Plain Dress as a Form of

Christian Witnessing in the 21st Century

Eugene Sensenig, Lebanon, 2005 - sensenig@cyberia.net.lb

For many, the choice of religious clothing is hardly a Christian issue, except when it comes to
distinguishing oneself from other religions in which such "antiquated" practices still exist. If ever,
Christian women are only expected to wear modest clothing and a head coverings during Sunday church
services and on major holidays. For Christian men, religiously motivated dress codes have literally died
out.

For the historical peace churches, or at least their respective conservative wings, so called plain clothing
is still the norm. Be it throughout North and South America, or in a small number of isolated
communities elsewhere in the world, old order Quaker, Amish, Brethren and Mennonite men and women
still wear distinctive garments, which they consider mandatory as a sign of their submission to the will of
God.

Personal reflections

Until I left the United States for good at the age of 19, I spent my entire life in communities strongly
influenced by a vibrant Mennonite sense of group identity. Born in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where my
father was working on a degree in history from Eastern Mennonite University, I moved to Evanston, a
suburb of Chicago, in the late 1950s, were I spent most of my childhood at Reba Place Fellowship, a
Mennonite urban commune in Chicago dedicated to the revival of 16th century radical, collectivist
Anabaptism. I spent my teenage years in the heartland of the Amish and Mennonites, Lancaster County,
also erroneously known as "Pennsylvania Dutch Land" because of the archaic German (Deutsch) dialect,
still spoken by the original settlers in the region. Finally, while attending Goshen, a Mennonite College
located in a strongly Mennonite section of Indiana, I signed up for an intensive German course with other
Mennonite undergrads in Kassel, in the state of Hessen. I went to Europe in 1975 and stayed there for a
quarter of a century. While living in Salzburg, Munich, and Bolzano/Bozen, I became active in the field
of minority and refugee rights, working closely with people from the Middle East. In 1999 I moved to
Beirut. This essay deals with my personal experiences with the issue of the dress code in three disparate
regions, i.e. Pennsylvania, Austria, and Lebanon.

Traditional Mennonite plain clothing in the US and Canada

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Modern migration studies make a distinction between first generation immigrants who have completed
their adolescence in their country of origin and those who become expats at a much earlier age. Being
born, spending my childhood and going through puberty in strongly Mennonite environments, I found
plain dress for both men and women to be quite normal. The sense of moral and social distinction, which
religious dress codes are intended to establish, was well anchored in my sense of personal identity well
before I moved to Germany as a young adult. You can take the boy out of Lancaster County, but you can't
take Lancaster County out of the boy.

The Christian dress code's "last stand" in the early 20th century

The defence of religiously motivated clothing standards within the Christian majority populations of
Europe and North America had become a lost cause by the beginning of World War I. A liberal market
economy for clothing and accessories (through department stores and mail order catalogues), combined
with the effects of mass media advertising (on billboards, in newspapers and later radio), were tempting
both practicing and nominal Christians away from traditional ways of dress. After the Great War, urban
and even small town women began to bob their hair, hemlines went up and the bicycle and mass
produced automobile offered consumers new forms of affordable transportation.

More commonly in Europe than in North America, both the liberal and social democratic parties and
social institutions openly attacked the Catholic Church's attempt to turn back the tide. Progressive athletic
clubs and mountaineering associations flaunted their newly found freedom by introducing scant bathing
suits, revealing sports uniforms and hiking gear that showed as much skin as possible. The logical
conclusion of this development was the leftist "Free Body Culture" (Freikrperkultur) or naturalist
movement, which was widespread throughout Central Europe and Scandinavia in the 1920s and 30s and
was institutionalised in many Communist countries after World War II.

Despite the conservative backlash that dominated most of Europe during the Nazi occupation period, and
the attempt to banish women to the home and garden following the war, a return to religious dress codes
was unthinkable in the Christian West by the mid 20th century.

Growing up Mennonite on adolescent shame and voyeurism

As a boy and teenager in Mennonite America, I was accustomed to differentiating between "us" and
"them." My parents had grown up in conservative homes in which boys and girls were expected to be
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baptised and wear plain clothing when they reached puberty. My grandparents generation dressed in a
way that most outsiders would have considered "old order", with the men wearing collarless jackets and
beards without moustaches; the women covering their hair with relatively large lace bonnets and hiding
their contours with additional layers of cloth.

