Let me say at the outset that I am persuaded by the arguments. I have no problem with ministers discharging their office while robed, and I also have no problem with ministers who wear a collar in public — as long as, of course, they aren’t driving around like crazy giving other motorists the bird.
So I find myself in sympathy with the theological arguments in favor of distinctive clerical dress — you can find a good example of them in Jeff Meyers’ The Lord’s Service. In addition, I find a great deal that is attractive in “collar stories.” In the circles I move around in, maybe a third to a half of the ministers wear a collar, and the opportunities that this creates for ministry with strangers is really extraordinary. A short while ago, Nancy and I were at a conferece in Carbondale, IL, and Burke Shade, the CREC minister there, was picking us up at the hotel. He wears a collar, and when he came into the hotel, a little boy chased him down and earnestly asked him if it was necessary to go to church in order to go to heaven. This is such a striking feature of collar-wearing that I am astonished that Campus Crusade doesn’t require all staff to collar up. My father is quite a gifted evangelist — the kind who loads up on tracts before an airplane flight, including some in Urdu, and so he happens to sit next to a native speaker of Urdu. It scares me to think what would happen if he started wearing a collar.
Because of these sympathies, and because I am in circumstances where a bunch of my friends are suited up for the game, I have started to receive questions about what my reasons are for refraining. At the last Auburn conference, the subject came up in the Q & A and my sketch of an answer there probably created as many problems as it solved, and so here is my second try. As I state these concerns, it is important to note that I really am speaking in generalizations, and am making no claims at all about any particular minister. As I think about it, a number of counter-examples to my concerns spring to my mind. At the same time, I think there are some things we still have to work through. There are a couple of big issues for me.
When you adopt clerical dress, you are adopting the temptations that come with it. This is not an argument against doing it — not at all — but it is an argument against those who don’t think the temptations are possible or likely. As I am fond of saying, when you enroll in a math class, the first thing you encounter are all the math problems. The person who says that all such classes should be avoided on these grounds — “have you thought about the problems?” — has an obvious shortsighted approach to life. But there is another kind of person who is even more shortsighted — the one who enrolls in the class in the sure and certain conviction that math problems are an impossibility. Trust the person who enrolls in the class, acknowledging that it is going to be a tough class.
So what could be tough about distinctive ministerial dress? There are a couple reasons, at least that I have time enough to deal with here.
First, Jesus talked about a certain kind of religious fellow, the ecclesiastical gloryhound.
It is a universal human tendency to be really aware of the problems you just escaped from, and not really aware of the temptations you are about to lurch into. But the temptations ahead are always the ones that get you. I would be a lot more comfortable with the resurgence of clerical dress if the ones doing it were the ones vigorously raising the objections and possible pitfalls. This would mean, for example, that when one of our number overshoots — say he now jangles when he walks, like a circus horse, and his pectoral cross is heavy enough to give his chiropractor unique alignment problems, he should be fielding hot, pointed questions from his collared friends, and not just from Aunt Milly the Baptist. This is not an impossibility — we should take a page from the playbook of Bishop Jewel, who consented to wear episcopal dress for the sake of the gospel while he retained to the right to speak about aspects of it as “fooleries” or “ridiculous trifles.”
Or as John Milton once noted, when he reflected upon a particular kind of ecclesiastical parade:
My second concern is the one I raised at the Auburn conference, and is the one where misunderstanding is likely and probable. I hope to do a better job here than I did with my off-the-cuff remarks there. Before I get to the bottom line, let me reiterate that counter-examples crowd into my mind also. But that said, my concern is effeminacy — not the fact of clerical dress, but what that dress in our culture happens to be, and what the connotations of that dress have taken centuries to become.
Dress is language, and just like words, the articles we wear have both denotation and connotation. As I said above, I am persuaded by the arguments about denotation. But in public speech you have to be aware of, and concerned for, the connotations also. If I were to fall into conversation with a stranger in an airport while waiting on a plane, and he asked me what I do, I would not reply that I am “a bishop.” I would avoid that word entirely because of the connotations. I could defend it easily in an argument over denotation — episkopos and presbyteros in the New Testament are used interchangeably, Q.E.D., and Bob’s yer uncle. But the connotations would still overwhelm and sink the whole thing, and I probably would not have the time to explain the point I was trying to make.
