This coming Sunday is Easter, and American churches are ready to receive larger crowds of worshipers. While church attendance in general has decreased, 90% of pastors still report Easter Sunday as one of their three most attended services, alongside Christmas and Mother’s Day. Whether for cultural reasons, family pressure, or habit, the Church’s opportunities for witnessing this coming Sunday are undisputed.
But besides the more important opportunity for sharing the gospel with families who would not otherwise warm a church pew, Easter offers a return to another old tradition: the phenomenon of one’s “Sunday best.”
For hundreds of years, an American woman’s best dress was the one she wore on Sunday. Now it’s the dress she wears to a wedding, a fancy dinner, or a night out. Indeed, many women don’t even have a “best” dress.
Going to church was once a religious and a cultural experience. Even those with doubts about their own faith attended church, and what’s more, they attended church with reverence for the institution they entered. They dressed the part.
Granted, dressing up for church is not a primary issue. Plenty of time and energy could be spent turning Sunday worship into one’s own personal fashion show to the detriment of spiritual health. Yet the American urge to emphasize authenticity to the point that it corrupts excellence in appearance is misguided. Dressing up for church can signal pomposity, yet it can also signal respect for the worship service, the men who lead it, and the people who one worships alongside. That certainly isn’t a bad thing, even if it is admittedly not enough.
While shopping this week for an Easter church outfit for my one-and-a-half-year-old, I noticed that there were plenty of Easter outfits, but not a lot of Easter outfits for church. Even a pastel collared shirt was hard to come by. Easter bunny appliques, puns about eggs, and spring colors abounded. Yet my search for dressy toddler clothes was fruitless. Maybe I’m just late to the shopping game, yet it wasn’t obvious that shelves had simply been cleared of such outfits. It seemed more likely they were never there. I could see a future where dressing up for Easter Sunday in your favorite spring pastels is a tradition relegated to old ladies.
Not only are Americans attending church less, but they are less likely to dress up. Combine the two trends, and we are risking a future where pews are not only emptier even on popular Sundays like Easter, but those who do want to dress up and worship are left with fewer options for classy, dressy clothing. The religious and personal change comes first (with Americans identifying as Christian less often), then the culture follows in all sorts of tangential ways (Americans not caring to dress up, even for church).
The decline in quality of dressing would be more palatable should it come with a return to authentic Christian faith, yet it is telling that the American closet and the American church seem to be declining hand-in-hand.
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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: Pexels