My parents had stopped wearing plain clothing while living in Chicago, so when our family moved back
to rural, backwater Pennsylvania when I was 10, it was quite a shock for me to realise that I belonged to a
community that I had till then associated with my grandparents exclusively. As opposed to my two sisters
and younger brother, I didnt attend a Mennonite secondary school, but enjoyed rather the comparatively
liberal climate of one of Lancaster's college preparatory schools, where I for the first time became aware
of the fact that I belonged to a unique local ethnic community. This relatively late recognition of the fact
that we as a group had been in the region for over 200 years longer than the rest of the local population
did not kindle feelings of confessional superiority in me; on the contrary, I was filled with a desire to be
like my "worldly" friends, who had "normal" relatives who didn't wear strange clothing and who spoke
exclusively English at home.

The author as a young man with his Mennonite mother, grandmother, great grandmother and great-great grandmother

Interacting with conservative and old order Mennonites in my teenage years made me aware of an
additional aspect of wearing plan clothes, which only an adolescent can fully appreciate, that is the effect
that it supposedly has as a deterrent to the male gaze. Observing young girls, in one's neighbourhood,
church or school, as they gradually turn into women is an experience that most men look back on fondly
as one of their most significant boyhood experiences. The fact that these girls started covering their hair
to one degree or another and cloaking their emerging contours, in no way discourages a 14 year old
boy's voyeuristic phantasy. After moving to Beirut I discovered that many of my Muslim friends shared a
similar experience when they reached this stage in their lives.

Jewish fascination with the Christian Other in Lancaster County

If there is anything in the eastern United States remotely resembling an indigenous white population,
Pennsylvania Dutch Land is certainly an example of it. The first Europeans settled in the region in the
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th
second half of the 17 century. The Sensenig family arrived at the Philadelphia harbour in 1734.
Lancaster is the oldest inland city in the United States.

Attending an elite country day school as of the age of 12 introduced me for the first time to the world of
America's ethnic intelligentsia, many of whom were Jewish. Most of my school friends were the sons of
Jewish professors at Franklin and Marshall College or the local Jewish professional class. Visiting my
friends' homes, I became aware of the unusual interest that their parents showed for Mennonites. Whereas
many worldly Christians in the region resented the influence of as they termed it the Mennonite
Mafia, Lancaster County Jews seemed fascinated with our charmingly archaic German dialect, the
Central European dishes we specialised in and the way Amish and old order Mennonites dressed in a
manner which was strangely reminiscent of centuries old European folk costumes. I remember proudly
telling many of my friends' parents how we had fled persecution and almost certain extermination at the
hands of Europe's Catholic and Protestant state churches in the 17th and 18th centuries and along with
the English Quakers had settled peacefully among the local Native American population.

In hindsight it is obvious to me that this special interest was the result of the unexpected similarities
between the dress, customs and history of orthodox Jews and old order Mennonites and Amish. This
overlap is illustrated by the fact that, even today, when I mention the 1980s cinema thriller "Witness"
(starring Harrison Ford) in order to give acquaintances an idea of where I come from, two people out of
three respond by saying: "Oh, I thought that the movie was about Jews."

The French "Kulturkampf" and European secular fundamentalism

The conflict mentioned above, between Europes liberal and social democratic counter cultures and the
conservative establishment in the interwar period, re-emerged in an even more virulent form with the
arrival of millions of Muslim immigrants in Central and Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s.

Social Democratic role models of personal and social liberation through sports Austria 1920s (Gruessing 1989, 122-123)

A Liberal-Socialist-Conservative consensus surrounding the Muslim dress code has led to a severe sense
of alienation on the part of many immigrants in Europe today. The process leading up to the banning of
religious clothing in French public schools was initiated in the late 1980s when local school officials first
attempted to remove the coverings from the heads of Muslim school girls.

The first manifestations of the current deep-seated conflict between secularism and religion became
apparent at the same time that the situation in Europe was changing in an even more significant way;
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Perestroika and Glasnost had prepared the stage for the complete collapse of the Soviet system in 1991.
With the end of the Cold War, political Islam was discovered as a useful enemy Other, which could
easily be demonised in order to galvanise public opinion against the enemies of secularism. Publicly
demonstrating one's faith became one item in the profile of a "religious fanatic" and potential terrorist
threat. The "hijab" was gradually being seen as the flag of counter-revolution, threatening the
achievements of four hundred years of European Enlightenment.

