The United flags of America

The Fourth of July was filled with cookouts, parades, fireworks, and flags. But with these we celebrated a country that believes government is, in Lincoln’s words, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The flag we proudly fly expresses our unity in these principles. But we are increasingly a fragmented people, unable to affirm anything with one voice. This fragmentation is extending even to our national banner itself.

After the massacre last month in Charleston, S.C., the Confederate battle flag came under intense criticism, given its role in Dylann Roof’s iconography and its wider recent identification with the segregationist culture of the Old South. Taking their prompt from the swift movement against the Stars and Bars by South Carolina, Alabama, Wal-Mart, NASCAR, and TV Land, some began raising comparable objections to the U.S. flag for its association with blemishes on our national history, whether real or imagined.

As far back as the 1970s, people have substituted variations on the American flag, reimagined for different groups: the African-American flag, the green American flag, the gay American flag, etc. This trend has the potential now to go mainstream. Consider how people don special stoles at graduation ceremonies. They overlay the vestments of their common academic achievement with assertions of their particular tribes: rainbow colors, African colors, and, for some reason, Hawaiian leis.

Flags could follow this trend. The political success of audacity these days is limited only by imagination. Will a soldier leave instructions that one of these flags cover his or her coffin? Will a government official request that one of them replace or accompany the Stars and Stripes in his or her official portrait? Standing up for the right to fly one’s own flavor of flag will rapidly become a litmus test for progressive orthodoxy in the Democratic Party. Republicans who oppose it will be called ugly nationalists and on the wrong side of American history. Anyone who objects will be vilified as insensitive, oppressive, and, of course, a hate-filled bigot.

Perhaps more likely is a broad movement against the old Red, White, and Blue itself in favor of replacing it with a rainbow version, a new flag for a new, more inclusive, more enlightened America. That flag has already generated controversy, and people waved it in celebration of the Obergefell same-sex marriage Supreme Court decision. President Obama repurposed another national icon, though temporarily, by splashing the White House with rainbow-colored lights after the historic decision.

Substituting Old Glory with a rainbow adaptation would not be revolutionary, but it would signify a revolution already affected, a revolution in what liberty means, the government’s role in it, and thus in the meaning of the Fourth of July. If most of the country thinks Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vision of liberty as freedom to decide what reality is—the celebration of nihilism and insanity as political virtues—is self-evidently true, a new flag would be a suitable next step. But that flag, and the republic for which it stands, would not be one a Christian could in good conscience salute.