Now I'm Stealing Topics From Other Bloggers

A couple of my Jive To The Monkey-approved blogs (well, formerly approved blogs, before they started harboring Rabby) have some interesting topics going on. This post will look at one of them.

Guitar Chick Nikki, otherwise known as Tricky Nikki, has a column on modesty, a topic she has visited before (and wrote about in her hit tune "The Modesty Song.") Although subsequent comments have dwelt on the sexual exploitation of the feminine form in the new Dukes of Hazzard movie, I found the most interesting part of her column to be the examples she gave of modest, stylish clothing, and her assertion that "modest" need not be a synonym for "frumpy" or "out of style." This is a point that many non-Christians fail to get. In some part, this is the fault of us Christians, particularly in old-time Pentecostal and fundamentalist ranks.

In the church where I grew up, modesty meant this: no shorts allowed at any time, for any reason. If I wanted to play football in the backyard with the neighborhood boys in the heat of August, I had to do so with jeans on. Gym class? Sweats. Swimming? "Mixed" swimming (swimming with guys and girls) was a no-no, so in general we could not go to public pools. If someone in the church had a pool, we could have same-sex swimming parties and wear trunks, but even then we were encouraged to also wear T-shirts in case a girl would happen to stumble upon our party.

The standards were tougher for girls. No pants of any kind -- only dresses and skirts, which must extend below the knee, and preferably, to the ankle. No ear-piercing (it was a given that they wouldn't pierce anything else), makeup, or hair-cutting. There were shades of variance with the hair issue. Valuable ministry time was taken up with questions of "is it okay for a girl to trim dead ends? Is it ok to cut bangs?" along with another big one "are culottes okay, or are they basically just pants/ shorts in disguise?"

In contrast, the kind of thing Nikki and friends are talking about has a basis in real Biblical commands. It takes into account the standards of our culture without putting the Bible at the mercy of the demands or whims of culture. The people agreeing with her (those I've seen or met anyway) understand what she's saying -- none of them are frumpy; none are immodest. This is what I mean when I talk about "balance" (in this or any other issue). Not a balance between the Word and the world, but a careful look at the Word and a prayer-life that seeks to understand what the Word really means, without drifting to an extreme that is dictated by our own misunderstanding of the commands of God or prejudices in our minds.