Some of you may have noticed the new button that appeared on my sidebar a few weeks back. A little while ago, I had the privilege of becoming a contributor for At the Well…In Pursuit of Titus 2, an online gathering place for Christian women, with articles written by around 20 ladies plus guests. They’ve just started a new series of questions and answers, and one of the questions was about modesty. Those of you who’ve gotten to know me will be able to imagine how my eyes lit up when I read that one. I wanted to share the question and my answer here. (And I encourage you all to check out the full post to read the other ladies thought-provoking responses as well.)

Here’s the question:

I was wondering how you view the Bible’s take on modesty? I was raised very conservative and still dress alot differently than the world, but it seems like so many Christian women don’t think that’s important anymore. Alot of people I know say it’s just a difference of opinion or a personal standard, but that doesn’t make much sense to me really. And I also struggle with knowing that it makes it more difficult for my husband when women in the church are dressed indecently. It’s bad enough that there’s so much temptation out there anyway but it seems like the men should get a break from that when they’re around fellow Christians. And unfortunately it’s not just the younger ones either, but alot of the older women that dress badly…ones that could be setting a better example. I’ve enjoyed reading all the posts on different topics and would love to hear someone else’s thoughts on this subject, according to what you think is right by the Bible and what the Lord would be pleased with us doing. I want to be someone who not only sets an example by my actions in this area, but also someone whose able to give a reason for why it’s the right thing to do when questioned.

And here’s my take on it:

Modesty is one of those Jell-O concepts. You try to pick it up, and it squishes fiendishly out between your fingers. 1 Timothy 2:9 commands women to dress modestly, but what does that actually mean when we’re getting dressed in the morning? How many inches long do our skirts really have to be? Some people have a hunch that there’s a cultural element in there somewhere. After all, in the Victorian era it was scandalous to let your ankles show, which makes the average Amish woman scandalous by Victorian standards. And then there’s our “freedom in Christ.” Modesty rules so often smack of legalism that a lot of people would like to throw them out completely. But then there’s that pesky 1 Timothy 2:9 again, commanding us to dress modestly.

What to do? What to do?

I believe the answer is: Be loving.

For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. –Galatians 5:13-14

Women’s bodies were designed to excite and delight men. It’s pretty simple biology: woman shows her body off, man notices it’s getting a little warm in here. But here’s the thing we all need to remember: God made women that way to bless our marriages, not to give men a constant buffet of lust-provoking eye candy.

Now for the love part. If the way I’m dressing is causing a man to take his eyes and mind off of his wife and put them on me, then I’m not being loving. Actually, I’m being selfish. I’m putting my own desire to be stylish, or to get attention, or to show off my cute figure above my brother’s purity or my sister’s marriage.

And it’s true that exactly where the line is will vary by culture, but since I’m a part of my culture, I really don’t have an excuse. I know what’s sexy in my sphere, and if I’m going to be loving, I had better save it for my husband alone and not flaunt it on the streets, or in the pew, or at my neighbor’s open house.

So when I’m getting dressed in the morning, I need to check my modesty level with my mirror, not my tape measure. It’s not really important how many inches my skirt is. What matters is whether my total package is “shamefacedness and sobriety” (1 Timothy 2:9) or “steamy little sex toy”. Guidelines may change, but our motivation should not. In our dress as well as in everything else, as Christian women, we should be ruled by love.

Recently, my husband and I have been questioning the way we dress for church. We used to have the mild inkling that wearing your “Sunday, go to meeting” clothes was a way of showing respect to the Lord. Most people in the churches we’ve attended wear their “best” clothes for church, and we always did, too. But we’ve started to see some problems with it.

For starters, clothes can be a status symbol. Last Wednesday, as my husband was driving home from work just in time for Prayer Meeting (which is held in our home), he found himself a bit uncomfortable in his dressy shirt, and sport jacket under his black wool trench coat. My husband dresses like that for his job, but he wasn’t so sure he wanted to walk in wearing those clothes because he thought wearing them might be drawing attention to the wrong things and possibly even “shaming them who have not” (similar to what was admonished against in 1 Corinthians 11:22). We women need to think about this as well, and not only this, but we have an added issue that I think deserves some consideration, the issue of not being a distraction to our brothers who have come to worship the Lord.

