Except What It Means

“Young people today are desperately trying to vandalize the image of God that they carry about, despite themselves, in their bodies. God gave long hair to women as a glory and a covering — showing that the Lord is near — and yet bewildered, unprotected, and lost women now cut their hair with hedge clippers and dye it bizarre colors . . . modern evangelical Christians, who have an eagle eye when it comes to imitating anything the world does, are blind to why the world is doing it. Unfortunate souls are trying to develop a cultural form of dress that says, ‘I am lost and hopelessly damned.’ And we have Christians who seriously want to imitate this or allow it into the hallways of Christian schools, saying all the while that we can make it mean something like, ‘Christians are on the cutting edge too.’ But actually it just shows that we are terminally clueless. Imitators of the world’s culture from within the church know everything about the world’s culture — except what it means” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 189).