LAST summer, St George flags popped up everywhere — on zebra crossings, mini roundabouts, and lamp-posts (Comment, 3 October 2025). “Operation Raise the Colours” was ostensibly non-partisan and all about inspiring patriotism; but it was hard not to connect it to the protests outside asylum hotels and view the nationalism that it promoted as exclusionary.
Against this backdrop, many church leaders are wondering whether they should fly the flag for St George’s Day. My encouragement would be to do so — and to use it as an opportunity to reflect on how we, as the Church of England, can foster a healthy kind of patriotism.
Healthy patriotism, I would argue, has three marks: honesty, particularity without exclusion, and an orientation towards the common good. Each of these presents a question to our worshipping communities.
FIRST, a patriotism that is healthy does not require a flattering account of the national past. It is willing to look at wrongdoing carried out in the nation’s name as well as its genuine achievements. Does our worship and teaching make space for that kind of honest reckoning? Do we tend to celebrate uncritically, or, perhaps just as problematic, fall into a habit of self-flagellation which diminishes the contributions that people have made, however imperfect, to our society?
Second, is our community genuinely inclusive? Healthy patriotism cherishes what is distinctive about a place and its people, without drawing hard lines around who truly belongs. Our churches serve everyone who lives in the parish; so it is right to ask: Who feels at home here, and who does not? How do our symbols, rituals, and stories send a message of welcome?
Third, is our vision outward-facing? Healthy patriotism is oriented towards the common good, asking what responsibilities the nation bears toward the wider world. A congregation that uses its gifts to serve the well-being of creation and people around the world who are suffering is adopting this posture well.
The Christian tradition has remarkable resources for the kind of patriotism which is worth commending — resources already embedded in our ordinary worship.
Take our practices of confession, lament, and praise, for example. Our liturgies combine an acknowledgement of our wrongdoing; prayers for our lives, communities, and the wider world to more closely fulfil God’s will for them; and thanksgiving for all that God has already done. This embrace of the complex picture of human life prepares us well for the honest and yet affectionate relationship with our history which healthy patriotism requires.
Praying regularly for those in authority, for enemies, for strangers, and for our global neighbour stretches our sympathies beyond boundaries.
Finally, the Christian tradition inhabits time in a way that equips it to resist two characteristic pathologies of nationalism. The first is nostalgia — the mythologising of a golden past that never quite existed, which underwrites a politics of grievance and loss. The second is its mirror image: a rootless progressivism that severs a people from its history and leaves it without the resources of memory.
THE Church holds together deep memory — scripture, liturgy, the calendar of saints — with eschatological hope: the conviction that history is moving towards a fulfilment not yet fully seen. A community that inhabits time this way can love its country and its past without being imprisoned by either.
We should be honest that, at times in our history, churches have failed spectacularly in all of this — faith has been weaponised in the service of crusades, colonialism, and an established cosiness with power that has too often baptised the interests of the powerful as the will of God. The resources that our tradition offers for healthy patriotism are hard-won, forged, in part, from the recollection of what happens without them. History is a reason for humility rather than withdrawal.
None of this, however, will communicate itself automatically. If a church raises the flag without explanation, some people will read it as a statement that they find troubling. Church leaders, in this political climate, will need to speak about this directly to both their congregation and the wider community, explaining that love of place is a gift to be received with gratitude and held with humility; that it goes alongside, not against, the welcome of the stranger; and that the cross at the centre of the flag speaks not of national superiority, but of sacrifice, suffering, and the redemption of all things.
In addition to the discussions in the congregation, a note on the noticeboard, online, or even in a local paper can extend the conversation to the curious passer-by — signalling to the wider neighbourhood what kind of community, and what kind of patriotism, the church stands for.
The framing should be honest about the flag’s contested history, clear about the church’s positive intention, and grounded in theology. The goal is not simply to pre-empt criticism with a disclaimer, but to invite the congregation into an act of deliberate meaning-making — to be participants in enriching the symbol, and in realising a community to which we are all proud to belong.
The Rt Revd Martyn Snow is the Bishop of Leicester.
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