Hi First name / friend!
One day, during the Covid lockdowns, my son and I were walking the dog around our neighborhood. As we passed a quiet house toward the end of the street, I pointed out a sign in the yard. It was a picture of a pine tree surrounded by the words “An Appeal to Heaven.” I had seen this sign everyday on my walks and had no idea what it meant.
I wondered if maybe there was illness in the home, or maybe a family member was serving in the military, or perhaps it had something to do with that family’s religion. I honestly never considered that it was a political statement.
My son immediately pulled out his phone to look it up and began reading about the historical significance of this slogan. And it was fascinating!
American history has always been interesting to me, perhaps because I didn’t grow up here, so I didn’t have all of the history classes and pilgrim plays and speech memorization—although that may just be an excuse because I don’t know that I would have learned about this slogan even if I had taken and paid attention in those classes.
Just in case you are in the same boat, here is the background:
The phrase itself, An Appeal to Heaven, comes from John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government. Locke asserts that when someone has exhausted the justice system and legal avenues and has yet to get justice—he has appealed all he can to man—then he must appeal to Heaven.
He says, “...And where the Body of the People, or any single Man, is deprived of their Right, or is under the Exercise of a power without right, and have no Appeal on Earth, there they have a liberty to appeal to Heaven, whenever they judge the Cause of sufficient moment.”
The flag became the official flag of the Massachusetts navy in 1776, originally commissioned by George Washington for use on six military cruiser ships in October of 1775. It includes a pine tree as a symbol of the British claiming an unlimited number of white pines for themselves in the “Broad Arrow” act. This created so much resentment among the colonies that it helped to start the American Revolutionary War. The white pine became a symbol of government overreach.
The founding fathers of this country had tried everything they could to negotiate with the crown. They had sought justice by every means possible within the boundaries of the law. And every attempt had failed, so they were left no recourse but an appeal to Heaven. “Colonists who saw [the flag] were reminded to be wholly reliant upon heaven and the God Who reigns supreme. Their focus was Jesus Christ, and their concern was living by conviction without fear of a worldly cost” (appealtoheaven.org).
While I would argue that appealing to Heaven should be our first step and not our last resort, this slogan certainly seems appropriate for our current society (though I’m sure it has been appropriate in every generation).
