As I look up and down my street I see a handful of US flags. One flies from the home next door. One leans off the wall of a large Hispanic family across the street. There is another a few houses down, too.
As much as flying a flag is a sign of some patriotism then not flying one isn’t a sign of much of anything. For some people who could but won’t fly the flag they also never put a candidate sign in the yard, for example.
Then there is me. Several years ago when we bought our house, I noticed the former owner left a United States flag flying from the front porch. I left it up. During the Biden administration, when a heavy storm bent the pole and made it unusable, I bought another.
I took it down in 2025. Maybe it was late 2024. I can’t remember exactly.
I wonder what the neighbors think. Once there was a flag, now there is not.
It’s not that I am indifferent to flag flying. I don’t fly it now because the flag has been co-opted by an authoritarian regime using patriotism to further its division.
I am not opposed to using the flag for a different message.
I had heard about a professor in Pennsylvania who posted an upside down flag – the universal sign of distress – in her campus office window after the 2016 election. She was pilloried online and in person. Administrators strongly suggested she take down the flag.
I wanted to repeat that bravery but the wife demurred. So we have nothing.
There are still moments where the flag isn’t connected to what’s being done to destroy our country.
That was what I thought as I stood alongside our town’s Memorial Day parade a few weeks ago.
My wife dressed our children in patriotic colors, with our oldest daughter in a flag shirt. We stood with a few hundred people and watched the fire engines, police cars, and high school band march down the street. Members of the high school’s ROTC chapter – all 15 of them – carried a flag like you see at an NFL game.
And now we face the next flag-laden holiday. America at 250. How does this Fourth of July land in my family?
Like most people, my wife and I are average citizens who vote, pay taxes, and participate in civic organizations.
But I am also in the unique position in the last year of publishing a critical book on Christian Nationalism whose chief subject – a leading conservative figure – was assassinated as it came out. From that, I have spoken at churches, community groups, and other places about the dangerous state of our democracy.
My year of public lecturing, media opportunities, and responding to attacks on my chosen career field of higher education has left me deeply worried. I have become cynical enough to lessen my CNN intake. I didn’t bother to vote in our state’s primary elections mainly because it seemed the races were already decided.
I want the corruption, incompetence, and destructiveness of the current administration to be met by an overwhelming majority of angry voters in the fall.
I want this Fourth of July to be a hinge moment. What Salmon Rushdie described as the moment when “it becomes essential to admit that the old forms will not do, the old ideas will not do, because all must be remade, all, with our best efforts, must be rethought, reimagined, and rewritten.”
He thought September 11 was a hinge. It turned out not to be. After the initial unity, we found ways to further divide, spy on our citizens, and sadly start a war that was based on lies. We are repeating and reaping from that moment today.
Rushdie offered his audience a choice in these hinge moments. In a 2002 lecture he said that “we will all be judged by how well we handle ourselves in this time. What will be the spirit of this frontier? Will we give the enemy the satisfaction of changing ourselves into something like his hate-filled illiberal mirror image? Or will we — as the guardians of the modern world, as the custodians of freedom and the occupants of the privileged land of plenty — go on trying to increase freedom and decrease injustice?”
I want this holiday to be something pivotal. Where we remember like we do on Memorial Day and then look to change because of what we recall. That is what birthdays are supposed to be like once you get past the teens.
But I am afraid it will not.
There will be many celebrations on this holiday. From the local to the national. But they will not be unifying. They will not be responsive. There will be pomp but few will reflect on our current circumstance.
If I can speak to the birthday celebrant: America, you are in trouble.
We are led by corruption and cowards, ideologies and idiots. But what is most distressing is that those who voted for them want the effects of all that to be felt most by the people they hate, who voted for the other guy.
And so we will continue going to high school football games, food truck rallies, and even church meetings all the while having treated this holiday like any other. Like it wasn’t a possible hinge moment.
But it could be. We could make the good choice Rushdie offers.
In that spirit, if we remember anything from that first Fourth and reflect on it enough to change our future, let it be this: no one is coming to save us. We are the ones we have been waiting on.
I’m in my late 40s. I’ve been alive for the last fifth of the country’s existence. Knowing what I know about the first two hundred years and living the rest, I know that the only way to defeat a Christian Nationalist minority is with a majority. One dedicated to American and religious values such as freedom, justice, and mercy.
That goes beyond voting. It has to be done throughout the year. But especially on days where the flag can be seen and felt.
Unless we do that, this holiday will be another in a line of fake patriotism burying real divides.
For that reason, I am not looking forward to the Fourth.
The Fourth this year will have my wife working a night shift at the hospital, me at home with the kids hoping the fireworks don’t scare them. At some point I’ll likely turn on the PBS celebration because it’s usually nice. Maybe I will go to bed early.
Matthew Boedy is a professor in Georgia and author of The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy. He lives in Gainesville, Georgia. He can be reached and read on Substack and other social media.
Unbound Social