Having fled Lancaster County at the height of the Watergate scandal, the tail end of the war in Vietnam
and in the wake of the coup in Chile, I had spent over ten years attempting to not only escape my
confining Mennonite upbringing, but also to distance myself from an American hegemonic identity of
which I in the dual traditions of Anabaptist pacifism and social justice was at the time intensely
ashamed. I embraced the European left and became a deeply convinced supporter of its strictly secularist
reform project.

The controversy surrounding the "hijab" found me unexpectedly at odds with my progressive friends and
university colleagues. My Mennonite background had caught up with me in a manner with which I was
by no means uncomfortable. Although I cloaked my support for the Muslim community in human rights
rhetoric, I keep imagining how I would have felt if somebody had attempted to forcibly remove the
covering from my mother's or sister's head.

Disco Joe and Batwoman on the beach

The confrontation with the religious dress codes in the Middle East again forced me to re-evaluate my
understanding of clothing in the Christian tradition. Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s most of the Muslim
immigrants I was confronted with wore coverings, beards without moustaches or baggy Turkish trousers
because according to my understanding they originated from Anatolian villages where this was the
norm. The clothing traditionally associated with Islam was in reality a manifestation of
underdevelopment, not fundamentalism. As a rule, if the wife wore a covering, normally tied behind the
head, the husband also retained some aspects of peasant style garb, including the obligatory prayer beads.

Travelling in Syria, Jordan and Egypt I was confronted for the first time with a phenomenon which I,
from a Mennonite perspective, instinctively found offensive, or at least highly inconsistent. On the
summer streets of Damascus and Amman, and even more blatantly at the Egyptian Mediterranean seaside
resorts, one constantly ran into men, dressed in stylishly revealing western fashions, accompanied by
wives smothered in trench coats, gloves and pointy black sunglasses, reminding one of the Batman TV
series of the late 1960s. (Incidentally, I was told that "Batwoman" is a derogatory term coined in West
Beirut by liberal Muslims.) The huge discrepancy between the manner in which fundamentalist Muslim
husbands expect their wives to dress, and the Bermuda shorts, tank tops and baseball caps in which men
paraded up and down the beachfront walkways of Mersa Matruh, convinced me that this had nothing to
do with witnessing one's faith and everything to do with sexist oppression.

This confrontation with sexism in religious attire made me wonder to which extent gender inequality
played a role in my own church. Reflections on this issue will be presented in the second section of this
paper, dealing with the issue of dress from a layman's theological perspective.
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Theological issues

In following I will attempt to deal with some of the scriptural and theological issues related to a faith-
based choice of clothing. I will limit my reflections on this issue to the New Testament of the Christian
Bible because it is from here that Mennonites and Amish take their justification for plain dress. It is also
in the New Testament that Anabaptists have found the conviction to witness to their faith irrespective of
the policy decisions taken by the secular state. It is indeed unfortunate that France either exterminated or
expelled its Anabaptist population, because if they had remained, the Muslim, Jewish and Sikh minorities
might have enjoyed the support of a vocal Christian church for their right to publicly wear religious
symbols.

Clothing as witness "Don't put your light under a bushel!"

Several verses from the Gospels, the letters of the Apostle Paul, as well as the book of James are
commonly cited when Anabaptists explain their need to manifest their faith in the societies in which they
live. One verse that is well known and highly important to most Christians is found in the Gospel of
Matthew (22:21) and is cited here (as in all future cases) from the New Revised Standard Version: "Give
therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." The verse
is interpreted to mean that every Christian has not only the right, but also the duty to disobey the state
when it implements laws that require Christians to offend the will of God. Civil disobedience is thus a
divinely sanctioned concept. This command takes on a more concrete character when combined with the
Apostle Paul's letter to the Church in Rome (Romans 13). Interpreted by the eminent Mennonite
theologian, John Howard Yoder, it has an almost Socratic ring to it, whereby the state's inherent duty is to
balance out the interests of various power players within the "polis" and must always be obeyed when it
fulfils this role.
Accordingly, if "the use of force is such as to protect the innocent and punish the evildoers, to
preserve peace so that 'all men might come to the knowledge of the truth,' then that state may be
considered as fitting within God's plan, as subject to the reign of Christ. This positive evaluation
cannot apply to a given state in all that it does, but at best in one case at a time, each time it
chooses the best alternative rather than adding evil to evil. It is, however, possible, and even
frequent, for a state to abandon this function, to deny any sort of submission to a moral order
higher than itself, and in so doing to punish the innocent and reward the guilty. That state is what
we find in Revelation 13, best described as demonic" (Yoder 1998, 63).
When the state abandons its "Socratic" role, of justly balancing power interests within any given society,
and sides with the forces of oppression and exploitation, it must be resisted, albeit for Mennonites using
exclusively non-violent means.

