Rocky Cape Christian Community

Mennonite students at what became Goshen College, Indiana, USA, 1895.

 
"Dress speaks," says my River Brethren friend Stephen Scott, in a book he wrote about plain dress. "One's clothing indicates one's identity and image, whether rock musician or sophisticated businessperson. Dress often makes a statement about an individual's social and economic status. Dress can communicate one's occupation: policeman, soldier, nurse, fast-food worker. . . ."
 
From this point of departure Stephen goes on to tell how Jesus' followers -- at least all the really serious ones -- have always sought to identify themselves with him and to separate themselves from the world in how they dress.
 
Is that true?
 
All my life I have heard it said that once we lose our visible identity (in dress, in speech, in the way we work and live) we lose our inner identity as followers of Jesus as well. Every church leader I knew from my earliest childhood not only taught separation from the world in attire, but the value of uniformity in dress as well -- the idea that the church as a whole, not everyone on his or her own, should decide what to wear. But as a young person, teaching school in an isolated Mennonite mission in northeastern Ontario, I began to question that teaching and for years following I did not know for sure what to make of it.
 
Now, from the perspective of nearly fifty years, as opposed to just over twenty, I have thoroughly and permanently made up my mind. And guess who convinced me -- the old die-hard traditionalists with their black hats, braces and long white beards? My old aunties with their floor length dark dresses, white organdy head coverings (as in the picture above) and pointed capes?
 
No. They didn't need to.
 
The people that got me convinced of the need for uniformity in dress were the people that struggled against it and threw it out, thirty (or more) years ago.
 
I have become thoroughly convinced that human beings -- human females in particular -- do not make wise choices on the long run if unrestrained by a church or society's norms on what to wear.
 
"What do you mean?" my friends argued during the 1970s and 80s. "Who says we can't be modest, that we can't be plain, or serve Jesus without church standards? Where did the idea of church standards, or of uniformity in dress, come from anyhow? Surely not from the Bible!"
 
In my twenties that argument sounded like a clever one and I thought it made a fair bit of sense. Now I see it for the childish whimsy and historical nonsense it really is.
 
The Bible does not talk about uniformity in attire because it did not need to. For thousands of years before Christ and for over one thousand nine hundred years following, everyone dressed in a uniform way. Eskimos like Eskimos, Czechs like Czechs, Amish like Amish, and Greeks like Greeks. Society, almost universally a male-dominated society, regulated exactly what people wore and what they did not.  
 
Men knew what looked good on their wives and daughters and what would cross the bounds of decency or common sense. Most women did not get many clothes, but even the ones that did wore exactly what society (and their own menfolk) gave them to wear.
 
The world-wide result among people that knew about God (Jews, Christians and Muslims) was graceful women in modest clothing, wearing their hair long. Even in parts of the world untouched by the Scriptures or by European civilisation, society directed what women should or should not put on.
 
Society and common sense. It all fit together, it all worked for thousands of years -- until the first World War ended, Western society broke down, women took matters in their own hands and everyone began to dress like they pleased. Or like fashion designers (usually in conflict with their fathers and husbands) told them to. World-wide catastrophe -- lovely skirts, shawls, and dark pleasing hues traded off on pink and orange and blotchy stretchy rubbish, words all over, and rolls of fat squeezing from every gap in faded denim -- is the night-marish, truly devilish, totally anti-human result.
 
Has no one told them that dressing without a "clothing standard" is a totally modern and a totally ridiculous, unworkable idea? Have people been trying to sell you that line? Laugh at them (or else weep for them). Show them the sidewalk or take them for a stroll in the mall and tell them to open their eyes.
 
We have come all the way from having beautiful graceful women on every hand to having a sight for sore eyes. Well do I remember bouncing through the tropical night in Suriname, on the back of an open truck, with a newly converted Muslim. "One thing I cannot figure out," he told me. "When Christians draw pictures of Mary, the mother of Jesus, they always depict her in modest decent clothes, with a veil on her head. But then they come around looking like harlots themselves. Would they rather look like unconverted movie stars than like Jesus' mother and sisters?"
 
My wife dresses plain -- always in godly style, as God's styles have existed through thousands of years -- and I cannot imagine her otherwise. I love the way she, and my sisters and my mother, and all the believing women that are close to me in Christian community, look. (Most of my nieces and extended family still dressing like the girl holding the Bible in the picture above.)
 
When I was little I loved my Old Order Mennonite grandmothers and my aunts and still remember them as the most beautiful women I have ever seen, their clothes completely hiding what had happened with their shapes over the years. Long full skirts and aprons covered their high-topped shoes.  Now I see older women and feel I must cry for them. So naked. So hideous. With most of their thinning hair trimmed off and painted like their unhappy faces.
 
Will no one wake up and shout it is time for this long Halloween to end?

Mennonite students (not Old Order) at Goshen College a hundred years later. What has been gained -- or lost -- in the past century?
 
I do not expect that the world's way of dressing will ever turn around and become decent or beautiful again. But what about us, the few little pockets of Christian believers that have so far refused to flow along with the tide? Will we keep what we have, or must we put our pinch of incense on the altars of fashion as well?
 
It is this simple: Either our church communities, our believing societies, our men-folk and church leaders keep on guiding our women in what they wear, or we lose it all. Fast. (Much faster than what many "experts" predict or think.) How does that go?
 
It goes like this (and I speak from having seen it all, from first-hand experience). We drop our uniformity and "standards" and say we'll just dress modestly, like the Bible teaches. Very well. Until along comes Jane and decides a new dress pattern would be more modest than her old one. Then that doesn't quite fit, and she can't stand the colour, so she tries another one next week. And three more next month, and starts writing e-mails and borrowing and swapping patterns and looking around for better ideas. . . . All this while Sally gets convicted to wear a different style of head covering, so she tries this and she puts on that, and she cuts a few corners off here, and adds some pleats there, and gets another pattern from Sue, and Mary has yet a different idea. . . . And before long you have all the ladies going from big to small to green to brown to orange, like this on Tuesday night, like that on Sunday, something sooo cute for the little ones, "I've gotta have a dress like Mandy" . . . And before you know it we are right out there with all the rest.
 
Clothes, clothes, clothes. Dresses, patterns, ribbons, frocks, veils. Round tyres like the moon. Nothing but thoughts about what to wear, while my great-aunts Katy and Lizzie wasted nary a moment planning or deciding on the subject for all of their ninety-plus years.
 
What is the problem? Does it have anything to do with what the Bible says, or what doctrine we believe is right or wrong?
 
Not in the least. It has all to do with how women-folk are made. Left to their restless selves they go from this to that to the other, spiralling further and further from common sense and human decency until they come out dressed to stop a train -- or to frighten a dead pig.
 
Quite frankly, I am disappointed in the "no standards" churches that set out to prove themselves right in the 1970s and 80s. The only point they have convincingly proven is the exact opposite of what they had in mind. They are much closer to the world now than what they were then, and they have raised a generation that can only go one direction -- much faster and further than what their parents could have foreseen.
 
Does this mean that fashionable dress and the reason for churches conforming to the world stem primarily or exclusively from weaknesses among the womenfolk?
 
Do not fool yourself. What our women do (and did, in the twentieth century) is only an indication of what happened to their men, who, if the Lord permits, shall hear about it next week.
 
Peter  
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au