To enter Reykjavik’s Grafarvogur Lutheran church, worshippers and visitors are invited to make their way down 16 steps painted in the rainbow stripes and the white, pink, blue, brown and black chevrons of the Progress Pride flag. The artwork, which can even be seen on satellite pictures, was originally a project of former head pastor Guðrún Karls Helgudóttir, now the bishop of Iceland, and her colleagues. The point was to show support for the LGBTQ community’s “need to be visible and accepted”, the church’s current head pastor, Arna Sigurðardóttir, told me.

And then some time in between the barely faded midnight sun of 7 July and the early morning light of 8 July, someone painted over all those colours with just three: blue on the outside, and two thin strips of white encasing a thicker strip of red in the centre.

The church’s pride flag had been defaced twice before, both times in 2022, once with black scribbling alluding to a verse from the Old Testament.

This time, though, when Sigurðardóttir heard the news that it had been completely painted over with the Icelandic flag, something about it felt different. “More systematic, in a way – much more methodical,” she said. “We are experiencing everywhere this pushback against human rights, and they’re starting to envelop it in national flags.”

A national flag becoming a symbol of contention and exclusion, rather than pride, is a phenomenon I know all too well. As a child, I used to sing the US national anthem to myself, in my head, to time brushing my teeth. By the time I was a teenager, in the rage and haze of the Iraq war and its dissidents, I sat for the compulsory morning pledge of allegiance, and saw the stars and stripes as a symbol of shame. This fraught relationship is why I felt such empathy, tinged with disappointment, when a young Icelander roughly my age told me, after the incident at Grafarvogur church, that for the first time in her life she was starting to feel uneasy with the Icelandic flag.

I had thought, naively perhaps, that a country with such a small population might be spared from the polarisation that is tearing the US apart and increasingly affects my adopted country, France. Instead I found myself face to face with someone who was starting to feel the same sense of rupture with her country’s symbols........

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