Plain and Simple

The other night my wife and I watched a movie called The 19th Wife, a tale based on events which occurred in a Mormon sect which still practices polygamy. It was broadcast on Lifetime (yes, I sometimes watch chic-flicks,) so the theme was the degrading of women trapped in polygamist societies. I was fascinated by the twisted theology, but really struck by the representation of the close-knit family structures (common among all Mormons) and the modest dress of the women.

Living in the Midwest, I am used to seeing the Amish in their buggies or on the streets, men in plain shirts with black trousers and women in pale blue or grey full-length dresses with long sleeves and high collars. These women stand out in modern western society, as do some Mormons, as fashion iconoclasts. More radically, Arab women, regulars on the nightly news these days, appear almost alien in their burkas. I am not a sartorial historian, but it seems that women in “civilized” societies have always appeared in public dressed in what I would call modest attire. ( I am consciously ignoring bare-breasted Polynesians and naked African bushwomen.)

The evolution of epidermal exposure in women took place quite rapidly. In less than one generation, roughly thirty years, they went from mostly covered to nearly naked. On the beaches and at poolside from the late 1960’s onward, women brazenly dress in small patches of cloth that would have brought about an arrest for indecent exposure scant decades ago. In modern media we get treated to displays of feminine flesh everywhere from the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders to the Victoria Secret runway exhibitions. The early TV censors must be rolling in their graves.

Having raised two daughters and lived with one wife through the worst of the feminist unleashing, I continue to be troubled by what we Christians accept in women’s attire. I am a typical male (I think) in that I admit to finding the female form a pleasure to look at. I also know enough phychopathology to understand that erotic exposure is like an addictive drug: what starts with a little peek must ultimately descend into leering at complete display. Frequently pornography leads to criminal acts against women by frustrated men. No, not every Playboy subscriber ends up a rapist, but nearly every rapist has a history of pornographic dalliance. Sadly, the “community standards” measure of what is obscene no longer works in my opinion. Community standards have sunk to obscene levels.

Our terrorist enemies are despicable in their tactics, but not so far off in their opinion that modern society has fallen prey to the greater enemy of our souls. I am not lobbying for a return to Amish style dress or burkas for all women. I respect the Amish and Mormons (if not the Arabs) for holding the line on modesty. The Amish and their nineteenth century ways are not going to catch on anytime soon (unless our economy fails completely.) But those of us who hold more traditional beliefs could learn something from the radical fringes of our religions. The Apostle Paul cautioned against using freedom as license. How did we so casually cross that line?

Can’t We All Just Get Along

As Obama, Netanyahu and Abbas meet in Washington to forge the outlines of yet another Middle East peace process, I marvel at the strength of hope within the human spirit. Even if I could forget the fact that the roots of their feud trace back to the time of Ishmael, some four thousand years ago, I can’t ignore the reality that for the last sixty years or so they have been fighting for control of a certain piece of real estate.
When the Jews were given the opportunity to settle in Palestine in 1948, they were overjoyed not because of its sandy beaches and warm Mediterranean breezes. There were no lush valleys bursting forth with generous produce to lure them. Unlike the surrounding deserts, there was no black gold bubbling just below the surface, waiting to be sold to an oil-hungry world. The one thing that drew them back like moths to a flame was a (then) modest little city on a hill called Jerusalem.
To the victors go the spoils, history teaches, so those who won the conflagration known as WWII decided among themselves to grant the Jews their fondest desire in reparation for the atrocities visited upon them by those who lost the war. The Palestinians didn’t exactly lose the war, but they were occupying territory controlled by the losers, so they lost by default, apparently. The indigenous Arab population, largely Muslim, fractionally Christian, had been minding their own business, doing whatever it is people do who live in mostly barren desert since the time of the last Crusade.

The Arabs probably would still be doing their own thing, unnoticed by the rest of the world, except that the Allied powers (the victors,) started shipping boatloads of displaced Jews to the Palestinian beaches. Those Jews had been saying for centuries at their annual Seder feast, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Suddenly, it was “next year.” So, led by men with biblical names like Sharon, Ben-Gurion and Mayer, they stormed the little city on a hill and made it their own – almost. Like their biblical predecessors in Joshua’s day, they never quite took complete control, and like that earlier time in history, the seeds were planted for ongoing conflict. The Jews long to rebuild their one and only temple on the second most sacred spot in the Islamic faith, a spot they have yet to wrest from Arab hands.
Hence the magnitude of the problem Obama faces. Since he can’t fix the economy, end the war, or convince the country that nationalized health care is a good thing, he’s decided to join the fraternity of Presidents who want Middle East peace recorded as their legacy. If he succeeds at all, the result will doubtless resemble his health care reform: forcefully imposed and generally unsatisfying. The little mountain where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac and where the Judeo-Roman conspiracy thought they solved their problem with one Jesus of Nazareth remains a focal point of historic significance. On a personal level in dusty Palestine or dirty Dearborn, Muslims and Christians can get along. But to bring these two peoples together as nations, as religions is a Gordian knot which outmatches even Barak Obama’s considerable cleverness.