One flag waving over the rioters at the US Capitol, emblazoned with a tree and the slogan “An Appeal to Heaven,” garnered particular attention as a symbol of so-called “Christian nationalism’s” effort to “take America back for God.”

America remains the world leader. This fact is naïve to reject and realistic to accept. It is the American Century still.

As shocking as the January 6 lawlessness was, I was surprised how quickly people who should know better switched gears and called for some version of the Global War on Terror to be fought—not on some distant desert or foreign mountain top—but inside America against American citizens.

This perception in Latin America and elsewhere is very troubling and should worry American conservative Christians who care about international religious freedom.

Mob violence cannot be tolerated, and when threatened should be met with overwhelming force—as a deterrent, and with proportional and discriminant force, or “reciprocal violence” if you prefer—without apology, with far less concern for “optics,” and without any concern for the ideology of the mob if deterrence fails.

We comfort ourselves, saying, “This is not who we are.” But without deeper reflection, such pat answers are lies, strengthening the “vulgarized knowledge” that allow us to ignore the chasms that threaten to consume us.

The sad and lamentable truth is that indeed this is who we are, for it was members of our own body-politic who did this, and we cannot heal if we do not confront the uncomfortable facts as they are. It was sedition.

Perhaps the best description of the episode last comes from the Germans. It was a “putsch”: a disorganized, somewhat symbolic strike against legal authority, usually with a rightwing inflection.

January 6, 2021, shocked and sickened many of us. It was a terrible, shameful day for the American Republic—truly yet another day of infamy in America’s bruised and bloodied history.