Chapter 15: Nationalism and the Flag in the Sanctuary

If you walk into a great many American churches on a Sunday morning, before the first hymn has been sung, before the first prayer has been offered, before the pastor has said a word, the theology of the room has already been established by two objects placed at the front. On one side of the platform stands the cross. On the other side stands the American flag. They are the same height. They are given the same visual weight. They frame the pulpit like matched pillars, and no one in the room seems to notice that this arrangement is making a claim that no earlier Christian generation, in any part of the world, would have recognized as Christian.

The claim is not stated in words. It does not need to be. The room is doing the talking. It is saying that the cross and the flag are the two great objects of American Christian devotion, and that the man who steps between them each week is a priest of both. It is saying that to be a good Christian in this country is, in some fundamental way, also to be a good American, and that the two loyalties are so tightly braided together that pulling one strand out would unravel the whole.

I want to say plainly what a person who has read the Bible knows and often does not say. That arrangement is idolatry. It is not a strong word chosen for shock value. It is the exact word the Book uses for what the Book is describing. The Bible has a long and specific vocabulary for the sin of placing any nation, any king, any human political project, on a level with the God who made the heavens and the earth, and every serious Christian tradition, for two thousand years, has recognized that this sin is unusually easy to commit and unusually hard to see.

The First Commandment Is Not a Suggestion

The Ten Commandments do not begin with adultery, or theft, or bearing false witness. They begin, in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5, with a warning about the loyalty of the heart. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them (Ex 20:2-5).

Israel was surrounded by nations that had their own gods, their own priests, their own temples, their own kings who claimed divine sanction for their rule. Every empire in the ancient near east had a state religion that made the king a son of the gods and the nation a chosen people and the army a holy instrument. The Torah stands against this, from the first commandment onward, with a claim so radical that Israel spent most of its history failing to live up to it. The God who freed slaves from Pharaoh is not the same kind of thing as Pharaoh's gods. He does not share the pantheon. He does not accept a shelf next to the local shrine. He is not, in the words of Deuteronomy 6:4, one god among many. He is one, and there is no other.

The reason the first commandment is first is that everything else depends on it. If you get this one wrong, the rest of the commandments become tools, not obligations. They become instruments in the service of the god you actually worship. If your actual god is your nation, then "thou shalt not kill" applies only to killing your own people, and killing the foreigner becomes a sacred duty. If your actual god is your tribe, then "thou shalt not bear false witness" applies only to lying about your tribe, and lying about outsiders becomes strategy. If your actual god is your president, then "thou shalt not covet" no longer touches him, and every warning the Torah wrote about wealth and pride gets exempted for the man at the top. This is what idolatry does. It does not abolish the other commandments. It bends them.

The Prophets Watch the Flag Go Up

The prophets of Israel were, among other things, professionals at spotting when their own people had started to worship the nation instead of the God who called it. They were not gentle about it.

Isaiah watches Judah put its trust in military alliances with Egypt and thunders, woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, and who rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many, and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord (Isa 31:1). The point is not that alliances are inherently sinful. The point is that Judah has come to believe that its security lives in its army, its treaties, and its geography, and not in the God who made both.

Jeremiah watches the people of Judah quote the temple like a magic phrase. Do not trust in these deceptive words: this is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord (Jer 7:4). He is describing a people who thought God's presence in their national institutions was automatic, that being Israel was itself a kind of grace, that the building meant the blessing. Jeremiah tells them, in the same passage, that if they do not amend their ways and their doings, if they do not truly execute justice one with another, if they do not stop oppressing the alien, the fatherless, and the widow, and shedding innocent blood, then the temple will not save them. It did not save them. The Babylonians took it down brick by brick, and Jeremiah watched them do it, and wrote Lamentations by its rubble.

The prophets are consistent on this point. They do not oppose the nation. They love the nation. They oppose the confusion of the nation with God. They oppose the sermon that ends with the flag salute. They oppose the priesthood that blesses whatever the king wants blessed. They oppose the theology that treats the state as an instrument of divine will and forgets that the state is a human institution that stands under the judgment of God like any other.