Our culture has developed a notion of dressing up for church. And “up” usually equals what we often think of as “attractive.” But recently I’ve been thinking about what the word “attractive” actually means. If we say that the south pole of a magnet attracts the north pole of another magnet, what are we saying? Unless something stops them, the two poles are drawn together until they touch. If a woman is “attractive,” it usually means she draws men to herself, and unless something stops them, they’ll eventually touch her. Attraction is the first step in sex.

OK, right about now, someone’s hitting the ceiling thinking I’m saying that if she doesn’t start looking unattractive or “repulsive” that I’m going to accuse them of initiating sex with everyone at church. Just come down for a minute and hear me out. Attractiveness is not a light switch, with only two positions: on and off. Attractiveness is a continuum.  It is not the case that you have to be disgusting in order to be considerate.

A lot of us are committed to modesty. After all, the Bible does say,

1Timothy 2:9-10 In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.

But what is modesty anyway? Is it just a function of what percentage of your skin is showing, or is there something more to it? The essence of modesty is not drawing attention to yourself for the wrong reasons: your wealth, your beauty, your fabulous sense of style. My husband and I have been talking about this a lot lately, and he feels like a woman is immodest when her appearance says, “Look at me! Look at this part here!” My husband, like all the other men out there who are fighting hard for purity in our sex-obsessed world, does not want you to beg him to look at you. He is, in fact, trying NOT to look at you. He doesn’t want to be attracted to you. Attraction, to be quite blunt, is the desire for sex. Realizing this, and helping men as much as we can is a huge part of modesty. Our “adorning,” our ornaments, the things that people are supposed to notice about us, are our good works, our meek and quiet spirits. And when is this more important than on Sunday, when everyone’s mind is supposed to be focused on the Lord, not on our gorgeous this or that?

But most of us women, myself included, have spent our lives trying to look extra beautiful on Sunday mornings, and the result is that we are more attention-grabbing, and therefore actually less modest, than usual. We do this largely because of tradition and because women like an excuse to be feminine and pretty. Also, there’s the herd mentality that if all my friends are going to be dressed up, then I want to be, too, which can sometimes even lead to the “church as beauty pageant” mindset, which can definitely take the “contestants’” thoughts away from the Lord as they’re busily comparing themselves to others. And some of us are dressing up for our husbands, to give them a chance to see us all scrubbed, and polished, and um, attractive. Let me be absolutely clear here! Without a doubt our husbands deserve and even need this chance like a drowning man needs a life preserver. But is church the best place to give it to them?

At church, not only are we out in public, we’re out with our brothers and sisters in Christ, people we are supposed to be building intimate relationships with, relationships which require talking, interacting, looking at each other. If we’re flaunting our nice jewelry,  fancy clothes, and killer figures, how are our sisters going to feel up next to us? And if we’re looking attractive, what can our brothers do to keep from feeling attracted? Walk away? Not talk to us? What if we’re in some man’s line of sight as he tries to look at the preacher? What’s he going to do then? Stare at his lap the whole service? What if we’re walking right past a brother as we take a toddler to the bathroom? Is he going to have to expend mental energy on NOT feeling the way our delicate clothes, Sunday best make-up, and bust-line enhancing high heeled shoes are inviting him to feel?

I’m not saying we should look ugly, only that we should think of ourselves as going to church to interact with a large range of people, not to show off. We need to consider the effect we’re having. Don’t come in with garden dirt under your fingernails. But maybe save your $300 designer dress for your husband’s company banquet, and maybe don’t breeze past the brethren in a cloud of seductive perfume.

All of us are confronted by status and sexuality in the world all week. Shouldn’t church be a rest from all that? Why are we trying specifically to look extra attractive when we know we are going to be interacting with a whole lot of women who are continually trashed by the world’s obsession with appearance, and a whole lot men who are beaten up everywhere else they go by ungodly women trying to provoke them to lust? What if we tried to be clean and neat at church, but extra modest, even simpler and safer than usual, concealing our curves slightly more rather than slightly less, and left our attractive best for times when women who are less blessed either physically or financially won’t feel inadequate, and men besides our husbands are not forced to interact with us. And of course, when no one but our husbands can see us, ladies, let’s pull out ALL the stops: the shorter, tighter, lower-cut, more “heaven help them if they don’t touch us” the better.

But at church, maybe we should be adorned with good works and leave it at that.

Let me know what you think.

