The Christian Nationalist Danger Behind the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ Flag

Justice Samuel Alito appears fond of insurrectionist symbols, and he isn’t alone.

Justice Samuel Alito appears fond of insurrectionist symbols. The New York Times reported last week that the justice flew an upside-down American flag at his home in the D.C. area in 2021 after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. His far-right views did not spare his beach home, either, where he displayed an “Appeal to Heaven” flag last summer, the paper reported on Wednesday. On Thursday, ProPublica reported that Leonard Leo, the conservative Catholic judicial activist who heads the Federalist Society, flew it outside his estate in Maine. Speaker Mike Johnson, an Evangelical Protestant, displays it outside his congressional office.

But what does the flag mean? Although it looks innocuous enough, it has become popular within the right wing over recent years. Capitol rioters carried it on January 6, 2021; so have militia members. In their hands, it’s more than an anti-government totem. It represents something else, says scholar Matthew D. Taylor: a hardened form of Christian nationalism. Taylor, author of the forthcoming book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, spoke with me a day after the Times revealed Alito’s second flag. Taylor not only explained the meaning of the Appeal to Heaven flag but described its roots, which run deep within a movement bent upon Christian supremacy in the United States.

Everyone’s talking about Justice Alito at the moment because he displayed an Appeal to Heaven flag. I know you were quoted in the Times story about that as well. What was your reaction when you learned that he had flown an Appeal to Heaven flag?
When I was helping out with the story and even giving the quote, I actually didn’t know which justice was involved. Jodi Kantor and the Times wanted to keep a close hold on that piece of information, so I just knew we were talking about an Appeal to Heaven flag being flown by a Supreme Court justice in the 2023 time span. And I was surprised but not shocked. So when I first started digging into this three years ago, trying to trace these networks and track these ideas and viral theologies that gave rise to January 6, I would’ve been shocked then to think that these symbols could be trafficked by leaders at the highest levels of government. But the last three years have given me a deep acquaintance with just how much connectivity there is between these religious-right activist networks and the circles of power in the Republican Party and in conservative politics. And it was Brad Onishi and I who wrote the first article exposing that Mike Johnson flies the Appeal to Heaven flag outside his congressional office.

I’m honestly much more puzzled as to how Sam Alito even came to think about that flag and came to fly it. I really don’t know what the chain of transmission is, either of the flag itself or of the idea of the flag. He’s Catholic. As far as I know, he’s not a charismatic Catholic.

I was going to ask you about Mike Johnson. Obviously, Johnson is Protestant and comes from an Evangelical background, and Alito is Catholic. As you’ve said, you don’t really know the chain of transmission there, but could we talk about perhaps a unifying ideology?
Well, the unifying ideology of the Christian right is broadly called Christian nationalism. America, either at its founding or in its essence, is a Christian nation, and any deviation from a conservative interpretation of Christianity is a travesty in American culture. The American government and American public square need to be aligned around Christianity.

Now, there are soft forms of Christian nationalism and there are more hardened forms of Christian nationalism. Soft forms of Christian nationalism are more sentimental, more vaguely patriotic God and country, flag and the cross, “We just want a good Christian America.” You try to drill down on that and say, What does that mean? “Christian values in government.” What values? “Love and harmony and peace.” That doesn’t sound too scary. But these hardened forms of Christian nationalism and what I call Christian supremacy are very aggressive, very organized, and have a very clear agenda, and that’s the world the Appeal to Heaven flag comes out of. It’s not a symbol of a generic, placid, passive Christian nationalism. It is a symbol of an aggressive vision of Christian nationalism driven by spiritual warfare and prophecy and the intent to remake America in the image of a very conservative Christianity.

Dutch Sheets comes to the idea of the Appeal to Heaven flag in 2013. He was the executive director at a Bible college called Christ for the Nations Institute. He invited a mentee of his, an army captain who is, in their terminology, a spiritual son, to an event. And so this army captain presents the Appeal to Heaven flag to Dutch onstage and tells the narrative of this flag — and some of it is historical; some of it is interpretive. He says that this flag was commissioned by George Washington to fly over the Massachusetts Navy, which is all true, as far as we can tell.