In James 2:14-17, Christians are instructed to support a concept that today would be termed the "social
Gospel," caring for the homeless and hungry, because "faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead."
Anabaptists interpret this as a positive command, meaning that social responsibility is both an individual
and collective duty of the church and every believer.

The Gospel of Matthew contains a comparison by Christ that for Anabaptists convincingly explains why
doing "good works" in society is a form of witnessing which must be an integral part of each Christian's
life. "No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light
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to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good
works and give glory to your Father in heaven." (Matthew 5:15-16) Putting one's "light under a bushel" is
understood as not witnessing by example. In this context, a Christian who goes unnoticed (as the French
state would have them do) is not seriously living his or her faith.

Finally, in an illustrated paperback put out by the old order Mennonite educational and sustainable
tourism organisation, "People's Place," in 1986, Stephen Scott argues the case that Christian witnessing
means being in society, but not of society. Citing the Apostle Paul in his letter to the 1st century church in
Rome (Romans 12:2) he states that plain clothing is the appropriate method of remaining integrated in the
modern world without being tempted by those elements of it that draw a believer away from God. "Do
not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may
discern what is the will of God what is good and acceptable and perfect." A variety of other scriptural
passages are cited by Scott to illustrate that stylish clothing and accessories draw believers away from
God, including the following passage taken from the First Letter of John and attributed to the author of
the fourth Gospel. "Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those
who love the world; for all that is in the world the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in
riches comes not from the Father but from the world." (I John 2:15-16)

In summary, Anabaptists understand their responsibility to God as being twofold; on the one hand
Christians must be actively engaged in society, helping the needy, resisting injustice and working for
peace. On the other hand, ostentatious dress and the flaunting of affluence lead believers away from God.
For old order and other conservative Mennonite and Amish men and women, the solution has been to
wear plain dress, thus resisting temptation and also witnessing to the world that they are submitters to
God's will.

Plain clothing as a form of sexist oppression

The tendency to see clothing, and especially the head covering, as a woman's prerogative, has played an
important role within the Anabaptist communities over the last two centuries. This phenomenon is rooted
both in scripture and the generally sexist nature of human society.

Scott points out that (as in the case of Islam, which I described above) Mennonite men have often left
plain dress up to their wives, preferring to dress "worldly" themselves in order to better function in
greater society. "In many instances in the past and present, plain women have been required to be much
more nonconformed than men. Many plain women have found this to be unfair and inconsistent; in fact,
for some, it has become their reason for changing to more fashionable styles." At the other extreme, Scott
also emphasises that many conservative and old order Mennonite men have tended to be attracted by
more liberal Mennonite women, thus placing undo pressure on traditional communities. "Sometimes men
have been responsible for the loss of plain clothing among women. If young men choose wives from
among those young women who stretch the church's dress standards, a large percentage of girls will
compromise the rules rather than risk remaining single." (1986, 42)

There is only one direct reference in the New Testament to the female covering. These few verses are
consistently cited by Mennonite communities of all stripes and can be found in the Apostle Paul's first
letter to the 1st century church in Corinth (11:2-16). Conservative and old order communities take the
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command contained in this epistle literally and consider it an enduring guideline for all Christians
throughout history. Liberal Mennonites contextualise this recommendation and understand it as a product
of its specific time and place.
As explained by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman in his portrayal of the Corinthian church,
Paul was convinced that "by foolishly thinking that they are already exalted and ruling with
Christ, these believers overlooked the real and present dangers in their daily existence. They do
not see that there are still evil forces in the world, which will infect the congregation if allowed to
enter. They do not see, to take one of Paul's most complicated discussions, that if women fail to
wear head coverings during church services they are susceptible to the invasion of evil angels who
might pollute the entire body of believers ()." (2000, 297)

Ehrman points out that, despite agreement amongst many scholars that the openly misogynous sections of
I Corinthians (such as 14:34-35) were most likely inserted by later church leaders who were intent on
removing women from positions of leadership, there is indeed general consensus that the "most
complicated" section on female head coverings is indisputably from Paul himself. As opposed to the
blatantly sexist first and second letters to Timothy and the letter to Titus, in which an "unknown author
used Paul's name to give authority to his attempt to address problems in some post-Pauline churches"
(Bassler 1993, 2231) Paul did believe that women should play a leading role in the churches he
established throughout the Mediterranean. "Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man
or man independent of woman. For just as a woman came from man, so a man comes from woman; but
all things come from God. Judge for yourselves; is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head
unveiled?" (11:11-13)

