The Freedom From Religion Foundation is demanding that the City of Diamond Fire Department immediately remove a Christian flag displayed on public property.
FFRF recently learned that the Fire Department is flying a Christian flag outside its station. The nonreligious individual who contacted FFRF reported that seeing a public fire department display a religious flag “feels exclusionary” and sends the message that non-Christians are not equally welcome.
“By flying the Christian flag on public property, the department is signaling official favoritism toward religion over nonreligion, and Christianity over all other faiths,” FFRF Staff Attorney Sammi Lawrence has written to Fire Chief Rebecca Dunn.
It appears that the Christian flag is currently displayed outside the fire station along with the U.S. flag and the department’s flag. This suggests that the department is controlling and selecting the flags displayed outside of its building — making the flags government speech. The Fire Department knows that citizens interact with and rely on firefighters during some of the most urgent and vulnerable times of their lives. People belonging to minority religions and nonreligious citizens should not be made to feel like outsiders in their own community because the Fire Department flies a Christian flag outside of its building. Such an act needlessly excludes the 38 percent of Americans who are non-Christians, including the nearly one in three adult Americans who are religiously unaffiliated.
“The Fire Department exists to protect everyone in the community, regardless of their religious beliefs,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “When a government agency displays a Christian flag, it sends the unmistakable message that Christians are favored insiders while everyone else is an outsider. Public institutions have a duty to serve all citizens equally. ”
The Christian flag, despite its benign origins, has unfortunately become heavily associated with white Christian nationalism and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, FFRF points out. As a report by FFRF and the Baptist Joint Commission for Religious Liberty details, the Christian flag was among the symbols of Christian nationalism and white supremacy that insurrectionists displayed as they stormed the Capitol.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With more than 41,000 members across the country, including hundreds of members in Missouri, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
