When the New York Times reported last week that Samuel Alito, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, had been flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his vacation home on the New Jersey shore last summer, the legal world was confronted with yet another classic case of how to deal with the current warring textual methodologies for interpreting the law. One could either “read” this obscure-to-some pine-tree flag in the way the New York Times and its experts did—as a signifier of insurgent Christian nationalism. Or you could read it as a kind of benign 18th-century foam finger: “Gooooo George Washington!”

In the week since, most defenders of the flag have doubled down on the foam-finger defense. In much the same way they claim that the right to bear arms is codified in the Second Amendment and has not acquired any new popular understanding since ratification, they urge that the Appeal to Heaven flag means only what it meant to the founders, because history ended on that day. Welcome to the world of flag originalism, in which the only winning answer is … 1775!

Most commentators understand that flags, like words, have changing meanings over time. “Until about a decade ago,” notes the Times, “the Appeal to Heaven flag was mostly a historical relic.” That meaning shifted fairly recently, when it was “revived to represent a theological vision of what the United States should be and how it should be governed,” according to Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and........

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