While the problems of the evangelical Purity Movement have been well documented, one of its biggest errors was promoting a non-theological account of modesty focused almost exclusively on behaviors. With few exceptions, modesty was largely cast as the responsibility of women to avoid certain dress code violations—e.g., short shorts, yoga pants, and above all, visible bra straps—in fulfillment of their obligation to keep the men around them from lusting.
Untethered from a substantive doctrinal core, efforts to teach on and practice modesty too often devolved into arbitrary rules, legalism, and judgmentalism with a heavy dose of shame for women who were deemed incompliant. Evangelicals—particularly the women who suffered from purity culture’s confused sexual ethics—needed something better.
As I worked through John Paul II’s (JPII) Theology of the Body for my dissertation, I was delighted to find something much better. In his reflections on human embodiment, JPII offers a far more robust account of modesty than anything I had ever come across.
And it doesn’t start with kissing dating goodbye. It starts in the Garden.
Why Loincloths?
Have you ever stopped to consider how strange it is that after sinning against God, Adam and Eve’s immediate priority is to make loincloths for themselves? “We sinned. Let’s cover our genitals!”
It’s such an odd response.
While it’s clear that they hide from God because of fear and the shame of disobeying him, why do they feel a pressing need to hide their sexual organs from each other?
The Lord’s words in Genesis 3:16 shed light on the dynamics that compel their behavior: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” While scholars offer various explanations of the Lord’s pronouncement, Derek Kidner articulates a baseline consensus among evangelical commentators: “[the phrase] portrays a marriage relation in which control has slipped from the fully personal realm to that of instinctive urges passive and active. ‘To love and to cherish’ becomes ‘To desire and to dominate.’”
A relationship of love has become a relationship of appropriation. Demanding in self-interest has overtaken the purity of reciprocal self-giving. Manipulation is the new norm. Trust has evaporated.
The Body-Person Dynamic
After surveying and naming the animals, Adam finds no helper fit for him. He realizes that while he is not the only body in the visible world, he is the only embodied person. It’s not until God creates the woman that Adam discerns not just a body, but somebody. In the purity of their reciprocal nakedness, the original couple were able to look at one other’s physical body and discern an immaterial reality, the naked body seamlessly expressing the image bearing person.
In his commentary on Genesis 2, Calvin imaginatively constructs Adam’s inner dialogue: “Now at length I have obtained a suitable companion, who is part of the substance of my flesh, and in whom I behold, as it were, another self” (emphasis mine).
By God’s design, the human body expresses the person.
The Ethic of Reduction
Unfortunately, sin severely marred the simplicity of the body-person dynamic such that humanity now struggles to look at a body and see a person. Our tendency is to reduce people to objects for use. It’s this inclination to reduction combined with their sinful, self-serving cravings that compels the initial couple to make, not hats or gloves, but loincloths.
The deeply theological ramifications of this act are significant. In essence, they each say, “If you had no problem disregarding God himself to satisfy your own desires, what good reason do I have to believe that when you look at my naked body you wouldn’t do the same thing? What assurances do I have that you will conceive of me as a person to love and not an instrument for satisfying your desires? For myself, I fear I’m in continual danger of doing to you what I did to God.”
In their vulnerability, with no assurance from one another or in themselves, they cover up. For the first time in a fallen world, the impulse toward modesty emerges.
Modesty Reconsidered
In his magisterial Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II (JPII) argues that the impulse of modesty expressed in Adam and Eve’s loincloths issues from a proper desire to defend their dignity as persons out of fear that the other might reduce them to their erotic goods. While not endorsing Roman Catholicism or JPII as a theologian in general, conservative evangelicals like me stand to benefit from his rich theological reflection on body modesty.
For JPII, modesty aims to highlight, present, and defend the value of the person by covering the body’s erotic goods—i.e., parts that are uniquely enjoyed in sexual encounter—so as to not be reduced to or primarily valued for them.
Crucially, modesty isn’t an effort to obscure one’s gender or appear androgynous. Scripture teaches that we should dress in ways that are consistent with and express our sexuality in our cultural contexts (1 Cor. 11).
Additionally, modesty doesn’t suggest that we are fundamentally immaterial beings who simply pilot a sexed body. Rather, as fundamentally embodied persons—having both a material and an immaterial component—modesty seeks to guard human beings against being reduced to their material component alone; against being conceived of as mere instruments (not people) valuable primarily for their sexual potential.
Thus, we cover our erotic goods for the same reason the initial couple covered theirs—to both protect and highlight ourselves and guard against being viewed by others in ways that reduce us to those erotic goods.
What About Stumbling Brothers?
While dressing modestly can certainly aid those around us in their own sin struggles, the engine driving it is not primarily, “Dress this way so that the men or women around you don’t lust.”
Instead, with an awareness of sin’s effects and an eye toward the value of the person, modesty says something like,
“Dress in a way that protects you from others’ lust and does not risk obscuring the fact that you are more than just a body. You’re an image bearing human—an embodied person created by God for the purpose of loving him and giving yourself in love to those around you. If you aim to dress in a way that honors, emphasizes, and elevates that, not only will God be pleased, but you’ll love your struggling brothers and sisters.”
Dressing in a way that defends our person defends our friends.
Self-Objectification
Conceiving of modesty through the body-person dynamic also helps to clarify the nature of immodesty. Here again, JPII is helpful:
“[Shamelessness] is the way of being or of conduct of some concrete person, in which he moves the very value of sexus so much to the foreground that it obscures the essential value of the person. Consequently, the person places himself in a sense on the level of an object for use, on the level of being to which one can relate only by using it … and not loving it.”
Thus, at the core of immodesty is an individual’s choice to present themself in a way that intentionally turns up the “volume” on their body and turns down the “volume” on their personhood such that others might perceive the former regardless of whether or not they perceive the latter.
Interestingly, whereas the impulse of sexual lust says, “You are an object to enjoy,” the impulse of immodesty says, “I am an object to enjoy.” In lust, we reduce another person to their erotic value. In immodesty, we obscure ourselves by highlighting our erotic value.
Intentional immodesty makes lemonade out of fallen humanity’s tendency to reduce a person to their erotic value. Aware of this tendency, modesty intentionally fights against it and foregoes whatever benefits self-objectification might offer.
Conclusion
While any principled Reformation-minded Christian should have serious disagreements with JPII as a Roman Catholic theologian, we can still benefit from his work by reading it with biblical discernment. When it comes to modesty in the context of the dignity and value of the body, his framework is particularly insightful.
Rather than offering a list of dos and don’ts concerning bathing suit style, high heels, and strapless dresses, JPII offers a theological account of modesty grounded in presenting and defending the value of the image-bearing person against humanity’s tendency to reduce others to their instrumentality as a bodily object.
Of course, like all principles, JPII’s account of modesty must be worked out in various contexts with wisdom and sound judgment. And yet, I believe it offers evangelicals a less legalistic, less arbitrary, more biblically sophisticated framework for discerning how we might dress in ways that correspond with and celebrate our nature as embodied persons created in God’s image.
To be sure, it is only in union with Christ that we’re enabled to increasingly see others as he sees us, viz., as unique, unrepeatable persons mediated through the body he gives. The abundant life we enjoy in Christ empowers us to fight against reducing others to objects for use or obscuring our own personhood to advertise our bodies. The fight for modesty will come to a swift end at the return of Christ. Raised immortal, we will, with effortless joy, forever see others and present ourselves as the embodied image bearers—the humans—God created us to be from the beginning.
