Alito’s Second Flag Has an Even Scarier Story Than the First

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that in addition to the upside-down American flag Justice Samuel Alito and his wife displayed outside of their home in suburban Virginia after the 2020 election, there was yet another provocative and highly political flag flown at an Alito household—this one hoisted on a flag pole outside of their vacation home in New Jersey in 2023.

This second flag, white with green pine tree, bears the words “An Appeal to Heaven.” Among certain circles, it has a very clear meaning: that the faithful should appeal to the forces of heaven to elect and seat Donald Trump as president.

If you look at the images from the Jan. 6 insurrection, Appeal to Heaven flags were everywhere. That the Alitos chose to display one outside of their home—in 2023!—cannot be separated from the flag’s ubiquity at the Capitol riots.

But in reality, the flag’s meaning is more complicated than just its association with Jan. 6—and in some ways, more ominous.

The Appeal to Heaven Flag is an old symbol from the American Revolution that was resurrected—and reinterpreted—around 2013 by a charismatic religious leader called Dutch Sheets. Sheets is associated with a network known as the New Apostolic Reformation that was started in the 1990s and is characterized in part by religious leaders and churches who are inspired to wage “spiritual warfare” against their enemies through the act of targeted prayer. NAR also preaches political organizing in the earthly realm, to conquer different facets of society for God.

To the charismatic Christians who this flag was meant to speak to in the early 2010s—that is,  particular nondenominational sects of Christians who believe in earthly miracles and the ongoing and constant intervention of the divine, and who often practice their faith through speaking in tongues and other similar displays—“appealing to Heaven” means praying for the intervention of God’s forces on earth. Many charismatic Christians in D.C. on Jan. 6 traveled there to pray, on the NAR leaders’ request, in proximity to the Capitol, against the forces of evil that they believe Trump was up against.

Sheets, who was already a prominent name among charismatic Christians, used the flag as a symbol of the spiritual fight to push Christianity deeper into society and especially into politics. In 2015, after Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized gay marriage nationwide, his movement expanded—and the flag started to gain prominence in other conservative Christian circles. This was a moment when many conservative Christians felt the nation had turned away from Biblical values; they needed to appeal to heaven for God’s intervention.

The Appeal to Heaven flag began to pop up everywhere. But it truly took off when Trump lost the 2020 election. Charismatic Christian prophets and apostles had already declared that Trump was anointed by God to be the next president, to fight the forces of evil in America. So in the aftermath of Trump’s loss, when it seemed to charismatic Christians that demonic entities were gaining territory in this spiritual battle, believers once again called upon God’s forces for miraculous intervention. These Christians may not be told by their religious leaders to fight in the earthly realm, but they’ve still been primed to think of the world as a battlefield, and themselves as soldiers, in a very real sense.

Since the insurrection, the flag has continued to appear at events for Christian nationalist figures in politics such as former Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. House Speaker Mike Johnson, too, displays an Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office door.

Johnson, though, is Southern Baptist—not a background that aligns with Sheets’ particular Christian tradition. Alito is also not affiliated with charismatic Christianity. He comes from a Roman Catholic faith tradition. Nor is Leonard Leo, who also flew the flag. Leo, the Federalist Society figure often credited for the current makeup of the Supreme Court, is a traditionalist Catholic.

The spread of this symbol among various political conservatives shows just how much the Appeal to Heaven flag has caught on with Christian nationalists, defined as those who abide by the (ahistorical) belief that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and needs to be reclaimed as one. (A Christian nation can mean many things, but at its core, it means a government that operates by Christian values, with an explicit privileging of the Christian faith above other religions.)

In other words, the current iteration of the flag has expanded beyond the community that birthed it—a huge success for Sheets, who can now use it to excite a much broader audience. Some see the flag as a call to spiritual warfare. Others interpret it as a symbol that God backs their specific conservative, Christian visions for the country. And it is also, now, inextricably linked to the violence of Jan. 6 and the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Some conservatives have pointed defensively to the flag’s origin in the Revolutionary War to justify the Alitos’ actions. The idea that the symbol is pulled from U.S. history could grant the flag a veneer of democratic legitimacy—but no one should confuse it for a contemporary democratic symbol. It’s a resurrected emblem, with a uniquely theocratic twist.

Regardless, anyone who owns one of these flags knows the most basic message behind it: America needs to be re-won for God. It involves Trump. But the goal will outlast him.