Rocky Cape Christian Community

From time to time someone wonders why our little girls cover their heads. In the light of history that is not a good question. A better question would be: Why do some Christians not cover their little girl's heads.

Many people in our churches have conservative Anabaptist backgrounds. The Anabaptists never started wearing coverings on their little girls. They simply never stopped. Their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers have done so in one unbroken line back through the Anabaptists, through the Roman Catholics, through the Byzantines, to the first Christians and the Jews in the time of Jesus.

The veiling of women, including little girls, is by no means a recent innovation. The practice of the most conservative Anabaptist groups accurately represents the historical position of Christianity on the issue.

Women in Paul's day wore a big sheet of material called a himation. They braided their hair or did it up in a bun. While walking outside of their homes they took a flap of the material and covered their heads. Only brazen "women's libbers" or prostitutes defied this tradition and walked around bareheaded.

Paul uses this tradition to teach an important Christian principle: the place of the woman. So he says women should be sure to keep the flap over top while praying or prophesying. (That is, while sitting together in someone's house for a church service, or while conducting religious duties at home). Both little girls and big women wore the himation and were thus constantly equipped with the handy "covering" (like the Indian sari).

Paul would no doubt have been surprised at the lengths some people have gone to in trying to define the undefinable: exactly how, when, and why the covering should be worn, and discussing very small details about how it should be made.

If Paul would have seen the synthetic, pleated, or silk stringed coverings worn by Mennonite or Brethren women today, would he not have had a hard time identifying them as Christian women's veils? And if he would  have heard some of the disagreements about the veiling, would he not have spoken to us of carnality?

That the exact time or occasion for "reaching for the flap" is not spelled out in the New Testament, may be taken for granted. Whether little girls covered their heads on the street or in meeting is an argument lost in supposition. Most of them quite likely did (little girls like to copy their mothers). And early Christian mothers would hardly have snatched the flaps from their little girl's heads saying: "Wait a minute, you're not even converted!" On the other hand, little girls most likely had a problem keeping their flaps over their heads while out chasing goats or feeding the chickens.

About the Anabaptist position, there is little to say. Women in 16'th century Europe were barely out of the wimple (a head covering that left only a circle from the mouth to the eyes exposed). Some women still wore the wimple centuries later. It would have been scandalous for any female from birth onward to appear anywhere, let alone in public, with her head uncovered during Anabaptist days. That is, all respectable or religious European females covered their heads all the time. The head covering for little girls (in fact the head covering in general) was not an issue for the Anabaptists. No Anabaptist ever wrote about head coverings to my knowledge, and for several centuries following, all women and girls Catholic, Protestant, and Anabaptist covered their heads. The practice became weak during the 18'th century and was finally lost in the 19'th, except in isolate areas (such as parts of Ireland, Germany, the Balkan states, Poland, and Russia) and among strongly traditional societies such as the Hutterites and the Old Order Amish.

Mennonites in the United States and Canada gradually lost the covering for unmarried women. A few kept on using it, but only for worship services. Then, with the "Great Awakening" and Daniel Kauffman's invention of "seven ordinances" (modelled after the "seven sacraments" of the state churches) the covering issue revived. (The Anabaptists had never considered the covering an "ordinance". They knew only two ordinances: baptism and the nighttime meal.) With this revival came the idea of connecting the covering with conversion.

Not only is the idea of putting on coverings at conversion a very recent one, it is an idea altogether out of line with Christian tradition and the New Testament. (If putting on coverings were to be taken as a mark of conversion for girls, then the logical mark for boys would be to cut and uncover their hair. I know of no church that forbids boys to cut their hair until they get converted.) Relating the covering to conversion is in fact a distortion of its original significance. 1 Corinthians 11 is not written in the context of a "conversion experience", but in the context of headship and order. Headship is a principle (like marriage) that far outreaches conversion. The covering is a symbol not of "conversion" (a term in itself foreign to the Anabaptists) but of submission and modesty. Coverings are to cover the hair, just like ample clothing covers the rest of the woman's glory. Modesty is a virtue that Christian parents are to pass on to their children totally apart from and long before conversion. Girls growing up in Christian homes need to find their place in this headship order before they are old enough to repent and believe on their own.

Delaying the covering until conversion produces quite negative results. It adds peer pressure to the conversion of little girls. I have seen too many little girls professing conversion in droves when they felt pressured to get out of braids. Testimonies to this problem are numerous in Mennonite churches.

One question often raised about coverings on little girls concerns the maintaining of "something special." People wonder whether the covering doesn't lose its significance for people who have worn it all their lives. The answer is an emphatic no. All Amish-background women in our Costa Rican churches have worn the veiling as long as they can remember. So have their mothers, their grandmothers, and their great-grandmothers, back for several thousand years. Their testimony is unanimous, and they wonder how Mennonite, or Brethren women could think that their veilings are more special to them.

The Christian woman's veiling becomes endangered when we think of it more as a symbol than as a garment. The wearing of the veiling is no complicated theory or doctrine. It is the simple putting on of a piece of cloth meant to cover. The only thing left for us to do is obey.

Peter Hoover
Montes de Oro, Costa Rica
21 January 1993