Much has been written about Paul's actual intent when calling on women to submit to their husbands
("But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his
wife, and God is the head of Christ. 11:3). Paul clearly states that a woman's covering is a "symbol of
authority," which she must wear on her head. Mennonites disagree on whether this covering should be
worn only during church services, as is the case in many other religious denominations, at all times when
a women is in public, as is practiced by most conservative and old order Anabaptists, or not at all because
of the considerable shift in social reality since the first century, as is the case in most liberal Mennonite
communities. Paul's lack of clarity has muddied the discussion on the covering over the centuries and
remains a key argument when comparing Western and Middle Eastern dress codes. (Akkent/Franger
1987, 68)

As an anecdotal illustration of the above, it might be of interest to some readers that this ambiguity has
often been brought up by some of my Muslim students in the cultural studies courses I have taught at the
Lebanese American University in Beirut. They repeatedly have pointed out that whereas Christians see
the covering as a form of sexist oppression of women by their husbands, Muslim women experience the
covering as a form of protection and recognition of their submission to God. I like to counter that First
Corinthians is indeed vague enough to lend credence to this interpretation, but that in the case of old
order Mennonites, Brethren, Quakers and Amish, both men and women wear conspicuous clothing
symbolising their submission to the will of God. Inversely, several of my Druze students at Notre Dame
University mentioned to me that they refer to the North American Amish and Mennonites when justifying
their personal choice to wear traditional religious clothing.
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Traditional Druze and Amish clothing

Plain clothing's "last stand" in the early 21st Century?

Scott describes the gradual decline of plain dress within the Anabaptist communities of North and South
America, as it had progressed up until the mid 1980s. Despite the incredible increase in religiously
motivated activism in the United States, starting with the Charismatic and Evangelical renewal
movements in the mid 1970s, plain dress is not making a comeback. The supporters of George W. Bush
tend to be highly conservative with respect to their theology, but state-of-the-art in their use of the
technological, psychological and logistical tools offered by modern 21st century society. They see their
role in society more as that of moral enforcers of their authoritarian norms and less as witnesses of God's
Word. Thus there is no need to make a distinction, based on specific religious dress codes, between the
community of God and that of the world.

I remember marching in Washington D.C. in the faith-based block as a child and teenager during various
demonstrations against the war in Vietnam during the 1960s and early 1970s. Old order Mennonites wore
their conspicuously plain dress, calling for an end to the US occupation of South East Asia, along with
Protestant and Catholic Latinos, African Americans, Asians, as well as people of various other religions.
Today many Mennonites are not only abandoning their plain clothing, but also their commitment to
pacifism and social justice, joining the ranks of the Evangelical Mennonites and Brethren, who openly
embrace the current president's domestic and foreign policy agendas. My own family is split along these
lines, with a majority of them supporting a definition of social values championed by the faith-based
initiatives of conservative Christianity.

Witnessing remains a core value of both conservative and progressive Christians. The ability to express
one's religious persuasions in the public sphere is a right that all people of faith must jealously defend.
Wearing conspicuous clothing and religious symbols has been an important way of outing oneself as a
believer for almost two millenniums. If the secular state is not willing to protect this right because of
exaggerated fears that fundamentalists might abuse this practice as a recruiting tool, then it is indeed in
danger of sacrificing the very enlightened ideals that most of us hold dear as the guarantee of our
individual freedom and personal integrity.
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Bibliography

Akkat, Meral and Gaby Franger. Das Kopftuch, Basortu: Ein Stueckchen Stoff in Geschichte und
Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main: Dagyeli, 1987.

Bassler, Jouette M. "The First Letter of Paul to Timothy: Introduction," in The Harper Collins Study
Bible: Revised Standard Version. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. New
York, Oxford: Oxford University, 2000.

Gruessing, Kurt. Die Roten am Land: Arbeitsleben und Arbeiterbewegung im westlichen sterreich.
Steyr: Museum Arbeitswelt, 1989.

Scott, Stephen. Why Do They Dress That Way? People's Place Book No. 7. Intercourse, Pennsylvania:
Good Books, 1986.

Yoder, John Howard. The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism. Scottdale, Pennsylvania:
Herald Press, 1998.