I’d like to introduce you to your imaginary Uncle Freddie. You love Uncle Freddie. He’s been single all his life, so you feel almost motherly towards him since he doesn’t have anyone else to look after him. He’s jolly, and open, and sincere, loves kids and animals, never misses birthday parties. You know, he’s family. Unfortunately, Uncle Freddie also has an unhealthy relationship with food. In fact, he weighs 600 pounds, and his doctor has told him that if he doesn’t lose weight, he’s going to die because if the diabetes doesn’t get him, a heart attack will. Uncle Freddie’s coming over for dinner tomorrow, and you’ve got a family pack of chicken. How are you going to cook it?

Recently, Joanna, of Jo-with-it’s Portfolio left me the following comment.

Do you wear skirts all the time? I think I would like to try it for a week or something, but I don’t know if there are any verses that say you should, and I don’t know where to look. I don’t want to do it for the wrong reason.

Yup, I pretty much do wear skirts all the time, but not exactly because I think the Bible says I should. Rather, I think the Bible has certain principles that should affect our clothing choices, and wearing skirts is the easiest way for me to keep them all in balance. I do not think mine is the only way to do this. It’s just the one that makes the most sense to me. The personal outworking of Biblical principle, is exactly that, personal. And above all, we need to follow the leadership of our husbands and fathers in that outworking.

Uncle Freddie will be our constant companion through this discussion because, just as he has an unhealthy relationship with food, there are an awful lot of men out there who have unhealthy relationships with women’s bodies through lust. And the way we prepare food for dinner for an unhealthy loved one has a lot of correspondences to the way we prepare our bodies for a day out in an unhealthy world.

The first Biblical principle that should affect clothing choice is modesty. Modesty is like keeping your cooking low in calories. It’s a slippery issue, hard to make universal rules about, but vitally important, especially when Uncle Freddie is coming to dinner, AND in the case of modesty (not low cal cooking), it’s actually commanded in Scripture.

In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. 1Timothy 2:9-10

The closest I can come to a good working definition of modesty is, “not drawing attention to yourself,” not putting up the big, sizzling, neon sign that screams, “Look at me!” “Look at me, I’m so rich!” or “Look at me, I just walked off the cover of InStyle,” or perhaps most crucially, “Look at me, I’m hotter than hellfire, I got more curves than the Pacific Coast Highway, and you’re gonna be dreaming about me all night, baby!” Maybe the simplest way of saying it is that modesty means not showing off.

And we really need not to show off because our brothers in Christ are living in a sex-saturated world, just like Uncle Freddie is surrounded by fast food restaurants and cheap candy bars. Sexual images are everywhere, easily available, addicting, and anonymous. A 1996 Promise Keepers Survey at one of their rallies found that over 50% of the men admitted being involved with pornography within one week of attendance. And according to a 2001 Christianity Today Leadership Survey 37% of pastors say that porn is a current struggle. It’s been a few years, and I’d be really surprised if the situation hasn’t gotten worse.

Men who are struggling with porn are guaranteed also to be struggling with objectifying the women around them, with viewing women as nothing but bodies, with living each day in a state of unbridled lust. And that lust is killing them spiritually just as surely as being morbidly obese is killing Uncle Freddie physically. Some of these men are completely given over, but others are fighting, struggling to keep their heads above water. And while we may sometimes be able to tell who these hurting men are, the numbers are so high that the majority of them are going unnoticed. You see them at church, at the store; they’re watching you from their cars as they pass you on the street. Do you love these men? Do you want to help them? Do you care if they lust after you? Or are you just annoyed with them? Are you angry at Uncle Freddie for eating way too many Twinkies and then overeating at your table?

The second principle is being feminine, the desire to look like a woman. This is akin to having what you cook taste good. The main verse people usually quote on dressing in a distinctly feminine way is:

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God. Deuteronomy 22:5

The important thing to keep in mind here is that this is part of the Law, and Christians have argued for centuries about what that means for us. Many people would be quick to point out that this same chapter forbids plowing with an ox and an ass together (v. 10) and wearing fabric made from combined fibers, such as wool and linen (v. 11). Most Christians, even the ones who say that verse 5 means that it’s an abomination for women to ever wear pants, would not rise up in righteous indignation at a poly-cotton blend, so a lot of people would like to throw out the idea that a women wearing masculine clothes is wrong, too. But there is a difference in verse 5. It’s unique in that a reason for the command is given. And that reason is that “all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” “Abomination” means God hates it. When God says He hates something we’d better take note, no matter which part of the Bible we find His declaration in. Indeed, we take very seriously other “abominations to the LORD” mentioned in the Law (idolatry: Deuteronomy 7:25, human sacrifice: Deuteronomy 12:31, involvement in the occult: Deuteronomy 18:10-12, deceitfulness in business: Deuteronomy 25:13-16, and many, many more). God, who does not change, has declared that He hates it when men look like women and women look like men. Now exactly what that means in terms of the actual clothes is going to be cultural, but I think we can at least take away from this the principle that God does want us to look like what He made us to be.

