Why I Spent 90 Minutes Steaming an American Flag

Yesterday I spent a good hour and a half steaming the creases out of an American flag.

I slowly moved our cheap $24 steamer over each inch of the 5x9.5 cotton, removing its creases and thinking of my father and the 23 years he left for work each morning in his crisp blue uniform. While proud of his military career, and maintaining great affection for a childhood spent on Air Force bases, I’m not normally an American-flag kind of girl. So yesterday I was surprised by how very beautiful I found it as a physical object in my hands and on our dining table. The sturdy fabric. The rich, saturated crimson and blue. The perfect embroidered stars.

Beautiful.

But if I see a pick-up truck with American flags flying behind its cab while belching diesel fumes into the street, I do not think that person has a commitment to liberty and justice for all. I think, There are so many people in my life who would not feel safe around that person.

Because the distance between what I think this flag should represent—a continually unfurling commitment to the dignity of all, protection from tyranny for both our citizens and our allies, and a government of the people, by the people—and what it is so often used to hide behind—the anxious and delusional so-called supremacy of a single race and a single religion, the contraction of rights, a cultish tyranny pawned off as patriotism—makes it difficult to claim this symbol as my own.

But I do love my country, damnit. I love that we set aside the most beautiful parts of this place to belong to all of us in our state and national parks. I love how many languages we speak. How many places we come from. How many ways we pray. I love that there are truths in the U.S. Constitution that even those who penned it could not possibly have understood the full power of.

I want to think of these things when I see the stars and stripes. I want to think of Sojourner Truth and Betty Soskin, Jimmy Carter and Dolly Parton, Amelia Earhart and Chita Rivera. I’m exhausted by seeing Old Glory and thinking instead of those who celebrate removing any mention of the Tuskegee Airmen from the Smithsonian’s website.

I want to take back my country’s flag.

And the term patriot, while we’re at it.

Why can it not be considered a form of patriotism to believe so deeply in what the United States of America has always said it is about that we refuse to settle for less? That we refuse to abandon this country to those who support policies based in little more than small-mindedness and self-interest?

And maybe this is why I keep thinking about interpretation. About who gets to say what a symbol means. About who benefits from calling their reading the only faithful one.

I’m not a terribly sophisticated political thinker, and I do not make a practice of writing about that part of life. Others are far more skilled and informed than I am. Not to mention I am prone to a wee bit of blinding rage, which is no good for anybody, especially me. So I try to stay in my lane. But my lane and this conversation overlap in this way: “constitutional originalism”—the belief that the most faithful way to interpret the Constitution is to try to discern what the framers intended it to mean—feels eerily similar to the belief that the most faithful way to interpret the Bible is to say GOD wrote it, so we should take every contradictory word of it literally through a so-called “plain reading.” I’m equally cynical about both, since the loudest proponents of these views have always been those who just so happen to benefit most from those particular interpretations.

Both approaches present themselves as simply “taking the text seriously.” But in practice, both can smuggle ideology in through the back door by pretending interpretation is not interpretation. And they get to hide behind these texts and say, Don’t be mad at me—this is what THE FRAMERS or GOD says. And then, as anyone who has studied history can attest, atrocities easily ensue.

But texts do not act by themselves. People interpret them. And when interpreters privilege the authority of dead men over the dignity of living people, the result is often that the vulnerable pay the price while the powerful call it faithfulness.

Not to mention that once a reading is labeled “plain” or “original,” dissent can be framed not just as disagreement, but as rebellion against God, law, order, or reality itself. That rhetorical move gives enormous cover to existing power.

But I DO dissent.

The biblical text, when treated as a Living Word and not simply a dead policy manual, allows meaning, comfort, and wisdom to unfold in both old and new ways for each community that studies it. It allows the Bible to surprise us, live in us, even interpret us.

Some may be tempted to walk away from the Bible altogether, and I understand why. I do. But I beg you to reconsider. Because as I’ve said before, scripture and theology are too potent to be left in the hands of those who only use them to justify their dominance over other people. We cannot cede our scriptures to them.

And perhaps the same can be said of the symbols and founding documents of this country. The cost of rejecting them feels too high when reimagining, redefining, and reclaiming are still available to us.

This last December, for his 83rd birthday, I gave my father a leather-bound copy of the U.S. Constitution and other foundational documents—inaugural addresses, Federalist Papers, speeches by Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, and, for some reason, the constitution of the New York Knickerbockers baseball club. He got a little teary, held it to his chest, and said thank you.

Maybe he understood something I am only now trying to say out loud: that love of country is not the same thing as uncritical loyalty. Sometimes it looks more like grief. Sometimes more like argument. Sometimes more like refusing to let a beautiful thing be used to bless our worst instincts.

So yesterday I patiently steamed the creases from an American flag and folded it into a perfect blue triangle on my dining room table, allowing myself to be affected by the beauty of this object before it is handed to my mother at my father’s memorial service.

And so here I am—it’s 4 o’clock in the morning—feeling unexpectedly tender toward a piece of folded cotton on my table, and still unwilling to surrender what it could mean. Maybe that, too, is a form of patriotism AND Christian faith: to hold something gently, grieve what has been done in its name, and still refuse to give up on what it could yet mean.

This last 8 months have been a doozie. I’ve had to step back from public life in most ways other than The Corners. I’m still here.

So thanks for sticking with me. Sending my love, Nadia.