Separating My Faith From the Flag

I refuse to allow my Christian faith to be tied to my identity as an American

Photo by Samuel Branch on Unsplash

In Embracing Curiosity, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life, exploring my faith and politics with curiosity and nuance.

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One of the most disturbing images from the January 6 insurrection was a photograph of the Christian flag flying next to a Trump 2020 flag. During the first public hearing on the January 6 insurrection, that was the last image that viewers were left with in the montage video of the horrific violence after the Capitol building was breached. Like many, I was as horrified as I was grieved that people who claim to share my faith 1) would have been present at such an event and 2) would equate the Cross with a corrupt president who had been lying to them about election results for two months.

I’m no stranger to the Christian flag. I attended Lutheran schools for the majority of my academic career and most of my teaching career has also been in Lutheran schools. I’ve heard the pledge to the flag spoken in multiple contexts and listened to the many reasons given for why we should do it. I probably fell out of tolerance for the practice around the same time I began to question the compulsory act of pledging allegiance to the American flag.

As it became more abundantly clear that our country had a lot of work to do to right the injustices of the past, I also started to wonder about the faithfulness of pledging allegiance to my beliefs. Jesus never asked that I fly a flag and daily pledge allegiance to my faith. He asked me to profess my faith through my words and deeds in the way that I interact with others. In fact, he was pretty clear about “showy” faith in the parable of the Pharisee and tax collector praying in the temple. As he described the men’s display of faith, he concluded:

I tell you that this man (the tax collector), rather than the other (the Pharisee), went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. Luke 18:14 NIV

It is a lesson that could extend beyond our faith lives.

I was born in 1979, which means that I spent the first decade of my life watching the slow collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain, Communism in Europe coming to its eventual demise by the time I was a teenager. As a child, I repeatedly heard how lucky I was to live in America. America was free. In America, I could worship how I wanted and read my Bible. In America, I could go to a Lutheran school and my parents wouldn’t be arrested. I was raised to believe that America was some kind of safe haven for all things Christian.

That was all true, to a point, but the uncomfortable truth for some is America isn’t the only place where all of those things are true. America isn’t the only place where those freedoms are legally guaranteed. My grandfather was a pastor in Canada for almost 25 years and we freely worshipped there. I worshipped and prayed in churches around Europe during a semester abroad. I prayed and praised God with the group of students I led on a Spring Break trip to Costa Rica. The Gospel is thriving around the world and isn’t dependent on the American Constitution to attract new believers. In fact, while the Church in America is slowly shrinking, the Global Church is growing.

And perhaps all of this helps to highlight even more why I feel it is increasingly important to separate my American citizenship from my Christianity.

I grew up in a Christian faith tradition that was supposed to highlight the separation of the Two Kingdoms, but the further I get into adulthood, I’ve become increasingly aware that this doctrine has lost ground to a fear-driven belief that the only way forward and the only way to save the Church is to guarantee that the Church’s influence in American politics trumps everything else. The only way to help our children lead godly and moral lives is to ensure that our laws reflect the rules and regulations presented in the Bible and to use the government to lift up Christianity as the basis for the way our country functions.

Except, it was never supposed to be that way. The Constitution determined that the government could not establish religion from the very beginning. While “separation of church and state” was written in extraneous documents, the phrase was meant to explain how the church and the state should function: alongside each other but not woven together. European history had shown us just how dangerous this entanglement could be. The Salem Witch Trials had done so as well. The Founding Fathers were not ignoring the influence the scriptures had on their understanding of government, but they had no interest in marrying the two.

It is a tension we have always had to struggle with as we have spent the last 250 years trying to figure out our identity, through slavery, women’s rights, civil rights, and more.

I am a Christian. I am an American. But my faith does not define my country of origin nor does my country of origin define my faith. In fact, more and more, being an American makes it all the harder to proclaim that I am a Christian.

Why?

Because when the two are intertwined they have become synonymous with toxic patriotism, hatred towards and exclusion of outsiders, anti-intellectualism, hyper-partisanship, and a host of other negatives.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We forget that the young Church in Acts grew because it was counter-cultural. It had no power. Becoming a Christian in the Roman Empire could mean losing your family, your wealth, or even your life. And yet people flocked to the Church because they knew it had something better to offer than the Greek and Roman gods of their youth. They knew these Christians were different. And they wanted what these Christians had. They were providing work for widows, homes for orphans, liberation from abuse for slaves, and rights for women. The early Christian church did not seek power but instead thriving faith communities where people loved and supported each other. They participated as members of the Roman Empire and when the laws required them to deny their faith, they chose death over faithlessness. Not being able to sing Christmas songs at a public school December concert is not persecution; being fed to the lions or burned as a human torch in the arena is.

That is not to say that we shouldn’t care about the state of our country or politics. That doesn’t even mean that we shouldn’t run for office or register in a political party. To be salt and light is to be immersed in the world we live in. But as Christians, we should embrace political homelessness. I used to think that being politically homeless meant being a lonely outsider, but I’ve come to discover two things. One, I’m far from alone in my political homelessness. Two, embracing a political ethic that focuses on the good of my country as opposed to the good of a given political party has actually made me better focused on how my actions as a citizen and the expressions of my Christian faith affect my neighbors.

One of my favorite new mantras, thanks to Kaitlyn Schiess from Holy Post, is to ask “are we Christians promoting the thriving of others?” A couple of years ago I decided that my mantra related to social media was going to be “does this further the Kingdom?” While my actions have been imperfect, I think I’ve done a fairly decent job of ensuring that the things I’ve shared and the words I’ve written have done more to make people curious about Jesus than push them away. This same principle is true when we talk about thriving. I feel the need to ask “are my political decisions bringing people to Jesus because I am showing them that I am interested in both their physical and spiritual thriving?” Not an easy question to answer, is it?

My God is not small. If there is anything to prove that the Creator of the universe is not small, one just needs to look at the images that have come back from the James Webb Space Telescope to understand how big God is. Jesus doesn’t need America to save his kingdom. Reverend Benjamin Cramer said it best in a recent social media post

I want better for my country. I want better for the Church in America. I want better for the Global Church. I want better for my children. I want better for my fellow citizens.

And so I will continue to work to keep the Flag and the Cross separate. I will continue to argue that a pluralistic society can make us stronger, not weaker. And I will continue to pray for changed hearts and minds.

Because when you love something you want better for it, and I’m not ready to give up on my country, yet.

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