Hiding the Flag?

For the first time ever, I wondered if any of my neighbors would look askance at the thirteen star flag I hang every Fourth of July.  

This flag, for me, as well as any version of the American flag (I have 48 and 50 star versions), stands for the ideals of the American Republic—to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for “all.” 

But this year, Nike famously withdrew its 13 star flag shoes because Colin Kaepernick said the first flag of the Republic flew over, and therefore “represented,” a slave-owning nation. I am not ignorant of the ways in which American understandings of what “all men” means were shamefully limited at the beginning. But more generous understandings, with laws to bolster them, have advanced since then precisely because of those founding words. 

Is the Betsy Ross flag now to be linked with Confederate general statues erected specifically to celebrate the triumph of Jim Crow in the South? What about the 48 star flag that flew over the Jim Crow South, or the 50 star flag that flies today over a nation still struggling to fulfill its promise—a promise that has grown in meaning and scope over our nation’s nearly 250 years?  

Growing Understandings

I know that “all men are created equal” didn’t really apply to black slaves kidnapped from Africa in 1776, (or to women!) but I also know that there were many people, even then, that saw the contradiction. I’ve learned that John Quincy Adams used the phrase in the successful argument before the Supreme Court that freed the Amistad slave ship captives. The phrase has inspired the aspirations of African-Americans for generations, who have demanded, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., that America live up to its promise. The flag is a symbol of that promise, not just a begrimed reminder of our national faults and failures. 

That is why I am disturbed by all too many “progressive” people who seem to be ceding the American flag to the Right, which is happy to claim it for its meaner vision of the “real” America. Why should they be allowed to co-opt this national symbol? 

And yet, I’ve had more than one progressive friend, though the ages, look askance as they come up my front walk, if I have a flag hanging on the porch, as I do on national holidays: the 13  star for July 4, the 48 for D-Day and Flag Day, the 50 for Memorial Day, Labor Day and Veteran’s Day. More than one has said that “they don’t like the current associations,” or that they don’t believe in such displays of “patriotism,” as if love of one’s country and its ideals belongs to the Right.

The Way Forward: Affirmation not Denial

The way forward in this national struggle is not to cede patriotism to one political slice of the population, but to affirm its original and continuing power to signify the best of the nation’s founding values, however flawed our realization of them may be in any era. 

In the run up to the national disaster of the 2016 presidential election, our most right-wing neighbor heard a group of us lamenting the increasing popularity of Donald Trump. “It’s clear,” she said, “who the people that love America are on the street—we fly the flag.”  One of my fellow progressive neighbors muttered that he wouldn’t fly the flag because it now “stands for people like her.”  

I challenged him: “How can you let people like her claim the flag for themselves?” A discussion ensued, and the next day a tiny, hand-held American flag appeared, stuck in a flower pot, on his porch—the only flag he had. (A larger one was to follow).  Since then, I’ve heard more than one anti-Rightist citizen talk about “that Constitution of ours” as a barrier to progress, rather than the launching pad of revised understandings and social progress through the years. I grow uneasy.

As the 20th century historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it; invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.” We will not realize a more generous America by denigrating our Founding Story, but by building on it. 

If Progressives cannot, or will not, root their vision of “America” in the “creed of equality” proclaimed by our Founders, flawed as they were; if they do not seek to “mend its flaws” by appeals to their daring promise, I fear we will not prevail in the struggle against those who would shrink that vision to some smaller, meaner version.

Jesus, the   Resurrection, 

and Earth’s Hope

All God’s promises 

receive their Yes

and Amen in Christ.  

St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 1:20

Just a few weeks ago, a woman in my class shared “the newest dystopian sentiment going around” — that humanity is doomed to extinction, but “this will be good for the planet.”  Actually, I’ve been hearing this for some time from relatives (“the animals would be better off without us”) and friends (“the earth will survive, but we may not, and that may be a good thing!”).  One common tag line to this imagined scenario is, “Serves us right.”

I suspect embattled whales and threatened elephants might heartily agree. After all, what many environmental scientists see as the “Sixth Great Planetary Death” of species is well advanced, largely due to the impact of humans, the currently over-successful species. But I can’t join in the “better off without us” sentiment: I am a captive to hope, in large part because of the biblical Story of God’s “humanity project”—God’s promises to humanity, and through us to earth itself.

The narrative you choose to live in matters. People of biblical faith have a Story available to them which says that the Creative Love that birthed the world cares about its fate, and ours as a part of it. This can give people of faith courage and hope that fly in the face of dystopian discouragement. The more you think we’re doomed, the less fire in the belly you’ll have to work toward a better outcome for earth and all its creatures.

