Rescuing the pine tree flag

By Leon Galis

Just when I think I’m late to the party again, somebody breathes new life into U. S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s flag or wife issues, as the case may be. The latest to weigh in is Faithful America, a “community of Christians putting faith into action for love and social justice.” Theorganization recently put faith into action by petitioning Justice Alito to resign. Like that’s going to happen.

What’s been missing in all the media noise about this is more than a passing reference to the actual history of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag (aka Pine Tree flag) that graced the Alitos’New Jersey vacation home. The chattering classes didn’t get much further than reports that it saw duty during the American Revolution, was a favorite of the January 6th insurrectionists and has been appropriated recently by Christian nationalists.

I was tempted to give The New York Times points for crediting seventeenth century philosopher and physician John Locke for coming up with the “appeal to heaven” phrase. But then I noticed that it took four reporters to chase down that factoid.And having uncovered it, they reported some scholars’ brief musings about what Locke was up to when he coined the phrase. But the story focused on more recent displays of the flag and any messages the Alitos might have flown it to send.

A flag can mean anything anybody wants it to. I get that. But if our insurrectionists and Christian nationalists mean to be wrapping themselves in the actual history of the Pine Tree flag to establish their bona fides, they’re getting it all wrong.

Insurrectionists first. Locke spelled out what you might take as a defense of revolution in An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government, the Second Treatise of Government for short. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, ranked Locke among the three greatest people who ever lived, and Locke’s fingerprints were all over the Declaration. So we need at least a Cliff Notes understanding of Jefferson’s debt to Locke. Neither bears much resemblance to the “patriots” who trashed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. .

Locke started from the premise that the only reason ultimately that we could have for submitting to the coercive power of government is to enjoy more security for our lives, liberty and the fruits of our labor than we could otherwise expect. Our right to life, liberty, and property hasn’t, he thought, been conferred on us by any human agency or institution. Rather, it’s a “natural” right, one that we can lay claim to just because we’re rational beings.

It's worth lingering over that point for a second. On Locke’s story, life, liberty and “estate” (that is, your stuff) aren’t three separable goods. Rather, they’re all of a piece. If you’re at the total disposal of somebody else, in other words, have no liberty, neither your life nor your possessions are your ownbecause you have both only at the pleasure of whoever has total power over you. To be in that condition is to be a slave. But no one could have a good reason for voluntarily agreeing to be anybody’s slave.

It's to escape exactly that condition that people authorize legislative bodies to enact laws binding on everyone equally for the purpose of securing everyone’s right to life, liberty and estate more effectively than anyone could by their own solitary exertions. And when disputes arise as they inevitably will about what the duly enacted laws permit and prohibit, since we all tend to be biased in our own favor, everyone is guaranteed access to neutral and impartial judges to resolve the disputes.  

What Locke means by “revolution” isn’t exactly what you might think. Locke wasn’t Steve Bannon and certainly not Lenin. In the last section of his Treatise, he doesn’t lay out a program, as Lenin did, for what we’d now call “regime change.” Rather, he described the conditions under which there would be what it’s more accurate to describe as “regime collapse.”

That happens like this. Everybody has the right to resist assaults on their right to life, liberty and estate, a right, remember, that we never have a good reason to forfeit. People will put up with governments that make mistakes and even inconvenience them with laws and policies they dislike. But when the government takes repeated actions, which Locke catalogues, over an extended period making it starkly obvious that the governors are bent on reducing the people to slavery, there is no regime anymore. There is only a state of war, in which there are no neutral, impartial judges to whom people could appeal to vindicate their rights. Rather, the only appeal left is “to heaven,” everyone being thrown back on their right of self-defense, hoping that God, the Supreme Judge of all, is on their side.

The people, on this story, don’t set in motion the train of events that cast them and their governors into a state of war. It’s the governors who do that by attempting to reduce the population under their jurisdiction to slavery. The “revolution” that ensues is the justified resistance of the people to assaults on their life, liberty and estate, the protection of which was the whole point of submitting to government authority in the first place.

Thomas Jefferson follows exactly this outline in the Declaration of Independence. In my edition, it’s three and half pages long, two pages of which read like a twenty-seven-count indictment of the British Crown. (The seventh count charges that the Crown has obstructed immigration of foreigners to the colonies. It’s amazing how much things can change in two hundred and forty-eight years).

The people who waved the Pine Tree flag and chanted “1776!” as they stormed the Capitol and called for the Vice President to be hanged were doing that at the instigation of a presidential candidate claiming election fraud for which no evidence was forthcoming. But Jefferson and his confederates were in an exponentially more dire circumstance, resisting, among other things, “…large Armies of foreign Mercenaries [sent] to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy [of] the Head of a civilized nation….”

Compared to the “long train of abuses and usurpations” that Jefferson pointed to in the Declaration, the January 6th mobhighjacked the original Pine Tree flag as a prop in the enactment of an appallingly destructive fantasy. I have no idea what fantasy the Alitos were enacting.

As for the Christian nationalists, we can make short work of them.

Jefferson didn’t invent the doctrine of the separation of church and state. John Locke did in his Letter Concerning Toleration, written in 1689 nearly a hundred years before the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom was ratified.

Although Locke didn’t say so explicitly, his argument is clearly based on probably the best-known passage in the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” That became the basis for the Protestant view that we’re saved by faith, not by works alone. Locke, subscribing to it without reservation, argued that it utterly destroys the pretentions of any government to secure salvation for those under its authority by any exercise of state power. The only road to salvation, Locke argued, isuncoerced, sincere belief, necessarily and unalterably private.Since government action can reach only our outward conduct and not our free, private beliefs, assuring or obstructing our salvation is beyond the power of any government whatever.

It follows from that, Locke says, that “…the Church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original, end, business, and in everything perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other.”

Locke even anticipated our Christian nationalists by pointing out that those among his contemporaries who held similar views were asking the wrong question. So are our Christian nationalists. The crucial question isn’t whether George Washington and his founding generation contemporaries established a Christian commonwealth but whether God did. And on that Locke is certain that “…there is absolutely no such thing under the Gospel as a Christian commonwealth.” 

What Locke’s views on religious tolerance make clear is why there’s no occasion in a well-ordered, functioning polity for “appeals to heaven.” In that setting, the only appeals to heaven that are in order are the ones that are private and personal. Otherwise, appeals regarding your right to life, liberty, and estate are to be heard by the agencies and institutions that society provides for that. The appeals to heaven memorialized by the Pine Tree flag beloved of our Christian nationalists are the only ones open to us when society has collapsed and it’s every man for himself. We’re not in that state just because kids can’t open the school day by reciting the Lord’s Prayer or wedding cake bakers offering a public service can’t discriminate against same-sex

If they’d read Locke and Jefferson with any care or at all, the January 6th mob might have persuaded themselves that they were kind of, sort of at least in Locke’s and Jefferson’s neighborhood. But the Christian nationalists marching under the banner of Locke’s “appeal to heaven” aren’t, as they like to complain, victims of “usurpations.” They’re usurpers themselves, conscripting the Pine Tree flag and Locke’s memorable words for purposes he famously and vigorously condemned.

Leon Galis is an Athens resident