Savile Row Salvation
I believe it was Peter Hitchens who once wrote something about the last man to wear a tie on Saturdays.
Well, it turns out that I am the last man to wear a tie on Sundays. Or, at least, that’s how it goes at my church, where I am weekly reminded of such senseless nuggets as: “God doesn’t care what you wear.” And: “God doesn’t care what you look like.” This seems to me a rather audacious thing to utter. God may well care what I wear. He may well care a great deal, in fact. Then again, He may not. Either way, how should I presuppose to know?
These nuggets invariably come from my congregation’s senior pastor, an affably sincere gentleman who certainly means well and, for all accounts, is a fine and learned and inspiring man of the cloth. But his wisdom is shortsighted, at least sartorially. For while I am quite sure that one’s wardrobe is not a prerequisite for entry into Heaven, I am similarly sure that a Protestant congregation (read: a democratic one) needs no encouragement in lowering its standards. We’ve been doing that just fine on our own for the last five hundred years.
When I look around on Sunday and observe what passes for the latest in men’s Sunday best, I see t-shirts. And bowling shirts. And golf shirts. And jeans. And Sperrys. And tennis shoes. And sneakers. And sandals. Sometimes even shorts. Our pastor, quite naturally, leads the way. He seems partial to skinny jeans. And he loves to wear his shirt untucked. No one else wears a suit, at least at the particular service I attend, at 10:00. Nor is anyone else wearing a tie.
My wife invariably calls me a snob whenever I point any of this out, but I am nothing of the kind. Consider:
Religion, dear reader, comes from the Latin religare, meaning to bind. This binding, in theory, applies to a group of followers. If you get enough followers together, you have a “people.” If in turn you get enough people together then, after a while, we might say that you’ve got yourself a culture. Mature cultures tend to fare better than childish ones, which is why a congregation full of Tom Sawyers bothers me.
I do not mean to pick on my fellow worshipers, from whom I could learn a great deal about many things, and have. It’s just that how to dress is not one of them. This is because if you dress like a child, you’ll act like a child, speak like a child, and be treated like one in turn. The Bible, of course, speaks against such infantilism, not that many have noticed. Many times, in fact, have people told me, somewhat incredibly, that children are closer to God. It’s said so often, at least to me, I wonder if it’s not become an unofficial Christian tenet. Practitioners of this tenet often seem to rely on misunderstood passages in the Gospel, like this one:
At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven
In reading this passage, however, we mustn’t forget, although we often do, that Jesus was Jewish. Jewish culture has always very clearly delineated between childhood and majority. It is quite possible that, in the foregoing passage, Jesus simply means for his followers to rid themselves of the idea that life in Heaven, not to mention entry thereto, is based on rank, or station, or right. In other words, you can’t graduate into Heaven, and you can’t advance while there, at least not in the way one graduates into adulthood. Remember, he only tells his disciples of the wonders of children after his disciples ask him, “Who is the greatest in Heaven?” His point is probably that there is no greatest – there’s no matriculation, age of majority, or rank. Even if this isn’t what he means, we should all be able to at least see that he is speaking metaphorically, a point which is underscored when Jesus goes on to give some quite unsound advice, if taken literally:
If his disciples should stumble, he says, they should cut off the offending appendage which caused them to fall.
Well, now. Does anyone honestly think Christ literally wants his disciples to cut off their hands or feet? Admittedly, there is great confusion among the faithful, to and through this very day, over what is literal and what is figruative - one which immediately springs to mind is whether we literally or symbolically devour the lamb of God during holy communion.
Here, though, Jesus’s metaphor, intends only to compel his disciples’ hearts – and by extension, ours – to mimic that of a curious and obedient child. He doesn’t want us to actually be like children.
This is why children being closer to God is rubbish. If children were quite so Godly then children would be leading Sunday service, as well as the church itself, like a kind of Christian Neverland. But children are nowhere vested with the color of such authority. Because they’re children. And we should more often treat them as such. I understand, of course, quite why the church would like to romanticize childhood innocence – it’s a hell of a recruitment tool. Everyone, after all, can “relate” with a theology which accepts its acolytes as children, regardless of whatever adult angst they may carry. Another, similar, recruitment tool is used when pastors encourage men to dress down on Sundays. Notice, in fact, that the same motive is at play; i.e., since the common man dresses down, we should all dress down likewise, to give all worshippers – all comers, as they say – a relatable point of reference. The modern church loves to give its worshippers points of reference, whether it’s your inner child or your commonality. Points of reference seem to matter more than anything else.
