The Easter grunge parade - choice of clothing for Easter church service - Column

Christian Century, May 3, 1995 by Martin E. Marty

AMONG THE MOST overquoted but worth quoting quotations is from George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman: "There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it." I thought of that the other day when reading a story in the Chicago Tribune headlined "Easter finery one legacy that few have resurrected." Reporter Mark Caro commented on how dressy clothes worn to church on the festival of Christ's resurrection or in the afternoon for a strut down the avenue in the fabled Easter Parade were almost nowhere to be seen this year.

My heart's desire! I got what I wanted, preachers of my generation might respond. We can recall how often we looked out at congregations of bonneted, white-gloved matrons and their daughters and granddaughters and bawled them out for misplaced priorities. Adapting a "Keep Christ in Christmas" anticommercialism, we complained about materialism and externalism and commercialism and commodification (though we did not yet know that word) as these were expressed in extravagant Easter wear. All that before churches got into the market of buying and selling precisely those -isms, a practice that makes prophesying against them more difficult than it was in Great Depression days.

No one changed fashion because of our sermons. People changed because fashion changed. You can make as much money selling faded jeans as selling those white gloves--and make much more selling certain brands of athletic shoes.

At Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral, Caro spotted the "sportscoat-and-no-tie look, the tie-and-no-jacket look, sweater-and-pants combos, matching backpacks for a mother and daughter, and a No. 45 Bulls jersey for a boy whose mind was on a different kind of second coming." He glimpsed few who had dressed up to attend the Lord's banquet.

Grunge was in and is only halfway out. Casual was and is and ever shall be all the way in. That's not all bad. My spouse and I don't spend time checking the attire of people at the Lord's Table. Now and then we do see an aggressively grunge-dressed family and say something like "Well, at least they're there," and rejoice with them.

Still, the utterly casual, chummy, no-different-than-any-other-day ethos that surrounds the Lord's Day and the Lord's Big Day leaves something to be desired. That hit us Easter Sunday noon when we drove by an African-American church. Everyone--men, women and children--in the huge gathering of worshipers were dressed in their best.

And Byron Brazier of the Apostolic Church of God saw no dressing down among the 9,000 faithful at his church. "In most African-American churches, people have always dressed for church," he told Caro. "It's a form of respect for the sanctuary." We in the non-African-American churches got what we wanted: people dress down. What matters, we all know, is what is inside the heart, and never, never, the externals. But is there not room for a feeling of pathos when one sees less "respect for the sanctuary" and recognizes no awe at all? All who say yes, please white glove.