When Biblical Modesty isn’t Biblical: A Critique of the Evangelical Understanding of the Issue of Women’s Modesty

In the opening chapter of his treatise on modesty titled On the Apparel of Women, Tertullian (c. 160AD – 125) famously described women as “the devil’s gateway” and if you were to look through my journal entries about my own body between twenty-one and twenty-three, written during my first eighteen months in church as a born-again Christian (as opposed to the nominal Christian I had been all my life), it would seem I was his biggest supporter in that view.1 In the treatise, Tertullian encourages his contemporary female audience to dress more modestly by appealing to Eve’s sin in the garden to characterise all women as ‘Eves’— equally culpable for Eve’s rebellion against God in the garden of Eden and therefore also deserving of the shame brought on by Eve’s sin. He locates the cause of Eve’s sin specifically in her femaleness, and offers an imaginative description of the kinds of things that were she alive today, she would undoubtedly be guilty of by virtue of her womanhood because of woman’s inclination to the sensual. The implication is that Eve’s womanhood is in itself shameful, and he is emphatic in his view that women today are to be equally ashamed that they were made female. 

In both making suggestions about the nature of woman that do not have their bases in Scripture (that she is more prone to vanity than her male counterpart, for example), and in censuring Eve for the sins she has committed in his imagination, Tertullian displays an attitude towards women and femaleness that is as alive in some pockets of the church today as it was in his and his contemporaries’ day. The practice of asserting wholly man-made ideas not substantiated by the Bible in order to characterise women as particularly deviant, particularly sinful, particularly lascivious, double-minded, and bent on the destruction of men through their sexuality is not new and shows no sign of dying off anytime soon. While most Christians do not display this distrust towards the female body as overtly as Tertullian does in his treatise or as Augustine did in The Literal Meaning of Genesis, in some Christian subcultures, it is evident in covert ways that the sentiment is shared just the same.

A while ago, through a podcast aimed at Christian women, I learnt the phrase ‘professed and manifest beliefs’. The exact time I became aware of this phrase couldn’t have been more providential because it happened to coincide with when I had become most conscious of my body and my outward appearance generally in the church I was attending. It was also when I had started to notice a disconnect between what was affirmed out loud about women in response to the perceived denigration of women in secular culture, which was that like men, they were also purified, sanctified, holy, blameless in God’s sight, and what was said implicitly, which was that women and their bodies (and those of certain types or ‘categories’ of women in particular) were inherently impure, shameful and problematic. As I would learn, the notion of professed and manifest beliefs perfectly articulated the doublethink and doublespeak I’d started to notice around the way female modesty is conceived of and spoken about in some subcultures of evangelical Christianity. 

When we speak about male (sexual) lust, we rightly quote Matthew 5:28-30 which exclusively places the responsibility of lusting after another person on the person doing the lusting. But we then qualify this responsibility (and at the same time introduce male lust into a conversation it is not biblically related to) by asserting that equally, women are responsible for not causing their brothers in Christ to stumble through their dress, usually bringing up 1 Corinthians 8:9-13 and Romans 14:13-15 and 14:19-21. This sounds extremely benign, proper even, given the responsibility of all Christians to one another, but it’s not — it’s doublespeak. I remember feeling that there was a slight conflict between the idea that a man was fully responsible for the feelings that arose in him when he looked at me and the idea that I was also responsible for not arousing those feelings in him, and as I progressed in my modesty journey, I realised it’s because there was a conflict. Something simply cannot be ‘fully’ the responsibility of a person if even a part of responsibility for that thing can be borne by somebody else. 

When I learnt that the purity culture of the 90s and early 2000s had urged women to dress modestly for the sake of men who were “so visual” in nature, which is not why Paul directs women to dress modestly, I was surprised because it seemed a very odd misreading of the Scriptures on modesty from the same group of Christians who prided themselves on their high view of it, in contrast to those Christians who did not take ‘seriously’ the revealed Word of God and played loose and fast with it. When I learnt that this was still the predominant understanding of modesty through my own conversations with the women at my church, some my own age and younger, and through observing contemporary evangelical Christian discourse about modesty in the form of resources aimed at girls and young women, it became apparent to me that in much of evangelical Christianity, the professed belief was that the responsibility for a man’s lust did not lie at the foot of a woman, and the manifest belief was the exact opposite. 

