National Flags as Secular Religion
Of course, many things symbolize the American nation--Great Seal, the bald eagle, Uncle Sam, the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, the buffalo, and the Liberty Bell--but nobody has proposed criminal penalties for disrespecting copies of them, a curious anomaly. The Flag Code takes a stab at explaining this: "The flag represents a living country." But this doesn't address how a flag's "representation" of the nation differs from, say, a page of maps in a geography book showing westward expansion. Doesn't that page even more fully represent a living country? Obviously, occult meaning is packed into the words represent and living. We have here, not ordinary language, but a religious text. A halo has come to hover over this symbol of union since the Civil War. Before 1863, the federal flag was only used to mark ships and property, and even sworn officers of the national army (such as Robert E. Lee, who resigned the US army to fight for Virginia) felt greater loyalty to the flags of their home states (Goodheart).
The flag-burning argument was aired in my college composition classes, and the most common explanation was that generations of soldiers fought and died for the flag. This would, indeed, distinguish it from the Liberty Bell, but, even if we ignore the fact that American soldiers have fought under thirty different flags (the most recent one introduced in 1959), it seems insane to believe that these soldiers died for a tricolor graphic. If this were the case--if the preservation of a geometric figure, in fact, motivated the sacrifice of thousands of lives--then there are less costly alternatives. I will share a silly but effective one, not supposing that anybody will support it, but offering a modest proposal to show that the preservation of a graphic design was never what any clear-minded soldier died for.
Ancient Greek pottery shows us that well-fired ceramics last for thousands of years, so if we are interested in preserving the stars-and-stripes, ceramic flags rather than cloth ones have a distinct advantage. Also, of course, flags can be any size, and preservation would be served by making them small, producing more for a given cost. The optimum size might be one that allowed the stars to be visibly five-pointed, maybe about three inches in length. If only half of the $69 billion United States military budget were redirected to mass produce tiny ceramic flags, a trillion could easily be produced within a few years, far more than any national enemy could ever hope to destroy, so there would be no further need to defend the flag. It would be absolutely safe, especially if these copies were buried at regular intervals all over the nation. This ridiculous program would eliminate all need to defend the flag as such. Of course, it totally misses the point.
So what is the point? Why did almost two-thirds of the US Senate vote in 2006 for a Constitutional amendment aimed at preventing even one reproduction of this graphic from being destroyed by protestors (but not by the Boy Scouts or the American Legion) despite the fact that thousands of reproductions were being manufactured every day to replace it?
The trope of a soldier dying for the flag does have a grain of truth in it, going back to the days of massed military tactics with swords and slow-loading firearms. When victory depended on fighting in compact formation, flags defended by a color guard marked the location of a regiment. Rallying 'round the regimental flag was crucial. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) tells the story of Henry Fleming, a union private who takes the colors from a fallen sergeant and leads a successful charge--literally offering to die for the flag as he leads his regiment to victory.
But, if we look a little more deeply into Civil War history, we learn that flags carried by union militia and volunteer units--the majority of union fighters--were not the stars and stripes but state colors, typically blue fields emblazoned with the state seal and motto. Even units carrying the stars and stripes fought under regimental colors because adjacent American units had to tell each other apart ("Regimental Colors"). In addition, nearly half of all Americans who died fighting in the Civil War (at least to the extent that anybody's death related to Old Glory) died fighting against it, not for it. So, even before WWI, when the machine gun and repeating rifle made flag formations suicidal, there's little basis for the notion that American soldiers died for any version of the stars and stripes, though thousands may have died for the territory that it symbolized.
I often taught the distinction between sign and symbol in lit classes. A sign has a single clear main meaning. A stop sign means stop, an American flag on a ship's mast signifies United States registry, and a donkey in an editorial cartoon means Democrat. A symbol, however, has multiple layers of meaning that aren't exhausted by any one reading. Several true readings of a symbol may contradict each other. Signs are simple and literal. Symbols are ambiguous, evocative, and impossible to pin down, the stuff of myth and modern poetry. At the shallowest level, the American flag is a sign, a label; it signifies the United States as opposed to, say, Albania, but this can't explain its display on private property. A homeowner isn't flying a flag on his porch just to remind people that his house isn't in Albania.
The flag symbolizes some kind of support for the US by the person flying it, but what kind? If the homeowner is a refugee, it may symbolize gratitude to a hospitable nation. If he's a veteran, it may recall years of service. It may even signify unselfish patriotism: John Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." But there is a darker side, and a cloth flapping from a porch post may signify that too. It may assert a narrow, even racist, concept of America and challenge critics to "love it or leave it." It may pose as superior to those less patriotic. It may go beyond support for national defense to rubber-stamp foolish military aggression by politicians, actions that damage the national interest. It may glorify killing. It may elevate the nation to Godlike status as an authority that commands unquestioning obedience beyond good and evil. In the words of e. e. cumming's satirical anti-war poem, "if the quote state unquote says / "kill" killing is an act of christian love."
"There will never be enduring peace," Aldous Huxley wrote in his 1944 introduction to the Bhagavad Gita, "unless or until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism" (22). Of course, not all nationalism is insane or idolatrous, but a slippery slope tilts that way. Nationalism as a false religion teaches the grossly unChristian view that subjects of my government have more rights, dignity, and importance than subjects of other governments and so, if ordered to, I am morally justified killing innocent foreigners. Such amorality may be necessary (within limits) in the ranks of a professional army. National defense would be hobbled if soldiers could veto commands, but when worship of the flag infects a civilian population, we have Huxley's "insane idolatries." The Golden Rule dies at the border, and the national flag, waved as an idolatrous sacred symbol, is allowed to preempt moral and practical critiques of policy.
Has veneration of the flag gone too far and become a false religion that confuses patriotism (valuing fellow citizens as extensions of ourselves and encouraging service to the collective good of a region) with blind obedience and xenophobia? I recently heard a politician (a Democrat, by the way) nostalgically recall our unity in the weeks after 9/11, when stars and stripes sprouted like daffodils all over town. But I recall darker colors from that period: a Sikh pizza deliveryman critically beaten, a Hindu friend who moved Canada to escape harassment, and bumper stickers calling for nuclear strikes on Afghanistan. The field of flags enabled a war in Iraq that destabilized the region, cost tens of thousands of lives, and soiled the national honor with prisoner torture while dramatically benefiting oil companies and civilian contractors.
The Civil War demonstrated the need to settle national disputes peacefully under common symbols. I stand for the anthem and respect the flag, but in my lifetime it has draped tens of thousands of coffins from Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Unity is good, and the flag does symbolize that, but too much of a good thing can kill. It should be a rallying point for life and decency. It should signify a just and humane order. It shouldn't be allowed to sugar-coat poison.
Works Cited
Goodheart, Adam. 1861: The Civil War Awakens. Knopf, 2011. In his prologue, Goodheart writes that at the beginning of the war, "For the first time American flags were mass-produced rather than individually stitched and even so, manufacturers could not keep up with demand. As the long winter of 1861 turned into spring, that old flag meant something new."
Huxley, Aldous. Introduction.Bhagavad Gita: A Song of God. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. Vedanta Press, 1987.
"Regimental Colors" Global Security, www.globalsecurity.org/regiment-civil-war-colors.htm. Accessed September 21, 2019.
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