People who follow trends are often very bad at reading them. People who read trends are often reluctant to join in the general merriment because they actually know what is being said. G.K. Chesterton once commented how gloriously wonderful and bright and cheerful Times Square would be . . . if you didn’t know how to read.
The old Sara Kaba lip plate adornment provides us with an example of this. (These are the lip plates that were tagged with the exotic sounding word Ubangi by an official with Ringling Brothers.) But regardless of what it was called, a few moment’s reflection on that now discontinued practice should reveal a couple things about it. The first is that such disfigurement of women was seriously demented. And the second fact is that the people doing it didn’t think so.
Our relativistic age now wants to say, “Well, then, didn’t you take any anthropology courses in college” Lay off, wouldja?” But however much it may betray my proclivities toward cultural imperialism, the first missionary to that tribe should have been praying earnestly about how to get the practice discontinued by his second day among them. Any missionary who did not declare war on that practice is a missionary who needed, in the worst way, to be sent back home in order to be evangelized himself. And when it comes to reaching this conclusion, the fact that lip plates are not condemned by name in the Bible should not even slow us down.
What women do to themselves, or place on themselves, is pulling in one of two directions. They are either trying to uglify themselves or beautify themselves. If they are attempting to beautify themselves, that is good as far as it goes, but now they are either doing it in the way God requires or they are not. They are either using a biblical standard of beauty or they are not. In the case of attempted uglification — dog collars, grotesque tattoos, and so on, our response should be one of simple compassion and a desire to reach out with a message of grace and forgiveness. Don’t over-analyze cries for help — just bring the help.
If she is trying to beautify herself, but needs some basic lessons in aesthetics, while the compassion should be a constant, the practical side of the case is a bit trickier. The Church has neglected the principles of aesthetics for far too long, and we are often dealing with such issues from a flat-footed start. Botox is fighting the curse, but ham-handedly. You don’t fight the curse, really, by making it look like you got your face pressure treated. And putting a little pretty on the side of your nose almost never has the effect intended. Making it sparkly doesn’t make it beautiful, as I might say to the cowboy singer with two thousand rhinestones on his coat. But this immediately creates another problem — speaking truth to insecurity — that I’ll try to address in a moment.
A Christian woman should seek to be two things in her public appearance — beautiful and (to all but one) unavailable. One of the fundamental mistakes that women make, when they are falling away from a biblical understanding of femininity, is that of confusing the effects created by signals of availability with the effects of beauty. But this is a drastic mistake. Beauty attracts certainly, in a certain way, but so does availability attract — in another way entirely. When women are signaling availability, they ought not to tally up the results as though they were coming from the beauty column. Because Christian women know that general availability is prohibited in Scripture, they are the ones most prone to make this category mistake. They adopt signals from the world, and try to change the meaning of those signals in their heart. But it doesn’t matter what those signals mean down inside her own heart.
The problem is compounded when no one tells the truth to Christian women who are being dragged, because of their insecurities, toward a fundamental worldliness. Not only is this a fundamental worldliness, it is a glaringly obvious worldliness. It doesn’t matter if the silent ones refuse to say anything because they can’t see it, or because they are afraid of the consequences if they do.
But here it is. We are a fallen race, and most of us aren’t that cute. This has implications for how we interact with each other. My wife tells me that women know when they are being “checked out,” and it has to be acknowledged that many men are not nearly as surreptitious as they think they are. But it must also be said that many of these women misunderstand the nature of the check out. The most striking fact about the majority of women who dress immodestly (or foolishly) is the clear fact (at least clear to everybody now) that they cannot really afford to do so. For example, when a Christian woman goes way too tight for church, the resultant glances from some of the men (that she does notice, awarding the men hypocrite points as she goes) are, in most instances, not what she thinks. One man is thinking, “Yikes, where’s my six-year-old?” Another man is remembering that memorable phrase from Wodehouse — “a snake with hips.” Yet another is wondering how fabric engineers manage to make it that strong, and is proud of America’s continued technological advantages. Twenty percent of the men do struggle with lust, but it is a lust excited by the apparent availability and sexual impudence, and not because Helen of Troy came through the second service today.
I don’t generally like the term missional, but I’ll use it here. One of the things that betrays our lack of missional heart for those who don’t know the grace of God is just this. We stare straight at all these trinkets, baubles, and tattoos and fail to see a lost generation, like sheep without a shepherd. We think it a fine missional tactic to scatter as though we didn’t have a shepherd either. Helps us relate to them.
But one of the things that Jesus does, over the course of time, is love away the blemishes of His bride (Eph. 5:27). So our task is to learn how to remove blemishes, not how to come up with justifications for putting new ones on.