An Arizona Senate committee later Wednesday morning is expected to consider a bill that would require HOAs to allow homeowners to fly the “An Appeal to Heaven” flag. State law already requires HOA’s to allow residents to fly certain flags, including the Gadsden flag, service branch flags, first responder flags, the Arizona state flag and any historic version of the American flag, among others.
The “An Appeal to Heaven” flag features a pine tree against a white backdrop, with the words “An Appeal to Heaven” above the tree. The flag dates back to the American Revolution, but in recent years has been adopted as a symbol of Christian nationalism.
But how do flags that were designed for one cause come to be associated with another?
To find out, The Show spoke with Leslie Hahner, a professor at Baylor University, where she studies the rhetoric of symbols and symbolism. The conversation started with the role flags generally play in terms of people identifying who they are and what they stand for.
Full conversation
LESLIE HAHNER: There is a basic human need to both belong to a community, but to also identify oneself in a unique way, and flags or other symbols allow that complexity of identification. We can fly a flag to say, I belong to this nation, to this state, to this community. But it also marks our belonging to the public in a way that helps us identify who we are, both within a community and as an individual.
MARK BRODIE: For how long has it been a thing that people will fly flags other than, for example, their state flag or the United States flag or maybe even like the flag of a sports team, but they, you know, flags that relate to other causes?
HAHNER: We've seen a steady increase in flags as a form of identification since about the 1980s. If you think about how LGBTIQ+ flags came into being, as well as other cause flags. So think of, even leading into the 1980s, POW/MIA flags, missing in person flags, those types of symbols began to take on more popularity as there became a more of a feeling of alienation among the populace.
So if you look at U.S. culture, for example, you'll see those flag sales and those modes of identification begin to increase in the ‘80s and ‘90s significantly. By the time we get to the 2000s and now the 2010s, those forms of identification have become even more compelling, not just to a domestic audience, but to whole sorts of audiences.
BRODIE: How much of that is new flags that are being designed or developed for particular causes or communities and How much of this is people looking back at older flags? I'm thinking, for example, of the Gadsden flag, the don't tread on me flag, which is a very old one, which was sort of retaken by the Tea Party, you know, over the last couple of decades for potentially a new meaning.
HAHNER: I'd say it's a mixture of both. I'd say about 50/50. So, for example, the Gadsden flag or the pine tree flag are 18th or 19th century symbols that have become increasingly more resonant with audiences. And we find that resonance because people are constantly looking for ways to differentiate their community and who they are. In the commercial world, we see this even more so. So football flags, for example, are creating record sales now where they wouldn't in previous years.
BRODIE: How does it come to be that older flags take on newer meanings? Like, how did it come to be that the Gadsden flag represented or came to represent what it did, or the Betsy Ross flag, or now the “An Appeal to Heaven” flag? Like, how does that happen? How does that evolve?
HAHNER: What's fascinating to me is that historically speaking, every flag that has been selected typically must go through a very material process of circulation, such that enough audience members see that symbol and connect it to a particular ideology. So if we go back to the Gadsden flag, that flag has been linked to different causes over the years, and the more repetition of that flag with an associated cause helps us to understand how it becomes, say, associated with the Tea Party or associated with a particular type of Make America Great Again conservative, for example.
BRODIE: Does it pose a challenge though if over the years it's associated with different causes, like does that make it more difficult for people to associate it with any one in particular?
HAHNER: Yes, in fact, the more a symbol circulates with assorted different links to different concepts or ideas, the more difficult it is to re-signify it or to move that symbol in different directions.
So, the Gadsden flag right now is seen as a very, very conservative symbol, and yet, it could mean other things. It could mean all sorts of things. So, for example, in Texas, I see that flag all the time, but it means something different to Texans than it does to the rest of the United States. it tends to signify a Texan attitude more than a U.S.-based attitude.
BRODIE: And in terms of the regulation of flags, I'm curious where you fall on that in terms of like homeowners associations or other entities trying to regulate what flags people are allowed to fly or not, like, are, are some maybe so hurtful or inflammatory that that they shouldn't be allowed to be flown in certain places.
HAHNER: So I have three comments I'll make here. The first is that a lot of neighborhood associations in Texas and in Arizona and many other states are banning the flying of political flags because they've seen how neighbors divide against one another when they fly those political flags. So I think the choice to ban certain flags is an attempt to create a stronger sense of belonging in a community.
However, on the flip side of that, when you ban a flag, it creates sometimes more incentive for people to fly that flag. So there's a bit of a struggle there over what symbols can do and how we ought to ban them. That said, the most effective, and this is my third point, the most effective way to deal with sort of the struggle over symbols is to create community incentives toward belonging.
So that's what I find so fascinating about the attraction to football flags or the attraction to community-based flags, say, city flags, for example. Because those are an attempt to get away from the negative ideology that we see that often causes division. And during, from 2016 through the present, flags have been flown often more to create division than to create connection. So I think what we're seeing in neighborhoods is a struggle over whether or not banning something actually helps create more community or whether or not community must be protected by protecting the symbol.
BRODIE: Is it safe to say, do you think, that the internet and social media maybe more specifically have sort of accelerated the speed at which flags can be adopted by particular groups for particular causes?
HAHNER: Yes, throughout the history of different types of symbols, we see people attracted to those symbols over time, and it may take years historically for a symbol to reach prominence. Even something as simple as the American flag, for example, changed dramatically over the years. What we see in this moment is that the internet accelerates the pace at which those symbols become adopted dramatically. To the point where a symbol can change now within one week to two weeks and dramatically change the way that culture and people respond to that symbol.
