As I discussed in my post “Religious Trauma and the Rainbow Flag,” many conservative Christians have an adverse response to common LGBT symbols such as the rainbow flag or pink triangle. This reaction often stems from repeated exposure to distorted media caricatures. In this post, I want to provide a helpful introduction to these symbols and why they point to common ground between conservative Christians and the LGBT+ community.
The rainbow flag was created by Gilbert Baker in 1978. Baker was born in 1951 in a small Kansas town. After attending college for a year, he successfully served two years in the army. Baker then moved to San Francisco where he had a career as an artist. He taught himself to sew and create flags. The rainbow flag was designed to inspire hope and confidence for the LGBT community. The flag represented the community’s effort to achieve equal societal standing, but it also had personal meaning for Baker who recalled being ostracized in childhood because of his sexual orientation.
The original flag had eight colors, but for practical reasons was reduced to six. Each color has a theme:
Life = red
Healing = orange
Sunlight = yellow
Nature = green
Harmony/Art = blue (original colors indigo and turquoise were blended)
Human Spirit = purple
More recently, some groups have added black and brown stripes to represent racial diversity in the LGBT+ community.
The themes of the rainbow flag are similar to essential values found in the Bible, including life, healing, light, creation, harmony, the imago Dei, and the value of every tribe and nation.
In reaction to the LGBT community’s use of the rainbow flag, I have heard some Christians object to what they see as a misappropriation of biblical imagery. They say “We need to take back the rainbow!” in reference to the Bible’s depiction of a rainbow after the Flood (Genesis 9:13-17). And I agree. The rainbow is an important symbol for Christians. But, the great thing is that by reclaiming the rainbow, conservative Christians find common ground with the LGBT+ community.
When I teach Old Testament, my students are always fascinated to discover that the Hebrew word in Genesis 9 often translated “rainbow” actually means “bow” –the kind one uses to shoot and kill with arrows. If you look at a rainbow in the sky, what do you notice? The weapon is turned away from the earth. The bow is a symbol of God turning his judgment away from humankind. In recognition that every human being is fallible, God made a covenant never to wipe out humankind with a flood again (Gen 8:21-22; 9:8-17). According to Scripture, the rainbow is a sign of God’s promise of mercy—a promise that levels the playing field for all of us.
What Does the Pink Triangle Mean?
The Nazis imprisoned approximately 50,000 gay men with 10-15,000 of these sent to concentration camps. Many of them died under terrible conditions. The Nazis forced gay men to wear a badge with a pink triangle. Other groups were similarly identified. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses were assigned purple triangles. If a man was both Jewish and gay, he was given pink and yellow triangles in the shape of a star. Unfortunately, German law was hostile toward gay people even after the war ended. Despite their suffering, gay concentration camp survivors were barred from post-war reparations. As a result of continued persecution, few survivors told their stories. Most of our records come from Nazi descriptions of how they treated gay people.
But, in 1972, a brave soul published a first-hand account under the pseudonym Heinz Heger. The book, The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps, was written by Hans Neumann based on several interviews with survivor, Josef Kohout. Josef was 24 years old when he was sent to a camp where he remained for the next five years. His crime? He sent a photo to his boyfriend inscribed with a declaration of “eternal love.” The correspondence was intercepted. Following his liberation from the camp, he met his life-long partner, Wilhelm Kroepfl. They were together for nearly 50 years.[1] When Josef died in 1994, Wilhelm gave artifacts to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, including a cloth that preserved Josef’s pink triangle and prison number (you can see these artifacts in the museum’s video).