Almost a century ago, the French Jesuit Pierre Thielhad de Chardin anticipated our current moment in Building the Earth: 

“The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth . . . It is too easy to find an excuse for inaction by pleading the decadence of civilization, or even the imminent end of the world. This defeatism, whether it be innate or acquired, or a mere affectation, seems to me the besetting temptation of our time.”  

A Reappraisal of the Biblical Narrative

Every new era sees a different dimension of Scripture. One of the great reappraisals of Scripture in our time highlight s how important the earth itself is in the overarching Narrative. What begins in a Garden ends with the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem to a purified and revitalized earth. In this scenario, the resurrection of Jesus is the first act in a redemptive drama that culminates in the resurrection, transfiguration, and restoration of earth itself. The resurrection of Christ isn’t simply an assurance the faithful will have eternal life, but the first step toward the “restoration of all things.” (Acts 3:19-21).  All God’s promises find a rousing Yes! in the crucified, risen Christ, including the continuation of “seedtime and harvest” (Genesis 8:22).

The first humans were given a set of Primate Mandates as earth’s guardian species: to “keep/watch/preserve and cultivate/serve/reverence the earth,” (Genesis 2:15), to relate with respect to the other species, and to create communities in alignment both with the created order and with the will of heaven. Human injustice and evil was seen in biblical culture (as in most ancient cultures) as throwing creation itself out of whack. In the Story, Christ is the Second Adam, born to initiate a process of setting things right in soul, society and human activity. When the Apostles proclaim the Resurrection, they link it to the ultimate renewal and transfiguration of the planet, not just to the narrower hope of persons living forever beyond death. 

Such interpretations are not mine alone, but part of a reappraisal of the Biblical story along a wide continuum, from Chardin to Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si on the environment.

One is not obliged to take all this eschatological imagery literally to take it seriously as an affirmation of humanity’s vital link to the well-being of the planet. The way the Story captures my heart, imagination and dedication means that, in spite of the looming threats to humanity, I cannot choose to write off humanity as a major evolutionary blunder. This would be a sin against biblical hope. The Story calls us to preserve and serve Creation as God’s gift to all species, not humanity’s exclusive larder.

What is Salvation For?

Souls need to be saved, yes; but for what? The Prime Mandates in the Creation story anticipate to an amazing, and alarming, degree the way in which we have become such a pivotal primate species on the planet, lording it over everything else in delusional and destructive ways. Our souls, our human psyches, need to be redeemed from their slavery to self-serving ends—saved for loving and serving Creator and creation not just ourselves. The Scriptures assure us that if we fulfill the mandates of our humanity, our eternal destiny will take care of itself,

Those who rejected and crucified the Prophet, and more than a prophet, Jesus represent the universal human tendency to rebel against the Good, to undermine our own long-term well-being, to hide our eyes from the “things that make for peace” (Luke 19:42). From the Cross, Jesus tells us that “we know not what we do.”  We didn’t mean to set off the current Great Death, but our heedless assault on nature provoked this die-off.

Choosing Hope

The times are genuinely apocalyptic on many fronts: destructive climate change, the bristling threat of nuclear devastation, the fragmentation of the post-war international order, the rise of terrorist assault on civilization. But we can change; we can repent; we can save the life of many species still remaining, including our own. This is what the God of the biblical Narrative hopes, desires and believes about us: “you can change. Choose life, not death.”  The Scriptures, and the ancient Jewish midrashic stories that surround it, picture the Creator gambling that this species will end up bringing earth and all its life to a new level of flourishing. 

“Earth would be better off without us,” however understandable such a sentiment might be, is a counsel of despair—unless it is a dawning realization that change must happen. We have been so bedazzled by the Myth of Progress that when “progress” falters, or its aims turn out to he flawed, secular faith in humanity falters easily. The the Scriptural Saga says that God believes in the Humanity Project.   

Our progress toward the Good is often touch and go, but we can and must learn from our mistakes. We live in an era where massive realization, repentance and amendment of life, personally and socially, is mandatory. 

Maybe you think the story the Humanity Project and oJesus’ resurrection are a fantastic fable. Then call it a dream, a motivating mythos planted in many human hearts over the time of the biblical narrative’s development and carried on in the heart of Christianity, sometimes hidden in the shadows. But the earth-oriented reappraisal of the Story can help Christians join the growing multitudes of people who realize that the human species has, quite literally, been born out of the earth-process itself, and morally owes its mother better treatment—to say nothing of our own survival.  

Whatever your animating Story, if you work to help turn this all-too-destructive, profit-at-any-cost marketplace civilization away from the brink, you’ll be part of the Resurrection Brigade.