Firstly, modesty in the way it is spoken of in 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Peter 3 has nothing to do with male sexual attraction and diligently warding it off by dressing correctly. It has nothing to do with how men perceive your clothing (or your body in your clothing, which is what is actually being talked about whenever we speak about clothing). It has nothing to do with men at all. As a little girl, I attended a Methodist church and had been baptised there at six, not knowing at all what baptism signified or who this Jesus everyone spoke about actually was. I stopped attending that church and church altogether at around twelve when my parents separated and church simply stopped being a priority. In the six years that I was a church-goer, I don’t remember ever reading the Bible personally or having the Bible read to me outside of Sunday school and I certainly had not touched one since leaving church. As such, my first by-choice interaction with the Bible was as a nineteen year old literature student with a mind virtually devoid of the teachings of man or the impressions of a dominant church culture on any Bible passages. With this background, it came as a surprise once ensconced in Christian culture to hear and read about female modesty as something mandated by God for the protection of men’s purity because when I had read 1 Timothy 2:9 for the first time, to my unchurched eyes, eyes which had been trained by my discipline of choice to read what a text said and not what you wanted it to say (and relay it as such to the lucky so-and-so reading your essays), the “braided hair”, “gold or pearls”, and “expensive apparel” listed as examples of immodesty signified that the matter at hand was excessive displays of wealth rather than displays of the body itself. 2

That the “weaker brother” to be considered in conversations about modesty is almost always conceived of as the man who may be inspired to lust by your appearance rather than your sister in Christ who may see your fine clothing, jewellery, or designer accessories and be led back to a life of materialism, for example, speaks volumes about the misapplication of the stumbling block principle to modesty conversations. It simultaneously speaks volumes about the extent to which men and male desire has been made central in what has only ever been a matter of a woman’s relationship with her God, something which is also highlighted by the fact that the word modesty in conservative evangelical Christianity is ubiquitously associated with ideas about the ‘visual nature’ of men in response to the female form.

The importance of dressing in a manner considerate of your neighbour, male or female, who may be made uncomfortable by the display of your breasts or genitals in a context where their display is inappropriate is a matter of human decency that is not-gender specific or linked to the idea of biblical modesty. In many places, where I live being one, it is sexual harassment to force somebody to look at those parts of your body without their consent. As such, all people should dress in a manner that doesn’t flout the standards of decency of the culture they are living in, which is not the same as saying women should dress in such a way as to not make men stumble. The former is an observable metric applicable to all that upholds the dignity of all while the latter explicitly privileges subjective male desire at the cost of female freedom. Were the stumbling block driven teaching of modesty consistently applied to its full extent, this is a cost that would in actuality be a lot higher than many of us would call reasonable, as will become apparent later.

Paul does instruct women to be modest in appearance, but what this means in actuality is far from what it has come to mean through the weaponisation of Romans 14:13-15 and 1 Corinthians 8:9-13 against female freedom. What it looks like is far more freeing than the bottomless list of what is “modest” and “immodest” produced by the application of those verses to modesty conversations. The construction of 1 Timothy 2:9-10 shows that what Paul primarily describes as the proper apparel for women who proclaim Christ are the good works she does as a result of living in obedience to God, rather than her clothing. Thus, modesty is about the posture of the heart of the person wearing whatever they might be wearing more than it is about the clothing itself. This isn’t to say that how women clothe themselves doesn’t matter because Paul describes how he wants women to dress. However, the only guidelines Paul gives for what constitutes modesty in dress are at the beginning of the passage where he instructs women to ‘[likewise] dress themselves in modest clothing, with decency and good sense’, translated in the NASB as ‘adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly’, and in the KJV as ‘adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety’.3 The word translated as ‘modestly’ or ‘modest’ refers to humility, meaning having a proper estimation of yourself in relation to God and others. (This is also not the same as thinking ill of yourself or being unable to acknowledge your God-given giftings, but merely a recognition of your need for God as much as anybody else and a lack of concern for distinction and prestige among others.) ‘Modest’ clothing can therefore be defined as clothing that is put on without the intention of drawing attention to yourself (what is meant by ‘modestly’ and ‘modest’), clothing that conforms to the standards of propriety for its context (what is meant by ‘decency’, ‘shamefacedness’, and ‘with proper clothing’), and clothing that is not ostentatious or excessive (what is meant by ‘good sense’, ‘sobriety’, and ‘discreetly’). 