Psalm 20:7 puts it in one line that any American Christian should be able to recite from memory and cannot. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. Psalm 33:16-17 says the same thing more sharply. The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue. Psalm 146:3 makes it plain enough for a child. Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.

Jesus Refuses the Empire

When Jesus is tempted in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry, one of the temptations is directly relevant to this chapter, and it is astonishing how rarely it is preached in connection with American religious nationalism. The devil takes him to a high place and shows him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory (Matt 4:8). He offers them to him. All these I will give you if you will fall down and worship me (Matt 4:9). Jesus refuses. It is written, you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve (Matt 4:10).

Read that story slowly. Political power over all the kingdoms of the world is offered to the Son of God, and the price of acquiring it is one act of worship pointed in the wrong direction. Jesus does not consider it. He does not weigh whether the good he could do with all that power would justify the compromise. He does not calculate whether accepting the offer might be, on balance, the strategic move. He refuses, in one sentence, on the basis of the first commandment. Anyone who worships anything other than the God of Israel in order to acquire political power has, according to the Bible, already lost the argument with the man they claim to follow.

Later, when the crowds try to make him king by force, John records that Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself (John 6:15). The offer of a throne, given by his own people, is treated the same way as the offer of a throne given by the devil. He is not that kind of king. He said so plainly to Pilate. My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world (John 18:36). If the American church means what it says when it calls Jesus Lord, then it has to reckon with the fact that his kingdom is not the same kind of thing as the American nation, and that the two cannot occupy the same throne.

Then there is the coin. Show me a denarius, Jesus says. Whose likeness and inscription does it have? They said, Caesar's. He said to them, then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's (Luke 20:24-25). The line has been quoted a million times in defense of paying taxes, which is fine but is not the deep point. The deep point is that the coin bears Caesar's image and the human being bears God's image (Gen 1:27), and the two must not be confused. Coins to the state. Human beings to God. The state does not get to claim the loyalty that is owed to God. That loyalty was signed for at creation and it is not renegotiable.

Revelation Draws a Picture of an Empire the Church Called Babylon

The Book of Revelation is one of the most misused books in the whole American religious library. It has been read as a coded schedule of the end times, mined for hints about helicopters and microchips and one particular Middle Eastern political conflict at a time, and paraded through decades of bestselling paperbacks in ways that would have baffled every early reader of the letter. What Revelation actually is, in its plain first-century sense, is a pastoral letter to a small collection of persecuted churches in the Roman province of Asia, and its central argument is that the empire they were being crushed by, though it looked eternal, was going to fall, and that its fall was already coming, and that their job was not to bow to it in order to survive.

The empire in Revelation is called Babylon. Everyone in the early church knew that Babylon was a stand-in for Rome. Peter uses the same code at the end of his first letter (1 Pet 5:13). Rome was the empire that had crucified Jesus, killed Paul, killed Peter, killed thousands of ordinary believers in ways too grotesque to describe in a sermon, and was demanding that its subjects burn incense to the emperor as a god. Revelation is the church's answer to that empire, and the answer is a picture of the beast that rises from the sea (Rev 13:1), a picture of the great harlot who sits on many waters, drunk with the blood of the saints (Rev 17:1-6), and a picture, in chapter 18, of that empire falling, with a chorus of merchants weeping over their lost trade because no one will buy their cargo anymore, including the cargo of slaves, which the writer names, in a devastating aside, as the souls of men (Rev 18:13).

Revelation is not, primarily, a book about the future. It is a book about how the church is to see the empire that surrounds it in the present. Its message to the persecuted is that the empire is not what it claims to be, that its rulers are not divine, that its power is not eternal, and that the little congregations gathered in secret with the wine cup and the loaf are, in the deepest possible sense, the true kingdom, and the emperor, for all his temples and legions, is a passing thing.

Every generation of the church has had to ask which empire, in its own day, is Babylon. And every generation of the church has been tempted to say, well, obviously, the other empire, the one over there, is Babylon, and my empire, my nation, my flag, is not Babylon. My nation is different. My nation is chosen. My nation is under God in a way the others are not.

That is the exact thought Revelation is written to forbid.

