"The Red and White and Starry Blue"
Peg Duthie
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cookeville, Tennessee
14 June 2009

Today is Flag Day, and the start of National Flag Week. The reason June 14th is Flag Day is because that's the day in 1777 when the United States flag was made official by the Second Continental Congress. As a holiday, its date was set in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson. It's not a formal federal holiday, but it does inspire assorted parades and ceremonies around the nation, and usually a flurry of essays and editorials as well.

The design of the United States flag has gone through multiple permutations since 1777, with variations in both the number of stripes and the positioning of the stars until the 20th century. The proportions of the flag were formalized in 1912 in an Executive Order signed by President William Howard Taft, who was, incidentally, a lifelong Unitarian. The current design dates from 1959, when the stars for Alaska and Hawaii were added.

I've been thinking about those stars lately, especially after a recent chat among friends where someone said, "If Texas and Georgia want to leave, I say we let them, but first make them pay for new flags." A more general reaction was that it's sometimes an incredible pain in the neck to be Southern, given that most of us are pretty smart and relatively sane, but we're not the ones who show up on CNN. When I was in Prague last month, another American tourist said to me, "You're not really Southern, are you?" and while I don't want to put assumptions in her mouth, I think it's safe to say that our region doesn't exactly enjoy a national reputation for diversity, tolerance, or intellectual forward motion. It's maddening and sad and probably not doing our local economies any favors.

The kicker is, wanting to up and leave isn't unique to the southeastern United States. During the past decade, there have also been secession campaigns in California, Vermont, Alaska, and elsewhere; the Second North American Secessionist Convention was held in Chattanooga in 2007. I can't claim to be an expert on secessionist rhetoric, but I've noticed that in the proposals I've read so far, there's a tendency to invoke the American Revolution, and how, these days, we venerate the hotheaded radicals who steered our separation from the British Empire. There are also a fair number of people who regard the unpleasantness of 1861-1865 primarily as a clash between Northern aggression and Southern self-preservation.

Looking beyond political geography, there's the current struggle of the Episcopal Church with conservative parishes attempting to break away to form an alternate American Anglican Council, and other schisms within other denominations; nine years ago, a group of UUs who felt the UUA had become too liberal formed the American Unitarian Conference. There are, of course, also instances of individual congregations splitting apart over differences too great to reconcile. This happened to my home church fifteen years ago, and it is far from the only congregation in Nashville to have endured that level of internal conflict and strife.

These are not exactly the most festive thoughts to be sharing on a holiday, nor are they the most conclusive, because I'm not about to tell you that secession or schism is always wrong. Sometimes the healthiest thing to do is to agree to disagree, or to walk away, or to refuse to engage. But sometimes it's a copout and a cheat: it's failing to respect the inherent worth and dignity of someone who doesn't happen to share our views, and failing to grant the compassion we ourselves crave for our own less-enlightened attitudes. I personally am a giant wuss about conflict: a member of my church recently observed that there are a number of people in our congregation who have difficulty "speaking the truth in love," and I am very much among that number: having to tell someone I personally know that they're in the wrong makes my stomach clench up, even on trivial matters. As I get older, I have become incrementally better both at giving and receiving criticism; intellectually, I've always understood that negative feedback on item x or project y doesn't mean I'm a hopeless, worthless human being who will never amount to anything ever again, but emotionally, I sometimes still have to consciously, deliberately override that all-or-nothing kind of reaction.

Some of this is cultural: I can't speak for all Asian American families, but my parents grew up within a brutally unforgiving system -- one where a poor performance on a single high school exam could short-circuit the entire rest of your life, and make all the difference between going to college or working menial jobs the rest of one's life. So, in turn, I grew up with a hairtrigger panic button -- the sense that I was always on the verge of irreparably screwing up my life because I hadn't studied or practiced hard enough. When you inhabit an environment where even trivial mistakes are treated as gigantic sins, you are not in an environment where healthy, soul-expanding arguments are possible.

This problem isn't unique to first-generation children of immigrants, however. In military psychology, there's a term called "the battlemind," which encapsulates the attitudes that a soldier is expected and trained to adopt in order to survive working in a combat zone. They include seeing the world in black-and-white terms and absolute trust in one's comrades and leaders -- no second-guessing, no dithering, no indulging in multiple perspectives or doubts. There isn't time for any of that when the stakes are life-or-death.

However, soldiers are also expected to turn off this mindset once they return to civilian life. And as the military starts to treat more and more cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, they're coming across cases where a service member wasn't able to turn off his or her combat-ready mindset -- where all the choices and shades of gray and back-and-forth that are a part of everyday civilian living had become threatening rather than inviting or reassuring. And when your mind is primed for combat rather than collaboration, you will eventually end up with conflict or tragedy.

It is perhaps stating the obvious to observe that we live among people who are chronically armed for bear, regardless of their military experience or cultural background. This is true of both the right and the left of religious and political spectra; what is far from obvious is what on earth we are to do about them. Can't shoot them all. Can't ship them all to an island or planet far, far away. Can't shout them into reason. Probably can't love them into reason. So where do we even start?

For me, it's questions like these that make the word "faith" so much more than another word for "religion." Merriam-Webster offers three multi-clause definitions of "faith":

1 a: allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1): fidelity to one's promises (2):sincerity of intentions

2 a (1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust

3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction ; especially : a system of religious beliefs

I want to offer you two more definitions to consider. "Faith" is the act of sticking around, even and especially when the going isn't going too well; it's knowing that there's always much more to a garden than the naked eye can see. "Faith" is believing that something can be done about the proverbial heat in the kitchen, even if it's simply sticking a foot between the storm door and the rest of the room so that the space doesn't seal itself shut -- so that it doesn't end up keeping people out you didn't mean to exclude. Secession is sometimes described by its opponents as setting yourself up to get hit by the door on your way out; I cannot stress enough that the reality is way more complicated than that. As people of faith, our mandate is to keep to the higher road and to honor that complicatedness, even when it doesn't love us back and drives us up our collective trees. It's to find our way back to that higher road when we stray from it -- when we flee from the garden because the Roman soldiers have shown up; or when we start sentences with phrases such "No one in their right mind. . ." or "All the Republicans. . ." or "All the Christians. . ." It is to see the flag of the United States as the embodiment of an article of faith; it is a living document that belongs as much to us as to its noisiest and least tolerant brandishers. In recent years, it has been wielded at times as a weapon; it is up to people of faith like us to stand firm and insist that it remain a sign of welcome. To quote "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it is

The emblem of the brave and true
Its folds protect no tyrant crew;
The red and white and starry blue
Is freedom's shield and hope.

It is up to people of faith like us to insist that words such as "brave," "true," "shield," and "hope" should be honored as complicated words. I offer you one more definition of "faith": it is knowing that your beliefs are likely to grow and to change, and working to do justice to that unknown, daunting beauty even when you don't have all the answers, and likely never will. May we have the strength to live to up to our hopes, and to grant to others compassion even -- and perhaps especially -- when we cannot manage respect. Amen and alleluia.