When modesty in dress is defined by the three principles Paul lists, determining one’s own modesty in a given situation, which we should be doing before we try to determine that of other women, is revealed to actually be a fairly uncomplicated issue. But where Paul defines modest dress as that which is decent, proper for its context and put on without the desire to attract attention (an intent that nobody can determine on another’s behalf—more on this later), the prevailing discourse around modesty for at least the last thirty years reveals that modest dress has actually been redefined as anything that a man will not be attracted to you in, which, being extremely subjective, is an inherently nebulous metric. (This is also the result of the conflation of attraction with lusting, which has birthed a culture where men are afraid of being attracted to a woman’s physical appearance, believing themselves to be lusting after her if they are.) It is only with the insertion of the need to consider a man’s thought life to the definition of modesty, which again is absent in Paul’s definition and is an idea that is only given impetus in modesty discourse through the removal of 1 Corinthians 8:9-13 from its original context, that modesty becomes as anxiety-inducing an endeavour as it was for me and has been for so many other women. This is understandably so, given that it is a difficult thing for a woman to cater to the possible weaknesses of every man she may ever come into contact with.

Apart from being a misapplication of the stumbling block principle, the problem with judging a woman’s modesty by how much she causes a man to stumble becomes apparent when the stumbling occurs even when a woman is dressed decently and appropriately for the occasion. People, men and women alike, are not only ‘stumbled’ by skin on display in low cut tops or skirts with “provocative” slits. People can also be stumbled by a woman in ordinary, context-appropriate clothing, which is the exact point at which modesty becomes a yoke on women that Jesus himself never placed on them. It’s interesting to observe the commentaries in online discourses such as the 2016 #TeacherBae controversy of people finding error in clothing that would otherwise be deemed modest on less shapely women (jeans, a T-shirt, or a dress covering all the parts of a woman’s body that “should” be covered by Western standards) and calling a woman immodestly dressed for wearing them, seemingly not making the connection that their perception of her immodesty is rooted in their sexualisation of her body and not in her clothing itself.

Hourglass figures, and the character of the body parts that contribute to giving a woman this figure, are not inherently sexual or more sexual than any other body type. Their sexual ‘nature’ is societally constructed because Western society has designated them a desirable body type. As such, we read women who have these shapes as more sexual than their differently shaped counterparts (we sexualise them, they do not sexualise themselves) and then blame them for our hypersexualisation of them. When women with these body types are called immodest in biblically modest clothing, the implication is that they should be doing everything in their power to obscure themselves from view—which is to say that their very existence is obscene—and what we are actually criticising when we criticise their appearance in their clothing is their right to inhabit the bodies given to them by God without shame. The fact that the same pair of nondescript jeans can be modest on one woman and immodest on another, or modest in a room full of heterosexual women but immodest if the room is populated by heterosexual men, illuminates the extent to which the definition of modesty has departed from the measurable principles given to us by Scripture and become something located exclusively in and perceptible only through the minds of individual men. 

If we acknowledge that women with certain body types will have a harder time meeting modesty standards than their differently shaped counterparts, the solution is not to tell those women that having to go to extreme lengths to conceal their shapes so that others do not find them attractive is their God-given lot in life because it is not, although the idea that it is has been naturalised to a disturbing extent in the circles I speak of. Instead of being a biblical idea, it is is instead the burden given to them by men who have decided that their existence in the bodies God has given them brings up feelings that they are uncomfortable with. The solution is to call men higher and ask them to take their thoughts captive and make them obedient to Christ when they face temptation, the same solution to any temptation faced by any Christian. When we suggest that she must accommodate the man who finds her tempting in clothing that is appropriate, we are telling her that her body is a shameful thing and that that she must pay for that shame with the trammel on her right to live as anybody else. We are telling her that she is “the devil’s gateway”.