The American Sermon That Was Never Preached to America

At some point in American religious history, and it did not happen all at once, a great deal of Conservative American Christianity absorbed the idea that the United States occupies a special place in the mind of God, that it is a Christian nation in a way no other nation is, that its founding documents are quasi-scriptural, that its wars are approximately holy, and that its flag deserves a place of honor inside the sanctuary. None of that is in the Bible. The Bible knows nothing about America. The Bible is not going to know anything about America. The Bible has one chosen people, and the New Testament redefines that people to include every tribe and language and nation gathered around the throne of the Lamb (Rev 7:9). The nation of America is not the church. The nation of America is a nation, one of many, and the Book applies to it the same way it applies to all of them, as an entity that stands under the judgment of God and that must be measured by whether it does justice, loves mercy, and walks humbly with the God who owns the earth.

A church that read its own Bible would not put the flag on the platform. Not because it hates the country. Because it loves the country enough to refuse to make it into a god. It would not sing the national anthem in the same service as the doxology. It would not treat the pledge of allegiance as an act of worship. It would not organize its calendar around civic holidays as if the fourth of July had the same theological weight as Pentecost. It would not treat criticism of the country as a kind of blasphemy. It would notice that the martyrs of the early church refused to say "Caesar is Lord" precisely because Jesus is Lord, and that the modern Christian who cannot separate "Jesus is Lord" from "America is great" has swallowed the ancient temptation whole.

None of that means an American Christian cannot love America. Of course a Christian can love the country in which he lives. He can vote in it, serve in it, pay taxes to it, work for its improvement, mourn its injustices, celebrate its beauties, and be grateful for its freedoms. What he cannot do is confuse it with the kingdom of God. He cannot fold the flag into the cross and pretend the two shapes have become one shape. He cannot let the sermon become the campaign speech, or the campaign speech become the sermon. He cannot let his patriotism become a form of piety. He cannot let his piety become a form of patriotism.

The Sacred Flag and the Empty Cross

The strange thing about the arrangement at the front of so many American churches is that it inverts the value of the two objects it displays. The cross, in Christian theology, is the sign of the death of the empire's god-king by the hand of the empire, and of the resurrection that vindicated the crucified one against the throne. The cross is an anti-imperial symbol. It is a symbol that says empires kill innocent people and that God takes the side of the innocent people, even against the empires. To place the cross beside a national flag, and to give the two objects the same visual weight, is to erase the very argument the cross is making. It is to domesticate the cross by pairing it with the object it was designed to oppose.

The flag is not evil. Flags are pieces of cloth that a nation uses to identify itself. They belong on courthouses and post offices and cemeteries and porches. They belong in classrooms where children learn about the country in which they live. They belong wherever a nation gathers to conduct the business of being a nation. What they do not belong in is the sanctuary, on the same level as the sign of the death and resurrection of the Lord of the whole earth. That is a category error so large that only a country that has stopped noticing it could commit it every Sunday for a hundred years.

I do not think most American Christians are trying to worship the flag. I think they have not been taught to notice that the room in which they gather has been arranged in a way that makes noticing very difficult. That is what idolatry usually looks like. It does not look like a person kneeling to a golden calf and calling it a god. It looks like a person kneeling to a God he means and, without noticing, kneeling in the same room and the same posture and the same rhythm to something else, and never having to choose between them because the room has made it feel like they are the same thing.

The Book asks the person who reads it to notice. It asks the reader to name what is on the shelf next to God, and then, if it is anything but God, to take it down and set it in a smaller place where it belongs. In a great many American sanctuaries, the flag is still on the shelf, and it has been there a long time, and the reader may not have realized until this chapter that the Book has been waiting the whole time for someone to walk to the platform, gently, respectfully, and move it into another room.

That is not treason to the country. That is faithfulness to the God the country's Christians say they serve. And the day the flag comes off the platform is the day the cross starts telling the truth again in that building.

You have a Bible. You know which commandment is the first one. You know which kingdom is not of this world. You know whose image is on the coin and whose image is on the human being.

Where do your ethics actually live?

If they live in the Book, this chapter is not an attack on your country. It is an invitation to love your country the way the prophets loved theirs, which is enough to tell it the truth.