Earlier this month I attended the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Advocacy in Action in Washington, D.C. On the fourth day of the gathering we headed to Capitol Hill to meet with our various representatives.

On the walk to the six buildings in which every U.S. senator and House representative offices, CBF’s director of advocacy, Jennifer Hawks, casually mentioned to me that — given my interest in Christian nationalism — I might be interested in seeing the Christian nationalist flags some of these politicos choose to fly alongside the American flag outside their offices.

Of course I was interested.

This is how I ended up spending six hours walking a total of 19 miles through the six office buildings at the Capitol. I walked by every single elected official’s office to document exactly which of them fly these flags.

Symbols and their changing meanings

According to Merriam-Webster, the very first definition of a symbol is “an authoritative summary of faith or doctrine: creed.”

Yet because symbols are referents and stand in for something else, the meanings of symbols change over time. The most obvious example of this is the swastika.

For nearly 7,000 years, the swastika symbolized “good fortune” and “well-being” across multiple cultures including those in India, China, Africa, native America and Europe. But after Adolf Hitler adopted the symbol for the Nazi flag, the meaning of the symbol changed.

It’s interesting to note how Americans responded to the changing nature of the swastika during and after World War II. An archived article from The New York Times dated June 11, 1938, announced that New York Hospital was removing two swastikas from its 335-foot chimney and replacing them with crosses because the symbol no longer pointed toward well-being.

“Sometimes the meaning behind a symbol becomes so horrifying that the symbol must be retired from use.”

“More than 100 anonymous donors contributed $1,000 for the alteration, which is being made in response to numerous complaints that the swastika has taken on a new meaning since the pre-Hitler days when the chimney was designed and constructed,” the article explained. “The two swastikas, which were built into the east and west faces of the chimney as age-old symbols of human welfare, are being converted into Greek crosses to conform with those on the north and south faces.”

The $1,000 necessary to remove the swastikas in 1938 was the equivalent of about $22,500 today. And each individual $100 donation made to that cause equals about $2,250 today. Various “religious and national groups” raised and delivered the equivalent of $22,500 quickly during the Great Depression and work began less than four months later to replace the swastikas on the building.

Those we know as The Greatest Generation who came of age during World War II understood that sometimes the meaning behind a symbol becomes so horrifying that the symbol must be retired from use.

They didn’t fight the changing meaning of the symbol or complain that its erasure from the building was somehow an erasure of their identity. They valued unity and human decency above ego.

The flags: From history to January 6

The day after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021, journalists Anne Quito and Amanda Shendruk published an article documenting some of the flags and other symbols seen during the attempted insurrection the previous day.

Many others followed suit, including the creators of the website Uncivil Religion (a collaboration of the University of Alabama’s Department of Religious Studies and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History) a digital resource documenting that day.

Here is one of many images from January 6 that show some of the flags carried that day by rioters as they stormed the Capitol and beat police officers.