When it is framed as loving to resolve “not to cause a brother to stumble” through your appearance in a context where modesty has been so radically redefined, it not only becomes a woman’s duty to ensure she is not perceived as sexually attractive by her brothers in Christ, his attraction to her also becomes an indication of her character and the condition of her heart. It’s commonplace in some circles to hear men berate women for dressing sensually or ‘flaunting’ their curves and telling young men that it is possible for them to ‘just know’ when a woman is intentionally being seductive in her dress. Putting aside how this encourages an uncharitable view in boys of their sisters-in-Christ, some of whom may just not know better about what constitutes appropriate dress for various reasons, such a statement is so problematic because it encourages boys to look to their feelings in response to a girl’s appearance as the arbiter of her motives, which perpetuates the victim-blaming of rape culture. 

Outside of actual exposure of those parts of our bodies deemed overtly sexual, saying that someone is dressed sensually, provocatively, enticingly or any other synonym should invite the question ‘To whom?’ because latent in comments like this is the accusation of an intent that may not actually be there. But it usually doesn’t. When is a woman ‘flaunting’ her body and when is she just wearing clothes that happen to flatter a shape she cannot change? And who decides? When we talk about being able to recognise a woman who is dressing or even walking with a seductive intent, what does this actually mean? Because it’s not the universally recognisable given that we seem to want to say it is. We subordinate all authority that belongs to God to the mind of a man when we tell young men that they can just know when a woman is being intentionally seductive. The man or woman who is seduced is the one who finds a certain woman seductive, which is not the same thing as saying she is seducing me, yet we have so exalted male subjectivity in a matter never concerning men in the first place that a woman’s intentions — something which previously could only be determined by God — can be judged by his response to her body. 

This is not limited to boys and men. Because I dressed and groomed myself how I liked, did not care to conform to a style that was not mine in order to fit in with any other group of women at my church, did not make an especial attempt to hide my body (because I had not yet learnt that it was shameful) and because my male and female friends and other congregants told me when they thought I looked nice in my clothing, over the course of my time in my first church as a Christian, one girl and her mother seemed to become convinced that I had a deep investment in making myself as alluring to male congregants as I could and treated me with the according suspicion.

This manifested in dirty looks in dresses I wore to church, scornful comments about women who dressed differently from them and who they had determined were dressing for male attention, and passive aggressive suggestions to me about the kind of women men actually preferred, which seemed to imply that they thought I was particularly concerned about men wanted in the first place, and that they presumed that my enthusiasm for people was something that I adopted exclusively in my interactions with men rather than being a fixture of my personality that I exhibited towards anybody I met irrespective of their gender. It eventually manifested in my being asked to leave certain church events I’d gone to help set up once our mutual male friends had arrived, when my company had been welcome prior to their arrival, being ignored at other events if I had gone there without my other friends, and not being invited to other events that the church’s student population or friends of friends would be attending, events that I would learn about either through the invitation of mutual friends or through my pastor’s wife. The idea that a man finding you attractive in your clothing or because of how you’d chosen to style your hair or your makeup was a reflection of evil intent on your part caused me to be treated with hostility for a year by two people with significant influence on church life and made the bulk of my time in that church miserable.

When we conceive of the female body as inherently charged, somehow more so than its male counterpart, which is exactly what we do when we speak of girls’ and women’s bodies as “stumbling blocks”, we’re training young women and girls to view their bodies as shameful because they cause problems for others. This is a harm that will disproportionately affect those with curvier bodies. To the boys who also hear this messaging, we’re teaching them to view women not as full people made in the likeness of God but as threats to their purity, a view of women which is no less dehumanising than secular culture’s objectification of women in other ways. Moreover, teaching boys, however indirectly, that it is the responsibility of their sisters in Christ to ensure that he does not lust after her is how we have ended up with a culture where men feel entitled to ask women to alter aspects of their appearance in public for their comfort. No matter how much we scream that we do believe in Matthew 5:28-29, the moment we say ‘but women’, we subordinate the need for personal responsibility in men to the need for the world to be appropriately coddling to what is presented as a universal struggle plaguing them. Both messages cannot work in the same sentence — one has to have pre-eminence over the other. As evidenced by the normalcy of men blaming women for inflaming their lusts (and women blaming other women for the same), the vitriol directed at women who fail to meet a community’s arbitrary modesty standards, and the lewd, often public dissection of women’s bodies in response to ‘immodestly dressed’ women, the one that prevails is always the latter. This is why it’s doublespeak.

