What the Appeal to Heaven Flag Really Means
The religious activist responsible for its recent popularity wants it to be a banner for an extreme form of Christian nationalism.
LAST MONTH, NEWS BROKE that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had flown a white flag with an evergreen tree and the inscription “An Appeal to Heaven” at his beach house last summer. This came days after the revelation that an upside-down American flag had been flown at the Alito residence in January 2021, following the riot in the U.S. Capitol. Alito has claimed that his wife was responsible for both flags and that their political associations were unknown to him.
The justice’s evasiveness about these flags is understandable: Both were visible in the crowd during the January 6th riot, and both have come to be associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement and Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. But while many Republicans have embraced the upside-down flag as a sign of distress for the ship of state—many flew them in response to the recent news of Trump’s guilty verdict in his trial over the Stormy Daniels hush-money case—they have taken a different tack with the second banner, arguing that the Appeal to Heaven flag is merely an artifact from American history and should not be interpreted as a political signal. For his part, in a letter to Democratic senators, Justice Alito said he was “duty-bound” to decline to recuse himself from January 6th–related cases, arguing that “the use of an old historic flag by a new group does not necessarily drain that flag of all other meanings.”
But a flag is not merely a decorative item meant for personal enjoyment, like a painting hung in your home. When flown in public, flags become signals to the public: They are intended to send messages about one’s affinities and allegiances. I do not know the Alitos’ reasons for flying the Appeal to Heaven flag for several months last summer, but I have spent the past three years researching the Christian symbols, theologies, and ideologies of the January 6th rioters. The Appeal to Heaven flag was a quintessential part of the fervor and chaos of that day.
While the Appeal to Heaven flag is rooted in American history, it has taken on a whole raft of new connotations in the past decade. And in that timespan, it has also grown far more popular than it has been since it was first flown. These flags have proliferated in public buildings and government offices not as a celebration of American independence, but as a coded endorsement of an ongoing Christian nationalist crusade, hidden in plain sight.
The original Appeal to Heaven flag was introduced on the eve of the American Revolution. It was commissioned by George Washington to fly over the small Massachusetts navy in 1775. The phrase “an appeal to heaven” was a popular slogan of that era that originated in a treatise in which John Locke argued that citizens can only abide tyrannical governments for so long before they “appeal to heaven”—that is, start a revolution, having exhausted every possible earthly appeal for justice.
That’s the history that House Speaker Mike Johnson and others claim to be celebrating by flying the flag. But in my research, I have found no systematic or popular use of this flag until 2013. It was then that the flag began to assume its contemporary connotations. And Johnson would know: The person responsible for the recent co-opting of the symbol is a religious leader with whom the speaker is well acquainted.
AT A GRADUATION CEREMONY for a small Bible college in 2013, the Appeal to Heaven flag was presented to the evangelical activist and former pastor Dutch Sheets, who came to believe this flag was a prophetic sign of another revolution that would spiritually redeem America from liberal tyranny. Sheets thereafter launched a protracted and influential campaign to promote the Appeal to Heaven flag as the banner of America’s Christian reclamation and to enlist government officials and Christian activists to promote Christian nationalism at the federal, state, and local levels.
It is impossible to understand the significance and centrality of this curiously named man for contemporary American politics without first understanding the religious subculture he represents. Sheets understands himself to be a modern-day prophet and an apostle sent with a special mission to return America to its Christian roots. For the past quarter century, he has been part of the inner core of a movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Sheets was mentored by the movement’s founder, a renegade evangelical seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner, who set out to revolutionize the church.
The NAR is an amorphous nondenominational Charismatic movement within contemporary Protestant Christianity. Almost all the NAR leaders understand themselves to be apostles and prophets, endowed by God with immense spiritual authority. Revival is the NAR’s leitmotif, and NAR churches believe they are playing a role in the emergence of a global Great Awakening, presaging the end times.
