Every time I see an American flag, especially the kind that stretches wide over a stadium or snaps in the wind above a courthouse, I can’t help but look up. It is the most majestic piece of fabric I’ve ever seen, and its beauty is never fleeting.

We celebrate that great flag each year on June 14, marking the anniversary of 1777, when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the official flag of the new nation. The flag they adopted was a theological statement, told in color and symbol. Our Founders believed that what a nation stands for ought to be visible.

Moral Choices Displayed in America’s Flag

The colors themselves tell our story:

• White for purity and innocence.
• Red for valor and hardiness.
• Blue for vigilance, perseverance, and justice.

These were moral choices, drawn from the same biblical vocabulary that shaped the founding generation’s understanding of civic virtue.

There were more significant choices:

• The thirteen stripes represent the original colonies, communities of people formed by church covenants, Scripture-based education, and the conviction that free people govern themselves under God or they do not govern themselves at all.
• The stars represent a union still forming, bound together by a common understanding of who made them and what they owed their Creator.

Tradition states that George Washington himself brought an early design of the flag to Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross’ upholstery shop on Arch Street in the spring of 1776. According to the account passed down through her family, Washington arrived carrying a rough sketch with stars that were six-pointed. Betsy suggested five-pointed stars instead, demonstrating that they could be cut with a single snip of the scissors. Washington agreed and Ross was commissioned to sew the first flag. The symbols of this republic were handled with deliberate care and treated as if they mattered, because everyone involved believed they did.

Forerunners to the American Flag Underscore Its Meaning

To understand the depth of that conviction, one should look to the other flags flying in that same era. The Stars and Stripes rose alongside banners that made the founding generation’s faith fully explicit:

• The Appeal to Heaven flag, commissioned by George Washington in 1775, flew over the naval vessels of the Continental fleet. At its center stands an evergreen pine tree, long used by colonial New England as a symbol of endurance and providence. Above it, the phrase drawn from the political theology of John Locke: an acknowledgment that when earthly courts fail to deliver justice, free men may appeal directly to the court of God Himself. Washington flew that flag as a confession of dependence, a declaration that the cause of liberty was too large for human hands alone to carry.
• The Gadsden flag, bearing its coiled rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me,” carried a natural law argument underneath its defiant imagery. The rattlesnake, Benjamin Franklin argued, was a uniquely American symbol. It never strikes first, but once provoked, it does not relent. The flag declared that liberty is possessed by free men and that those men will defend it. The theological premise underneath the defiance was clear: rights are not the government’s to give.
• The Bennington flag, one of the earliest American flags, carried the numerals “76” as a permanent marker, a declaration that 1776 was a turning point in human history, a moment the founders believed was arranged by Providence for a purpose larger than themselves.

These were the flags of a people who understood themselves to be participants in something sacred. Read the letters, the sermons, and the founding documents of that generation and one conclusion is unavoidable: they believed the freest nation in human history was being built under the watching eye of the Almighty God.

That is the inheritance the Stars and Stripes carries. It is the flag that outlasted the others as the singular symbol of the Republic, bearing the weight of everything those other banners declared. The moral seriousness of the colors. The covenantal identity of the stripes. The expanding promise of the stars. All of it gathered into one banner, still flying 250 years later.

Honoring our Flag and Preserving Its Legacy

So on Flag Day, we pause to honor something far weightier than national pride. We stand in the tradition of a people who knew that ordered liberty flows from moral accountability, and that moral accountability has a source. They built a government with checks and balances because they had read their Bibles and understood that power corrupts. They enshrined religious liberty because they had seen what happens when the state tries to occupy the throne that belongs to God alone.

The next time you see an American flag stretched wide over a stadium, snapping above a courthouse, or standing in a church sanctuary, look up and allow yourself to be moved by the grandeur of the flag. Look up, just as Francis Scott Key did when he watched the flag survive a night of bombardment over Baltimore in 1814; that moment ultimately inspired him to write what would become our national anthem.

Look up and remember what it cost. Remember the One who was acknowledged when it was.

designed. And remember that the fight to preserve that legacy is far from finished.