The denotation of the collar is plain enough. This man is set apart for ministry, and is vocationally called to the service of God and the Church. That is why the collar generates so many comments or questions. But there is a backdrop set of assumptions, connotations, that are part of the mix also, and any man who wants to function as a biblical minister has to swim upstream in a wide, flowing river of certain cultural assumptions about ministers and ministry. And we have to recognize that those assumptions line up with the popular identification of clergymen as the third sex. Since there is no “third sex” for real, this translates into a weird kind of effeminacy. Those who wear collars, or who robe up, should be more concerned with the projection of masculinity than some of them appear to be. Yes, the denotation says you are a minister of God. But what do the connotations say about what kind of man of God you are?
Here is where counter-examples come to mind. I know a former Marine who wears a collar, and the effect is not a problem at all. Many of the men I know who wear collars do so in a way that is quite masculine. They remind me of the occasional clergyman in Wodehouse who boxed while at Oxford, and who discharges his clerical duties with beefy enthusiasm. But the reason the image in Wodehouse is funny is because it is an unexpected twist on the popular reputation of clergyman, a reputation that is largely deserved.
There are obvious exceptions, and real ministers really do need to be tough, but still the reputation of ministerial milquetoastery is not really all that unfair. Generations of “the nicest young man in the church” have been urged by the church ladies to consider the ministry, and because it was a vocation which by common consent involved no bleeding knuckles, and lots of being nice to people, the church has come over time to consider the best candidate for future ministry to be “that sweet boy.”
We are all aware of the type — from real life and from literature. The literary portrayals are sometimes overstated and are unfair for that reason, but they still work, and they work for a reason. That reason is that the caricatures answer to something that most of us have seen in real life. From the psalm-singer David in Cooper’s stories, to the Rev. Mr. Kinosling in the Penrod stories, to Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, we ministers have the opportunity to see ourselves as the world sees us. We ought to think about it more than we do. When the work of fighting Injuns warms up, “the parson” is usually underfoot and useless.
So here is the deal. When a man puts on a collar, he needs to know that a certain masculine gravity is necessary to keep that collar from pulling him (by association and connotation) in a direction he doesn’t really want to go. If he has that gravity, and is aware of the long connotations associated with clericalism (and familar to the resultant anti-clericalism), I think that wearing a robe while preaching, or wearing a collar, could be entirely a good thing. Cool. Do it. But unless we have this conversation generally, others are going to imitate him without much thought, and some of those who imitate him are going to be mousy little men already standing chest deep in the pond of effeminacy. And when they put on the collar, it will just plain pull them under. They already exhibit the tendencies that created the caricature in the first place — they are the nice boy who went to seminary as instructed by the church ladies — and then they adopt a uniform that has a lot of these standing connotations for the surrounding world to tag him with. I was watching a very nice “reverend” being interviewed on television the other night, and he was so gentle and did everything but pat the viewers on the back of the hand. It was obvious, and his collar made it screamingly obvious.
Now I know that some readers of all this will have been blessed with no experience of what I am talking about at all, and it will seem to them that I am therefore talking nonsense. I am glad for them. They grew up with a gruff and collared Lutheran pastor who was a Navy Seal before seminary, a man who kept a spitoon in the vestry, and so the natural conclusion they might draw is that Wilson is being hyper-sensitive here. So sensitive, in fact, that we suspect a little effeminacy, do we not?
The first reason I gave above for going slowly is one that is more likely to be recognized and dealt with, for no other reason than that the opponents of clerical dress are likely to bring up all the relevant passages, and the point will at least be discussed. But our problem with centuries of an effeminate ministry is not widely recognized, and yet it is a deeply-rooted problem in the culture of the West. I have a very high view of the ministerial calling, and believe it to be a scriptural one, but I also believe that a certain kind of clericalism was largely responsible for the rise of a virulent anti-clericalism. Before we head back there again, could we talk a bit about what we did wrong last time?