Wagner came to believe that he was one of these latter-day apostles and that he should lead a wholesale restructuring of the governance of the modern church. He was fond of saying, “The New Apostolic Reformation is the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation.” While the boundaries of the NAR can be difficult to pin down because of the informality of the movement, nearly all of the hundreds of energetic men and women who have joined NAR leadership networks identify as modern apostles and prophets, and they are also often pastors of local churches.
Wagner, Sheets, and other early NAR leaders put a significant emphasis on spiritual warfare; they imagined the world to be dominated by a malevolent hierarchy of demons the church was called to battle unceasingly. The mission of the apostles and prophets was to orchestrate massive campaigns against these principalities and powers so that Christians could take “dominion” over America and other nations.
In 2008, movement leaders were exhilarated by the news that one of their own—Sarah Palin, who had been personally mentored by an NAR prophet—had been named the Republican vice presidential candidate. Members of NAR networks believed Palin was a herald of their coming spiritual conquest of the nation, with Sheets and others prophesying her success in that fall’s election. The NAR vision briefly floundered when Barack Obama and Joe Biden won instead.
Dutch Sheets lamented Obama’s victory as a “rejection of God’s laws and a stealing from us of our godly heritage.” Even more pointedly, he argued that President Obama’s support for abortion rights facilitated “blood sacrifice that empowers demons.” At least once, Sheets parroted the right-wing lie that Obama is a secret Muslim. It was at this spiritual nadir that the revolutionary flag grabbed hold of Sheets’s imagination.
In early 2015, having become enthralled by the prophetic symbolism of the Appeal to Heaven flag, Sheets rolled out a new spiritual warfare campaign under the flag’s inscription, “An Appeal to Heaven.” He traveled around the country holding revival meetings over which he raised the banner. Sheets encouraged his conservative Christian audiences and readers to “rally to the flag. . . . Wave it outwardly; wear it inwardly.” Relying on far-reaching NAR networks to spread his message, Sheets helped reestablish the Appeal to Heaven flag as a revanchist symbol of counterrevolution, an inspiration to likeminded American Christians to redeem their country from the heathen Obama administration and its supporters.
That June, as Sheets’s campaign was starting to gain momentum, Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed in Breitbart advocating his cause. She urged lawmakers and elected officials to fly the Appeal to Heaven flag as a sign that “we would dedicate to God this land.”
This campaign emerged within weeks of reality TV host Donald Trump announcing his candidacy for U.S. president. The growth of the Appeal to Heaven campaign coincided with his political ascendancy, and his slow-moving consolidation of American evangelical support would follow. NAR leaders were among the first evangelical elites to endorse Trump in 2016. Sheets and fellow NAR prophet Cindy Jacobs mobilized their followers for him, seeing the real estate mogul as a vehicle for achieving Christian dominion. The prophecies and pronouncements NAR leaders and other Charismatic figures shared about Trump, then and since, have fueled the perception among sympathetic evangelicals that the man is anointed by God with a special purpose to lead the nation.
AS TRUMP BUILT HIS MOVEMENT, the Appeal to Heaven flag became ever more entwined with it. In 2019, Sheets and Jacobs were invited to the White House to help strategize for a prophecy, prayer, and spiritual warfare initiative that would accompany the 2020 Trump campaign. Among their collaborators was Paula White-Cain, Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, once described by the New York Times as the former president’s “personal pastor.”
Two weeks before the 2020 election, Trump visited an NAR church in Nevada. During the service, the hometown apostle got up on stage and unfurled an Appeal to Heaven flag. “It’s time to Appeal to Heaven,” he said to Trump, “Heaven has sent his angels to protect you. Heaven has sent an army of angels.” Sheets triumphantly posted a photo of the moment to his social media accounts.