And then here’s the piece of interpretation. The captain says, “So this is the flag under which the United States was born because it predates the stars and the stripes and it’s there at the time of the Declaration of Independence.” And that is the narrative that Dutch has attached to: this idea that the Appeal to Heaven flag signifies a sort of primal covenant that God made with the United States even before it was called the United States. And some of this goes back to the ways they read different accounts of Jamestown and the Puritans and different prayers that were prayed and covenants that were made, but they believe that there is this ancient covenant between America and God and that the Appeal to Heaven is about bringing America back into alignment with that covenant.

Many readers might be familiar with Paula White due to her association with Donald Trump. Could you explain a little bit more what figures like Paula White and Dutch Sheets actually preach and which sector of Christianity they tend to belong to?
So with these folks, we are talking about a sector of Christianity that we scholars call “independent charismatic Christianity.” In some ways, it’s the nondenominational wing of Pentecostalism. And so it’s a world without a lot of clear boundaries. It’s a world of entrepreneurial leaders who, using their skills and charisma and savvy, create ministries and attract audiences. It’s one of the fastest-growing segments of American Christianity, one of the only segments of American Christianity that is growing, and it is a segment of global Christianity that is growing almost unbelievably rapidly.

It’s a style of spirituality that thrives in this anti-institutional environment that we’re living in because it’s not built around institutions with bylaws and committees and long legacies. It’s built around these charismatic individuals. And Paula White and Dutch Sheets are both celebrities in that world, and, really, many of the NAR [New Apostolic Reformation] leaders are celebrities. It’s a niche world of charismatic media — there are dedicated podcasts, dedicated YouTube channels. So it’s a world that if you don’t have direct contact with, it feels very foreign, but it’s a world with millions of people in it in the United States who are tracking these ideas, who are believing these prophecies, and who are following these charismatic celebrities — and they have almost a level of religious and spiritual authority that goes far beyond your everyday pastor.

You mentioned the NAR. What’s the relationship between independent charismatic Christianity as you’ve described it and the New Apostolic Reformation?
If we think in terms of concentric circles, independent charismatic Christianity would be the biggest circle. The NAR is always kind of the smallest circle but because it’s a network of leaders. Those leaders are highly influential in charismatic media, in these apostolic and prophetic networking circles, and the leaders of the NAR are some of the most influential luminaries of the independent-charismatic world. And when I say world, I mean world. I’m talking about a global, independent-charismatic culture that has many transnational ties, and the NAR leaders are global celebrities.

That’s interesting because I had once considered the NAR to be relatively fringe, but now that seems to certainly no longer be the case.
So a colleague of mine, Paul Djupe, is a political scientist at Denison University, and we put together a survey earlier this year to see how far these ideas had spread. What we found was that of the seven NAR-originated statements that we tested, six out of seven got more than 50 percent approval among American Evangelicals. And these are ideas like “There are modern-day apostles and prophets who should have an integral role in the leadership of the church.” I grew up Evangelical. I grew up even charismatic Evangelical. I never heard that idea. But now, more than 50 percent of American Evangelicals affirm that idea.

The NAR were some of the first Christian leaders to get onboard the Trump train. There were many Evangelical leaders who gave these wishy-washy “I’m voting for Trump as the lesser of two evils. I’m voting for Trump because of the Supreme Court. I’m voting for Trump because Hillary Clinton is bad.” The NAR were the people saying, “We are voting for Trump because he is God’s anointed. Because Donald Trump is a type of a Cyrus. He has a Cyrus-anointing on him.” And the origins of the Cyrus idea comes from Dutch Sheets’s friend Lance Wallnau, another major NAR leader. In 2015, Paula White begins to gather independent-charismatic celebrities to meet with Trump, and that’s when Lance Wallnau is brought in and it’s this claim that he makes as he meets with Trump: that he believes that God reveals to him that Donald Trump is a type of a Cyrus akin to what is described in Isaiah chapter 45. And if you read that passage, Cyrus is called anointed, and when we’re talking anointed in biblical terms, the Hebrew term there is where we get the term messiah.

