Not Yours to Claim

There's something I've noticed in the last couple of weeks as I get my daily overdose of social media. It is a trend of those who are about to serve posting something to Facebook/Instagram/TikTok of them wrapped in the flags of their destination country or state.

Something about these images struck me as odd, though I couldn't really put my finger on why until I sat down to try to capture some thoughts.

The Photo Op Culture

It started with a simple observation when seeing one of these posts: there's something about this that seems odd to me. I think one of the first things that strikes me is the overall trend that social media encourages by taking ordinary life occasions and turning them into photo ops. Baptisms, mission calls, weddings, and gender reveals have been turned into something that has to be elaborate and surrounded by pomp and circumstance.

It makes me reflect on a trend from my own youth when asking someone to a school dance was supposed to be this huge ordeal. Candy bar messages, car decoration, and otherwise public displays replaced a simple opportunity to ask someone to go to a dance without making them feel obligated to go through an equally elaborate setup in order to respond. It's the performance and the pressure of it all that always sat wrong with me.

What bothered me about those dance asks wasn't the enthusiasm behind them. It was that the performance had become the point. The actual question — do you want to go with me? — got buried under the production. The sincerity got outsourced to a candy bar arrangement, and the person being asked was left obligated to respond in kind or feel like they'd cheapened something.

I feel an echo of that in these flag posts. The actual thing happening, a young person leaving their life behind to serve, gets wrapped in costume. It becomes content. And what might have been a private expression of commitment or excitement turns into something that feels more like what might be called virtue signaling rather than merely sharing something you're excited about.

What a Flag Actually Is

When it comes down to it, draping yourself in a flag for this reason is in bad taste. I wrote not long ago about borders and how the states and nations flags represent are arbitrary. That being the case, flags do still carry a lot of weight with them. They represent a heritage. They represent a culture. They represent a belief system.

The act of treating a flag like a shawl, when you are not a native of that state or country, seems like trying to adopt something that isn't yours to claim.

A flag isn't a costume. It isn't a prop. It's a symbol that people use to represent themselves to the world. Flags represent their history, their sacrifices, their identity. When someone who has never been to that country, who doesn't speak the language, who knows almost nothing about its culture beyond a church assignment list, wraps themselves in that nation's flag for a going-away photo, there's something presumptuous in it. A way of saying "I belong to this" before you've done anything to earn belonging.

And that presumption matters more here than it might otherwise, given what the trip is actually for.

"I Am Here to Make You One of Us"

It's almost insidious given that the missionary calling is not so much about "I am one of you," but is very much about "I am here to make you one of us." Mormons don't serve missions to integrate themselves with their hosts. They do so to assimilate them. The gospel message isn't supposed to care about borders, it is supposed to be for "every nation, kindred, tongue, and people" (Mosiah 3:20). Thus it strikes a chord of cognitive dissonance to take something civil and mingle it with a supposedly divine mandate.

Think about what the photo actually communicates to anyone from that destination country who might see it. A young person, probably not from their country, probably knowing very little about their culture, is draped in their flag. The caption announces this person is coming to their country. Not to live there long-term. Not to become a lasting part of the community. To convert them.

The flag says "I embrace you." The mission says "I'm coming to change you." Those two things don't sit comfortably together. The flag is borrowed solidarity. It's a visual claim of kinship that the mission itself denies in purpose. If you genuinely believed you were going to become one of the people you're serving, the flag might make sense.

There's actually a precedent for that posture within the Book of Mormon itself. When Ammon is brought before King Lamoni, he says: "Yea, I desire to dwell among this people for a time, and perhaps until the day I die." He wasn't there to serve a term and come home. He went to serve as a shepherd, to live among the Lamanites indefinitely. The conversions followed from that. With Ammon's posture, the flag might mean something real.

But the entire theological premise of the modern LDS mission is the opposite: you carry the one true gospel into a field of souls who don't have it yet, and then you come home. The two-year cap is built into the calling.

The flag, in that context, is costume. And the people whose heritage it represents deserve better than to be used as backdrop.

The Older Displays

I don't write this to ridicule those participating in this trend. I do so only to ask them, or whoever might read this, to ask themselves: "Is this the right way to go about this?"

When I was a missionary, one of the first things we did after getting to the Missionary Training Center was to find the large wall map and everyone in your district would stand by that map and point to their assigned field of labor. I remember in the foyer of the church I attended, there was a display case that had the photos of the missionaries serving and where they were doing so. I still have the plaque with my missionary photo in my posession.

I find myself wondering if the ways we went about displaying these things was any better than the current trend.

There's something communal about the foyer display case that an Instagram post lacks. The photos lived in the chapel, where the congregation that sustained these missionaries could see them, pray for them, write them letters. It was accountability within a community rather than performance for an audience.

But I'm not sure that makes it innocent. There was still something about the ritual of pointing to the map. Your arm extended toward Indonesia or Nigeria or Brazil — that was meant to be seen. It had drama to it. It turned a bureaucratic assignment into a moment. The mission call itself, opening the envelope in front of a gathered family, reading the destination aloud. All of this was theater too, just a different kind.

Maybe the difference is that the older displays kept the theater inside the community, where it served some purpose. The flag photos push it outward, into a public stream designed for strangers and algorithms, where the purpose shifts from communal witness to personal branding.

Or maybe I'm being too generous. Maybe it was always performance. The medium just used to have a smaller audience.

What I Hoped a Mission Was

I remember how much of my personal hope in serving a mission was that I would disappear as myself and only be a conduit through which truth and the love of God was shared. I hoped to bring people to repentance and into something that transcended this life.

That hope to disappear, to become transparent to something larger, was genuine. Whatever I think now about the institution and the doctrine behind it, I can't dismiss what I wanted then. I wanted to matter in a way that had nothing to do with me. No credit. No recognition. Just the work, and whatever good might come from it. I believed I had felt God's love and I wanted to share that with others.

That's not what the flag photos represent. They're not a disappearance into the work. They're a declaration of the self. They're saying in an almost demanding way, look at me, look at where I'm going, look at this moment. The missionary at the center of the frame, the flag draped across their shoulders, the social media caption beneath.

I understand these are young people who are excited, and who are about to do something hard, and whose families are proud. I'm not questioning the sincerity beneath the post. I'm questioning what the post does to that sincerity.

The Spit in the Eye

So, in a sense, seeing this flag trend feels like a bit of a spit in the eye at what I used to believe a mission was about.

I've left behind the theology that sent me into the field. I no longer believe I was carrying the one true gospel to people who needed it. I no longer think God was guiding the process.

But I believed it then. I believed that a mission was supposed to be an act of self-emptying. It was supposed to be a disappearance in service of something beyond you. Whether or not that theology holds up, the ideal itself seems worth preserving. The best version of service, religious or otherwise, has always looked something like that.

The flag trend does the opposite. It inserts the self into the foreground. It claims a belonging that hasn't been earned, wraps it in visual drama, and posts it for engagement.

And that's the dissonance that finally helped me put my finger on why these images bother me. Not because the missionaries are bad people. Not because the excitement isn't real. But because the medium has convinced us that even our most sincere moments need to be performed. That even going somewhere to serve requires a costume.

The flag belongs to those people. Let them keep it.

What you carry into the field doesn't need to be announced.