many of them were devout.

I had every reason to be a nationalist. It would have been the popular position. It is probably what most people around me expected of a man with a following.

I did not do it.

When somebody tried to trap me on the question of paying the empire’s tax, I asked whose face was on the coin, and told them to give the man his own picture back (Mark 12:16–17).

That is not an endorsement of Rome. It is a refusal of the frame. You have brought me a question about which flag, and I am telling you that the coin is not the subject.

And at my arrest, when one of my own men drew a weapon to defend me, I told him to put it away (Matthew 26:52).

That is the single clearest instruction I ever gave about the use of force, and it was given in the most sympathetic circumstance imaginable — an innocent man being arrested at night by armed men.

Here is why empires like me so much.

Go back to Lesson 2 and remember what we found.

A man from a village cannot be put on a flag. He has a face, an accent, a mother, a trade and opinions about money.

A title can be put on anything. A title has no village and no politics of its own. You can put a title on a coin, a standard, a banner, a uniform, a podium.

Twenty centuries of empires have reached for the title and left the man in the village.

And here is the thing to notice about nationalist religion.

It always costs its members nothing and demands everything of somebody else.

It never asks the congregation to sell anything, forgive any debt, or eat with anybody they would rather not. It asks them to be angry at people who are not in the room.

That is a very comfortable arrangement, and it is the exact reverse of everything in Unit One.

One more thing, and then I will leave it.

I did say something about my kingdom, and it is not what you think.

I said it was not of this world (John 18:36). The people who quote that verse usually use it to mean my kingdom is in the sky and therefore has nothing to do with rent.

That is not what it means. It means my kingdom does not work like the kingdoms of this world. It does not have an army, it does not have borders, it does not have a treasury and it cannot be captured.

That also means it cannot be represented by any of those things.

Not by a flag. Not by a general. Not by a party. Not by a country.

If your faith can be folded into a national flag, look very carefully at what got folded out of it.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 26:52.

You will find: me telling an armed friend to put the weapon away while I am being arrested unjustly.

Then look up: Mark 12:16–17, and notice I answer a political trap by pointing at a picture on a coin.

The Short Version

• The flag in the sanctuary starts in 312, with a sign painted on army shields.
• My own country was occupied, and I refused to be its nationalist, in the one situation where it would have been popular.
• I told a man to put his weapon away while I was being arrested.
• A title can go on a flag. A man from a village cannot.

Think About It

1. There is a Christian in another country whose flag is where yours is. Which of you is wrong?
2. What does nationalist religion ask of the people who hold it? Anything?