The moment modesty becomes about keeping men’s lusts at bay or the avoidance of being a stumbling block is the same moment it becomes an unachievable task for women, no matter how conservatively they are dressed. My friend told me of an instance where a female congregant at her home church had been asked by a man not to put her hair in a ponytail because he found her neck distracting when sitting behind her. This isn’t to shame that man or any other man who may feel the same way but to draw attention to the problem in appealing to 1 Corinthians 8:9-13 as a way to dictate female dressing or grooming habits. Where does it stop? By the 1 Corinthians 8 application of modesty, the woman would have to —out of love for her brother in Christ — do everything in her power to obscure her neck from his view so as not to inflame him. And achieving this, what when another man in the same congregation is ‘stumbled’ by a woman’s cascading hair? Who does she choose to ‘love’ in that scenario? We’re asking a lot more of all women than we may realise when we say “Yes, Matthew 5:28-29, but don’t cause him to stumble”, and we’re asking for nothing short of the total erasure of those women with bodies considered conventionally attractive by the current beauty standards. Further, when accommodating any man’s feelings is framed as love, it will always be unloving, unkind, and unchristlike for a Christian woman to refuse to grant a man’s request, whether that request costs her the ability to wear her hair in a ponytail or her ability to wear clothes the right size for her.

Not only is the modesty message that derives its authority from the stumbling block passages a bastardisation of those passages and an erasure of what Paul actually says about modesty, it also undermines what Jesus said about lust, no matter how much we insist that it doesn’t. So how do we encourage girls and women to dress modestly and address the issue of lust in boys and men? I think we start by extracting (male) lust from conversations about modesty because they are two separate conversations. Then we direct women to Paul’s instructions about female modesty, wherein he only asks women to 1) not be thoughtless in their dressing and flout the standards of propriety of the culture and context they are in, to 2) not dress with the intention of drawing attention to themselves, which, crucially, nobody else can determine for them, even if they find their attention going towards that woman, and to 3) not care more about outward beauty at the neglect of the beauty valued by God —that of a gentle and quiet spirit expressed through their submission to their own husbands.4

We don’t make claims about men being more visual than women because the nature of men, whether natural or manufactured, is not actually biblically relevant to the conversation of female modesty. We don’t talk about women and the female body as potential stumbling blocks because stumbling blocks are behaviours that violate another’s conscience, not people themselves, nor merely things that possess the capacity for a person to sin by, which most everything could be. This kind of language when ascribed to bodies that cannot be changed, that God actually made good, breeds the shame that we should be trying to negate instead of encourage in young girls. 

If men are indeed more visual than women, we ask them to actively partner with the Holy Spirit in being transformed from the inside out, the same thing we ask of all Christians facing any temptation. We don’t encourage the circumvention of a necessary internal work by making demands of everybody else around them. With nothing about anybody’s else’s duty before them to qualify it, we ask them to obey the principle given to all of us by Jesus in Matthew 5:28-29 and to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit, one of which is self-control, by abiding in Christ. When we remove the rhetoric of it being their sister’s responsibility to dress in a way so as not to “make them stumble”, which again, is not actually an achievable task for women, we empower men to take responsibility for their own purity regardless of the actions and choices of others. In doing so, we actually make room for the Holy Spirit to do His job of transforming their hearts rather than keeping them in a state of spiritual infancy by asking the women around them to help men not see them in the fullness of their creation. Finally, we also confer dignity to the women we have historically degraded by figuring their bodies as obscene, dangerous, threatening, and problematic for merely having features deemed attractive by some. 

  1. Tertullian, ‘Chapter I.—Introduction.  Modesty in Apparel Becoming to Women, in Memory of the Introduction of Sin into the World Through a Woman’ in On The Apparel of Women <https://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf04/anf04-06.htm#P265_52058
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  2. 1 Timothy 2:9, NASB. ↩︎
  3. 1 Timothy 2:9, CSB. ↩︎
  4. 1 Peter 3:3-6, NASB. ↩︎