Cyrus is a type of a messiah in the biblical frame. He’s not the Messiah. He’s a messiah. He’s an anointed savior of Israel who sends the Jews back from exile in Babylon. And so how do you get to this situation today where there is this quasi-messianic attachment to Donald Trump? Well, the NAR is at the heart of that story. They’re the ones who have popularized those ideas. And I think the popularity of those ideas has increased as Trump has consolidated his hold on American Evangelicalism — that the ideas that were used to propagate and propagandize Christian Trumpism have become popular along with Christian Trumpism.

Can you explain briefly what the Seven Mountains are and how they factor into this story?
The framework of the Seven Mountains was coined by Lance Wallnau in the year 2000, and he’s blending together different dreams and visions that he’d heard about from other leaders. The idea is that in society and at every level of society, there are these seven arenas of influence: government, family, religion, education, arts and entertainment, media, and commerce. You imagine them as a mountain, and at the top of that mountain, the position of control is either held by Satan and the demons or by God and the Christians.

And so the goal of Christians is the mandate. This isn’t framed as a suggestion. It’s framed as “This is what God commands.” It’s for Christians to take control of each of those mountains, to ascend to the top of the mountain, to do spiritual warfare to displace the demons that control that mountain and then to take over control of that sector of society and let Christian influence flow down into it.

If you think of most Evangelical politics, the political mobilization of the religious right in the 20th century, the goal is to mobilize the grass roots. I mean, even in the phrase the Moral Majority, you get the sense that it’s about mobilizing this majority to win elections. But the Seven Mountains is a vanguard approach to societal revolution. It’s about taking over positions of influence to change society from the top.

This is not just kind of a run-of-the-mill Christian nationalism, “We want society to be more Christian.” It’s a dedicated program. It’s an outline for how to enact Christian supremacy in society. And it’s scalable — in your community, in your city, in your neighborhood, but you’re also talking about the Seven Mountains at a national level. And they believe that these same Seven Mountains are in every society. The Seven Mountains has become popularized, but from the start, it is a strategy for how to transform societies using targeted Christian influence at very influential positions.

How much of a threat is this hardened strain of Christian nationalism, as you put it a bit earlier?
The efforts of the religious right in the 1980s and 1990s were channeled into the mechanisms and the rules of democracy: “We need more voters. We need more Christian lawmakers. We need to use the tools of democracy to change culture.” And in my view, all of that is within the rules. All of that is how pluralistic democracies are supposed to work. There’s all kinds of different interest groups, and while I might not agree with one of their policy points, they were operating within the rules. But what has emerged more recently is this move toward Christian supremacy, which is not really concerned with the rules of democracy.

Dutch Sheets made it very, very clear after the 2020 election, as he’s leading all these different efforts that ultimately culminate on January 6, that he’s not interested in what the American voters chose. The American voters are also populated and possessed by demons. He cares about what God’s will is for the election, and he wants to see God’s will enacted in America by hook or by crook. And he says in his podcasts, “God does not want Joe Biden to be president.” So at some point when you have Christians aligning around the idea that the only voice that truly matters in American democracy is God’s voice, well, you’ve given up democracy.

The fact that those ideas are becoming more popular among American Evangelicals and Christians in general signals that we should be very worried about this upcoming election. What is Donald Trump willing to do to stay out of prison? He has legions of Christian followers whose theology and whose attachment to these prophecies tell them that the only way Trump could lose is through a demonic conspiracy that is their job to overthrow. So we are tumbling toward another potentially slow-moving constitutional crisis with violence threatened, if not enacted. That is a scary, scary prospect. And if Trump wins, these people will populate his advisers or his circles of official and unofficial advisers, and they will be in the catbird seat to organize a policy agenda.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.