Outside sporting occasions, the sudden emergence of flags is seldom a good sign. It’s usually an early warning sign of a power grab. It spells trouble.
Of all the Catholic martyrs, 85-year-old Polycarp heads my list of inspirational heroes of the faith. In refusing to burn a pinch of incense to the deity of the Roman Emperor, Polycarp said: “86 years have I served Jesus and He has done me no wrong. How can I then blaspheme my king and saviour?” He wasn’t asked to do much. Just sprinkle some incense as a recognition of the crazed emperor’s ego-mania spilling over into a divinity complex. But he refused.
The unwillingness of the early Church to bow down and worship state gods is part of the rich inspiring myth and history of the Church. It set Christians apart. Their morals and their ideals were pitched so differently from their “bread and circuses” neighbours. But they had to take a stand. And from time to time, as Jesus said it would, it cost some of them their lives.
Social media was thick and bust with two particular images recently. They were flags. Flags have always been about identity and power. They tell passers-by, “this is who we are, and we are in control”.
One was at the White House. The Pride flag was made the centre-piece of a flag display celebrating “Pride month”, with the Stars and Stripes appearing to cede precedence. Social conservatives were outraged by this, but there was more unconventional stuff to come. At a reception celebration gay and trans, Rose Montoya, a gay trans activist model, who had just been introduced to President Biden, jiggled “their” naked breasts in celebration for the camera, in images that were gratuitously flashed around the world via social media.
Closer to home a different video, shot at night in Regents Street. Workmen on raised platforms were flooding the sky between the buildings with pride flags, as it happens replacing the national flag. As one last Union Jack fluttered lamely and lumpy to the road, angry bystanders shouted at the orange jump suited contractors, “You’re pulling down the wrong (adjectival) flags mate. “We know mate,” came the emollient and grim reply. But they were employees, and following orders.
The ambitions that the Pride flag expresses have grown exponentially. It is to be found everywhere. On police cars, on Government buildings, throughout universities, schools, hospitals, etc. It hasn’t escaped the warier sociologists that it has become or it is acting like a religion.
Semiotics works both rationally and sublimely. Different people will see the Pride flag as representing different values. Not many people are aware that when Gilbert Baker designed the flag in 1979, he intended each colour to represent a value that mattered to the pan-sexual community.
The fact that sex (pink), magic (turquoise) and spirit ({which one?} (violet) head the list, followed by life (red), sunlight (yellow), nature (green) and serenity (indigo), ought to give us something to think about. Working backwards, invoking “spirit” to use “magic” (an aspiration for control) to promote sex is quite some project.
And it has worked. If we had not got the message from the marginalisation in the public and increasingly now the private sector of anyone not on board with Pride values, control has indeed been achieved. That’s the message of the flags.
Perhaps the symbolism of the flag is not just artistic fancy and whimsy. Since magic is understood by the Catholic Church to provide the means to evoke “the anti-spirit” to unshackle sexual appetite, and the outcome is a movement calling itself “Pride”, they can hardly be accused to trying to hide what it stands for. Perhaps Christians should take the ambitions of the Pride movement in its own self-understanding a little more seriously than just attributing to it specious notions of inclusion and social justice?
Because behind the invocation of sex and “liberation” there has been a very serious philosophical shift, with consequences that are hard to underestimate.
The first step in this re-evaluation is to ask how it is that a very small percentage of the population have effected a take-over of this scale. The ONS has put the numbers of homosexual people at about 1.8 per cent of the population. Let’s be generous and double it to 4 per cent to avoid arguing about tiny numbers. How has 4 per cent of the population achieved this? And the answer is that they haven’t. It has a required a shift in attitude of the 96 per cent.
We have gay marriage because the straight majority decided that defining ourselves by our sexual and erotic longings was a congenial way to understand what we were here for. Our society came to see sexuality as something primarily for personal pleasure and self-expression, detaching procreation from it. In fact seeing pregnancy not just as secondary but such a problem that all moral judgements about destroying the pre-born child were smothered and censored.
The Pride flag says “we are here for sex”.
The Bible says we are here to know, love, serve and be reconciled to God within limits that constrain all our other longings.
Christianity advises that to recover the image and likeness of God, the only path is humility. Pride confronts this head on, and celebrates Pride.
Suddenly, instead of being a movement of liberation for the downtrodden, it emerges and a movement of self-realisation in a form of rebellion against the Creator. How do we judge this? Pro creativity gives way to sterility. Humility gives way to pride. The soul gives way to the body. Angelic deteriorates into animalistic.
If the Church has been slow to recognise the real theological ambition of Pride, Pride has not. The first people to be exempted from inclusion are the Christians.
What can we do to liberate the 96 per cent from a programme that carries them away from their creator, and away from heaven.
Whilst the Church remains faithful to the proper constraint and experience of sex within marriage, it may be too late to persuade a society that is addicted to sex, and has developed a capitalism that is predicated on sex-selling, that it should change its minds. Sex may be too highly charged to be capable of being discussed. Maybe we need to start somewhere else?
Pride itself may be a better target. After all, we all know that proud people are neither loving or loveable. Proud people are bullies. Proud people are full of themselves, certain they are right and superior, and difficult to live with. In practice, actually, no one really likes pride. And, it has consequences. It isolates people. That in turn matters because we have discovered that beyond our captivating by sex, we have a deeper longing, which is not to be lonely.
Loneliness has become an epidemic. It has unleashed depression and misery on a wide and unforgiving scale. But in response to this we also know that the one barrier to offering the lonely the cheerful and generous companionship the human heart pines for is pride.
Pride keeps the human soul locked in its prison of self-imposed alienation from God, and all human beings carry in the deepest parts of the soul, out of sight of the mind, a longing for the God who made them.
The crucifix is of course the greatest antidote to pride. There the humility of God’s rescue mission could not be clearer. But perhaps the Church needs its own flag, that Christians could quietly begin to display, emblazoned in gentle and elegant calligraphy, “Humility”.
We are being faced not with a new national emblem, but with a sign that has pretentions to a wider university, that constitutes a new religion.
Perhaps the old religion that is so well practiced in the love of the soul as opposed to the body, and service not power, prayer not magic, humility not pride, could begin to flex its responsibilities and gently and but persistently suggest to our wounded and befuddled neighbours that the mangled rainbow and allegiance to it, is a mistake.
We are after all being invited to worship false gods. A panoply of old gods have re-emerged wrapping themselves in the pride flag, – gods of sex and confusion, rebellion and control. They are not very different from the old pagan gods, and not even very different from the old Roman emperors.
We must avoid burning incense on their altars, and honouring their flag.
Obviously we owe it to Jesus, the embodiment of humility himself, but also to Polycarp, without whom the Church would not be here. The emperor has no clothes – ditch the flag.
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