When the election was declared for Joe Biden that year, leaders in the NAR movement became the commanding generals of a mass spiritual warfare campaign for Trump’s fallacious reinstatement with the Appeal to Heaven flag as their rallying standard. Echoing the central theme of Stop the Steal while mixing in new prophecies, Sheets galvanized Christians to reject the results of the 2020 election. “It is God’s will for Trump to win this, not Biden,” Sheets told the hundreds of thousands of people who regularly watched his daily videos in late November 2020. “We have no choice but to continue to fight.”
Then, eight days before January 6th, Dutch Sheets and a team of fifteen NAR apostles and prophets met for hours at the White House with Trump administration officials. When they emerged, they were reticent about who was involved and what was discussed, though a few later made cryptic comments like “strategy was given to us from people in the know” and “get ready to gallop and get your sword bloody in the spirit of God.”
On January 6th, as has been widely reported, those Appeal to Heaven flags Dutch Sheets did so much to popularize among his followers could be found peppered throughout the riotous crowds that surrounded the Capitol. Cindy Jacobs was also there, singing and praying with a group of NAR prophets and apostles in front of the besieged building. Some members of the group were wrapped in Appeal to Heaven flags. They used a speaker system to broadcast prayers against the demonic principalities they believed had orchestrated the stealing of the election from Trump. Jacobs even called Sheets mid-riot to have him prophesy over the building via speakerphone.
Jacobs prayed at one point that things would “not turn violent” even as she surveyed the violent crowd pressing into the locked-down building. But in footage of the riot, an Appeal to Heaven flag was seen attached to a pole being swung at Capitol Police officers manning the barricades around the building. At least one rioter who entered the building wore an Appeal to Heaven flag wrapped as a cape. When police later came to arrest him, they found the flag spattered with blood and with mace. He claimed the blood was not his own.
For his part, Dutch Sheets spent much of his time during the riot leading a spiritual warfare conference call, with 4,000 participants joining him and other Charismatic leaders in making live prophecies about the unrest.
Since January 6th, Appeal to Heaven flags have gained further visibility through their endorsement by government officials. The National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL) is leading one campaign to fly the flag over government buildings. The energy for that initiative—which publicly makes its case for the flag in purely secular and historical terms—comes from the organization’s founder, former Arkansas state senator Jason Rapert, who happens to be a devoted follower of Sheets.
In November 2023, my colleague Bradley Onishi and I reported that the recently elected House Speaker Mike Johnson flew an Appeal to Heaven flag outside his congressional office. He was given the flag by an NAR-affiliated pastor. Asked for comment, his spokesperson said Johnson appreciates “the rich history of the flag.” A few weeks later, Johnson was the keynote speaker at a gala put on by Rapert’s NACL.
SHEETS’S CAMPAIGN HAS BEEN an unmitigated success. The Appeal to Heaven flag has come out of the nation’s dusty archive to be raised over one of the most energetic (and dangerous) Christian movements in recent American political history. At this point, it has been linked to some of the most powerful figures in each of our three branches of government: the former president, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and, finally, a Supreme Court justice.
While Rapert, Johnson, and others gesture toward a centuries-old historical interpretation of the flag in order to argue for its worthiness as a nonpartisan standard of our country, its recent history belies their case. The Appeal to Heaven flag owes its present-day interest and attention on the part of lawmakers and the public alike to the work of Sheets and his fellow NAR activists, who have transformed it into a far-right Christian nationalist shibboleth. The flag’s expanding meanings have given it new ties to Donald Trump and the “lost cause” of the 2020 election. Its history has become a useful pretext that covers over the flag’s contemporary meaning: People who fly it can then signal their allegiance to the Christian supremacist vision to fellow travelers without giving any sign of this commitment to outsiders.
In a liberal democracy, the assumption of good faith has its limits. Should Trump win the White House again this fall and begin to enact Project 2025, it may no longer be necessary for Christian nationalist hardliners in positions of power to disguise their true ideological commitments. Their vehement appeal to an unaccountable power will have finally come to fruition.
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