Chapel Dress

Can you wear Dockers™ to church? Jeans? Flip flops?

Recently, Robert Kirby of the Salt Lake Tribune published a blistering critique of an edict by an official in his church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). The church official had laid down a dress code; one that went right to the level of discussing whether particular brands of menswear were appropriate for a church worship service. In a fit of gleeful self-righteousness not uncommon to non-Mormons in Utah, I wore my own khakis to church that day, only to see that we certainly had unspoken community standards regarding dress in our liturgical space. Any anthropologist worth his or her salt would have noticed the near complete homogeneity in clothing out in the pews.

The truth is there are good reasons that dress for church is a matter of significant debate. As any teenager can tell you, personal dress is a highly symbolic and socially charged form of communication. Furthermore, just like much of religious worship in our society today, it sits precisely at the juncture of the personal and communal.

Dress minimally conveys personal social status, ethnicity, and, despite the dominant trend towards all-casual-all-the-time, it still conveys how individuals perceive the event they are attending, their role in that event, and their relationship to the other participants. Dress is never simply personal expression. Moreover, collectively, dress will define how a community wants to be represented.

Add worship into the mix—a setting where a community describes itself and its relationship to its god or gods—and dress takes on an additional weight. Top it all off with the tension that exists between a culture that tells you to pursue your personal interest at all costs and religious organizations that remind us that we live in communities. There’s no wonder that you hear as much about “chapel dress” as you do about theology. Dress in church sits at the center of more than one negotiation between the individual and society.

I don’t see any reason to rail against this very important human form of symbolic communication. Rather, I tend to think that thoughtful consideration of dress in church is highly worthwhile. Are you taking the event seriously? What does it mean to you, and how do you want to convey that in your dress? Most importantly, what are you saying to the community you are joining for worship?

At the same time, due to the potential for dress to be exclusionary, a community needs to be extremely careful in how it maintains inclusiveness in its stated or unstated dress codes. Our challenge today is to create vibrant communities in a world of unprecedented, wonderful, and rich diversity; communities that are identifiable in all of our collective symbols, including dress, without being exclusionary. I think it is perfectly ok for a religious community to develop a collective understanding of proper dress, so long as this understanding is broadly inclusive of all ethnicities, socioeconomic groups, etc. It is particularly important that the community's standards fully include those who have done all they can to simply join the service. At the end, it is just important to say “We believe this is serious business, worthy of taking care in our most personal of communal symbols.” No more, and no less.