But our only reference point needs to be that we are all sufficiently depraved. Also, we must remember that God isn’t all that common. What’s more, He’s certainly not a child. Hence, I’m less concerned with relating to church or relating to God, and more convinced that it is better to feel small in the presence of either, overwhelmed by complexities that children cannot – and should not – comprehend.
Stanley Hauerwas once wrote, “As soon as a preacher begins a sermon with ‘I cannot believe what my seven-year-old daughter recently said,’ you can quit listening. The subject of the sermon, no matter what else is said, will not direct attention to the witness of the scriptures to God.” Similarly, whenever my pastor, God bless him, tells me the Lord doesn’t care about what I wear to church, I stop listening. Whatever else he says, the message is tainted with the last thing a democratic congregation needs to hear, which is Feel free to meet God on your terms. Granted, this is usually the exact opposite of what the pastor – the good servant that he is – is trying to say. Nevertheless, it’s the implicit import. For instance, even though my pastor is blessedly conservative about many things – marriage, for one – nothing he says is ever going to prevent, or even slow, anybody in our congregation from getting a divorce. We have already tacitly been told that God will meet us on our own terms. Not His. And we’ve not been challenged otherwise because the church has focused too much on making us feel at home, on being there for us, on therapy. This even applies to churches which fetishize “service” because often the service is its own form of therapy.
Admittedly, I am aware how strict and puritanical these points may seem. But believe it or not, I do not want a congregation of teetotaling blue hairs who slap my hand with a ruler every time I laugh at a sex joke, and I certainly don’t want to be a part of a congregation which refuses me entrance into the sanctuary if I don’t wear a suit and tie. I don’t think the God Who gifted His son, Jesus Christ, unto the world is either a tyrannical or doggedly puritanical entity. Hence, we shouldn’t mimic such strictness or piety. In fact, I understand well the dangers of a church which thinks it is better than everyone else. After all, Christianity is premised on the idea that we are all dirty, poor, miserable, and fallen; and the only way out of this miserableness is to accept God’s gratuitous gift of grace. We can’t work, buy, pray, or dress our way into salvation. But moderns, as I have written before, have lost the ability for nuance and distinction. And there is a certain amount of distinction between accepting the fallen, with whom we are all in league, and encouraging the fallen. A church, in other words, doesn’t have to have a dress code, but it shouldn’t have an anti-dress code either, or else I fear it has missed the point.
Purposefully dressing like a child, not because of wealth or station or anything else but because of a philosophy which doesn’t purport to care about what we wear to church, does two things. It reinforces a childishness which I believe we, as a faith, have had quite enough of, and it also reinforces, even if tacitly, a commonality that doesn’t bring us closer to God, but rather brings our perception of God closer to us.
The scary thing is that our broader culture has led the way in this march toward casualness. That this is scary is because it is hard to imagine how the church is going to stand as a bulwark against the profane if it can’t even withstand an assault on acting, or dressing, one’s age.
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A few notes are in order about this broader culture, which is infected with rot. Most Americans wear this rot on their sleeves, happily dressing down, happily dressing shabbily, taking pride sometimes in wearing the tackiest of attire. This, even as many of them – those who style themselves conservatives – loudly protest and Tweet and vote against the erosion of something called “values,” a point of fact which begs another:
Most of what I write, here and elsewhere, tends to be aimed at my fellow “conservatives,” those who fail to often see that the most destructive notions impelling our decline are usually borne of our own making. As the fellow wrote, maybe there’s a beast. And probably, it’s us.
As conservatives, we must understand that it is inherently impossible to defend “values” when one not only practices but promotes the democratic catechism of leveling, especially of the slumming-it variety, which is what one inherently accomplishes when he or she refuses to admit that there is such a thing as taste or style, which is to say distinction.
Distinction, in a literal sense, is how the tie came to be, back during The Thirty Years War when mercenaries sought to wear them to denote affiliation. Despite researching the matter, I remain confused as to whether these mercenaries – Croatian, I believe – were fighting for or against Louis XIII. I suppose it doesn’t really matter because I’m not such a traditionalist that I wish to return to the cravats of the time of Louis XIII. But a little appeal to distinction can’t hurt a nation which vests its conserving hopes in a movement made up of people who love to slum it.
The opposite of slumming it isn’t being snooty and upper-crust, just like the opposite of having a dress code isn’t having an anti-dress code.
I suppose, though, there’s no coincidence that the American church – to the extent there is such a thing as an American church – as well as the American people are similarly arrested by not only a decline but a perpetual existential inquiry: i.e., who are we and where are we going? It’s hard to understand who you are when you don’t understand how to dress.
Clothes make the man in more ways than one.