OK, now comes the hard part, a balancing act tougher than menu planning for a 600 pound uncle, because the easiest way to look feminine is to wear clothes that are small and tight, that show lots of your delicate skin, gracefully follow every curve, and leave no doubts about how small and soft you are compared to the average man. But, oops! That is not terribly modest. Now what? More fabric? Baggier? More androgynous?

It’s really easy to be modest without being feminine, and it’s really easy to be feminine without being modest, just like it’s really easy to cook low calorie chicken that tastes like rubber, and it’s really easy to cook succulent chicken that’s fatty enough to clog seven more of Uncle Freddie’s hardened arteries.

Take jeans for example. Jeans can be kind of modest if they’re really loose and straight cut. Some men, to be perfectly blunt, are going to have trouble with having their eye follow the line of your legs up to where they meet (a place it would be better if the men around you weren’t thinking about), but you could always mitigate that with a really big shirt that hangs half-way to your knees. And if you’re super careful about not letting your hips sway too much, depending on your hair, you might even pass for a wimpy little man, and then for sure, you’d be modest. But, ew, not to mention “abomination.” So maybe we don’t want to go there, but the minute your jeans are tight enough to show the world that you’re actually female, you’re cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible. And, um, we all know how men are about…cars.

So, what do we do? I tend to think that modesty has to come first, but not to the absolute exclusion of femininity (because God does want us to look feminine). We constantly have to strike a balance, and that is governed by the most important principle yet, the Principle of Love.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s return to Uncle Freddie for a moment. How are you going to cook that chicken? Look at these menu options and the thoughts behind them, and try to think which one is the most loving.

Well, option one is, you could say to yourself, “It’s Uncle Freddie’s fault he’s so fat. If he overeats at my house and gains six more pounds, he’ll have no one to blame but himself and his own out of control lust for food. I’m getting out the Crisco and frying that chicken because that’s the way my husband likes it. Anyway, if Uncle Freddie doesn’t eat fried chicken at my house, he could always stop at KFC on the way home, so it doesn’t really matter how I cook.”

Or, you could say to yourself, “Poor Uncle Freddie, food is just too hard to resist! Maybe if I boil the chicken in several changes of water, I can remove all the fat. My family’s not going to like it, but I don’t want to feel like I killed Uncle Freddie!”

Then there’s option three: “I love Uncle Freddie, and I know he really struggles with food. I want to make a nice dinner for my family, but I don’t want to sabotage Uncle Freddie’s efforts, either. Maybe I could fire up the grill to give that chicken a nice mesquite flavor without adding extra fat and calories.”

In my mind, option three is the most loving. You’re balancing your love for your family with your love for Uncle Freddie and sensitivity to his struggles. You’re trying to make food that will be yummy for your husband and children, but that won’t contribute to Uncle Freddie’s problems. Of course, he could still overeat, but you’re giving him a fighting chance at staying on his diet.

It is this balance that I’m striving to achieve in my clothes. I want to be feminine and pretty, to look like a woman, but I don’t want to show so many curves that the men around me start hearing engines revving and feel the salt air on their cheeks. And for me, that means wearing skirts. Skirts are obviously feminine (just think of the little outlines of the people on the doors of public bathrooms–the canonical woman is wearing a dress). You can tell at a glance that I’m a woman, but (if my skirt is long and full enough), I’m not showing all that many curves, far fewer than in the average pair of pants. It’s great mesquite flavor without too many calories. My family has a nice dinner. Uncle Freddie lives through the night.

***

Note: There are some women who have been sexually abused who cannot handle wearing skirts. My mom had a dear friend who was in this situation. I asked her to be in charge of the gift table at my wedding, and after much anguish, she finally told my mom she didn’t know if she could do it. She figured if she had an official wedding “job,” she’d have to wear a dress, and she just couldn’t bring herself to put one on. I told my mom to tell her that I cared about her, not her clothes. She could wear whatever she wanted to my wedding. I still wanted to honor her with a special role.

I do think that skirts are a great option for most people, but I would never want anything I say here to be used to make someone who’s hurting feel guilty.