“O say can you see” stood in the place where God should be — and it didn’t wave but passively stood, planted and seemingly unmovable, across from the Christian flag that is also red, white and blue. This is the scene in so many Christian houses of worship across the country. It not only serves as a reminder to the congregants that they are in America, but quietly and effectively offers the assertion that America is a Christian country, founded on Christian principles and being a good American necessitates being a Christian. Or, in the synagogue, two flags often stand on the bimah, an American one and the Star of David — confirming not only American loyalty, but loyalty to another country and to another political ideology. These symbols are not too subtle, and the implied message is God and country…and country or countries are on the same level as God.
According to all our theologies there is no god greater than God, and we share a timeless struggle against idol worship in all its manifestations. We caution against worshipping money and riches, against pride and arrogance; we call for humility and the extension of love to our neighbors down the street and across the globe. We pray to keep God before us and above us, and seek to be accountable to that God. We strive to create a synthesis between our daily living and our worship, and seek to allow nothing to supplant the prominence of God in our lives. Yet on these altars, these places that are set high and represent the loftiness and sacredness of God, stand symbols of nationalistic pride. They are placed in the place where the spirit and concept of God alone should reside, and we are therefore declaring that God must share sacred space with nationalistic symbols of pride, arrogance and militarism.
Some would suggest that this is simply patriotism. But patriotism placed on the altar alongside the conceptual sacredness of God is the height of idolatry, and in Christian text we are taught “No one can serve two masters…” (Matthew 6.24) Messages conveyed in sacred settings subtly and yet strongly enculturate participants without people even realizing that their thinking and perspectives are altered in the environment by the images, words and other expressions presented.
There have been fierce arguments about the gender and race of God, because religious culture has usually asserted the maleness and whiteness of God. In the Black church, for example, there has been a reticence to allow a white Jesus to collect the dust of obsolescence. The reason is that people have for centuries seen images of a white Jesus, and that image has been affirmed by the brutality, colonialism, and cultural construction of white supremacy. The late feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote in her famous book “Beyond God the Father, Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation,” “If God is male, then the male is God.” She outlined the issue of images and language, and discussed how we are captive and alienated because of those images and expressions. In the same way, the church’s portrayal of God (Jesus) as a blond, blue-eyed European for so many years has impacted the human psyche. To paraphrase Mary Daly, “If God is white, then white is God.” This would be an adequate and fair translation of Daly’s logic orientated towards race.
The equation of God as white, male, and American cannot be better described than by Reza Aslan, author of “Zealot.” Iranian-born Aslan, whose family migrated to the U.S., writes in the preface of that book, “Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America’s national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American.”
Images and expressions of divinity, and their placement, are not accidental but purposefully carried out to engage the culture. As a consequence, they condition people into a flawed understanding of what is important, valuable, and superior. Usually that is white and male. The Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. until recently had windows in its sanctuary that honored Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and the Confederacy. In the face of Black Lives Matter protests and the numerous campaigns around removing statues and images that elevated and legitimized the Confederacy, the leaders of the church finally heeded the demands of the time and removed the windows in 2017. The cathedral also took the initiative of choosing a Black artist, Kerry James Marshall, to design new stained glass with themes of racial justice that will replace the Confederate windows. The leaders of the cathedral intend that the new windows will depict “a new and more complete” story of the nation’s racial history. They have also recruited Black poet Elizabeth Alexander to write a poem that will be inscribed on stone tablets alongside the new windows.
But without such challenges to images, monuments, flags, and stained-glass windows, the normalcy of things offensive and hurtful continues to be offered throughout the country. It becomes embedded in the consciousness of the observer, distorting our beliefs, contributing to our collective biases and misconceptions, and feeding our most unwelcoming and often violent reactions to new thoughts and new people, as well as any re-examination of concocted American narratives. God has been supplanted by the various images and expressions of the culture.
There is “prosperity theology” that feeds our capitalist tendencies. There is also Christian Zionism that weds itself to Jewish Zionism in a twisted theology supporting occupation and oppression of Palestinians, even while ignoring the destruction leveled at Palestinian Christians. From the pulpit or the bimah lined with a flag of one kind or another we look for the presence of God — but see instead the symbols of nationalism, exclusivism, and militarism where God should be. We conflate God with the flag and the flag with God, and misplace our worship and our God in the process.
It is time for us to re-examine and correct what we have done with God. Is is time that we tear down the idolatrous images of nationalism and narcissistic pride and worship God in the simplicity and awesomeness of the existence of God. We need to recognize all our cultural predilections and discern which we have attached to God. This will begin a re-examining and deconstructing process that will lead us toward a God uncontaminated by a particular culture, one that holds all cultural affairs accountable to a higher standard.
The theological struggle, in this historical moment of political and theological rancor, is to discover a God of inclusion that is welcoming and warm. We have to discover a God that is free from our cultural expressions and biased language. We must grow comfortable with a Holy and Divine Being that is more amorphous, one beyond our human definitions and confinements. One of my professors in seminary, Dr. Simon Maimela, declared that God was God in Godself, meaning that God exists above and beyond anything we know or can describe. God is not male, and God is not White, Republican, Democrat, Socialist, American, or of any other nationality or political persuasion, but God is God in God’s own being. God is not wrapped in the American flag or the Star of David, or any other flag, but the existence of God is defined only by the being of God, and stretches beyond our words and the limits of human language. This means that the Holy One, the Sacred One, the One that is Divine is beyond our human expressions, defying our nationalistic images and tendencies or expressions of cultural, race, and gender superiority. In other words, we need to free God to become God.