About the only conservative character portrayed sympathetically in the show is Ainsley Hayes, a young Republican lawyer (and she only appears in twelve of the 154 episodes). Here she is debating her boss over that touchstone of left-right disagreement: gun control.

Sam Seaborn: It’s not about personal freedom, and it certainly has nothing to do with public safety. It’s just that some people like guns.

Ainsley Hayes: Yes, they do. But you know what’s more insidious than that? Your gun control position doesn’t have anything to do with public safety, and it’s certainly not about personal freedom. It’s about you don’t like people who do like guns. You don’t like the people. Think about that, the next time you make a joke about the South.

You don’t like the people. How often is that the underlying reason for the political (or theological) positions we hold?

Last week Andrew posed the question, “What does the flag say?” Another way to phrase that question is, “Do you like the people who fly those flags?” And that feels the deeper question as it gets closer to the root of our responses to the flags. If I don’t like a particular flag being flown what about the person who put it up – how do I feel about them?

A friend who ministers in an area of Birmingham close to the origin point of the campaign to fly the St George’s flag, raises helpful points around this. His perspective: that as well as affirming the concerns and fears many may have at the flags going up, we also need to do better at affirming the legitimate concerns and fears of those putting them up. This probably isn’t easy to do for those of us who live in areas where there are few flags flying. The reality is that we don’t often have to mingle with those in areas where flags are abundant. And we probably don’t often have to deal with the issues these people are concerned about.

Here are the concerns my friend observes in his community – some of which are specifically related to Birmingham:

Freedom of speech/expression, arrests for online comments, grooming gangs, unlawfulness, radical Islam/Islamists, desire for sharia law, potential islamophobia laws, the currently predicted demographic flip, illegal and mass immigration, rising living costs, bankruptcy of the council, lack of bin collection, LGBTQ+ agenda/ideology, and the difference between how the council seems to have reacted to the raising of Palestinian and English/British flags.

Any of these issues can make for uncomfortable conversations – the kinds of discussions that polite middle-class society would rather avoid. It is far easier to dismiss the people who have these concerns as racist, or irredeemably right-wing, or ‘deplorables’.

Which brings us back to Ainsley Hayes’ argument with Sam Seaborn: not liking guns is one thing, but not liking the people who like them is quite another. So, do you like the people? If we don’t, it might not be the flags that are the real issue.

Photo by balesstudio on Unsplash