Women Wearing Men's Clothes

Here I go again. And for three reasons in particular. First, I was sent a mass email from my alma mater (Maranatha Baptist Bible College) in which was a link to watch a live stream of a basketball game at the home gym in Watertown, Maranatha men versus Northland men. I opened that email right when I was preparing to do my daily trip to nowhere on the Nordic Trac for forty-five minutes. I often watch live sporting events while on the Nordic Trac in my garage, where I have a home office (I live in California---it's warm), on my computer screen. We don't have cable so I can watch things for free on my broadband internet. The game was just starting as I began to exercise. So I watched.

Northland defeated Maranatha. I watched the last part of the first half and then most of the second half. Maranatha might need to do something about its gym floor, because guys were slipping all over the place due to non-stop moisture in many places, especially right under one basket. About 5 people could not towel it off fast enough. There was a lot of ice-skating out there. But I digress. At half-time, the video feed stayed on, and the student body held some kind of activity on the court with girls running around all over the place. I switched it off then because I didn't want to watch that. All of the girls, all of them, a couple of dozen, were wearing pants. Mainly jeans. Not all loose fitting. It wasn't easy to look at. I just shook my head watching it. What they wore definitely affected how they behaved as well. They were running and bumping around, well, like men. They had girded up their loins like a man and were doing the now permissible type of activity.

Now for me, it isn't that I don't think women can do physical activity. I believe they should. And that isn't my point, so I'm going to leave that little digression to go back to my original focus. I never saw that type of female appearance when I was a student. The school has departed from that particular standard. As I watched how women's dress has changed there, I thought about the basis for the standard in the first place. I believe there is a distinct male garment and female ones that are unique to women. Because of God's prohibition in Deuteronomy 22:5, that when violated the individuals involved are an abomination to Him, I don't believe women should wear the male garment and men the female garment. Our culture still mainly keeps the female garment off of men. Men don't wear skirts and dresses. However, women wear pants. So men don't have a distinct garment any more.

And then I get to the crux of this part of this post. A big argument for the women-wearing-pants crowd is that women wear women's pants. I'm telling you. I don't see it. These professing Christian women don't wear pants that are different than men's. They don't care. That argument comes out only when someone like me comes along. It isn't any kind of conviction, just a convenient game to play at the time. I know that. I think the people know it too, and it shows when you look at all the pants. These women or the men, who supposedly are in headship over them, don't have a conviction about "women's pants." They just don't care about following Deuteronomy 22:5 at all.

I recognize that some people have other arguments. It's just that the "women's pants" argument is the one I hear the most now. It's the men and women both wore robes' argument. Since they both wore robes then, then they both wear pants today. Of course, that misses the point of obeying Deuteronomy 22:5. The assumption is that there would have been a male robe and female robe and neither gender was to wear the other's robe, which would have had distinctions that distinguished it plainly from the other. The move to women's pants hasn't been a move to distinguish the distinctions. It has been one to remove those distinctions. It has been a move to disobey Deuteronomy 22:5.

And again, I know there are other arguments. They have not been the historic position of the church on this passage. The two that come immediately to mind are the Canaanite worship point and then the "don't-wear-military-implements" argument. I'm not even going to deal with them. I've done that here before. They are just dodges. If there is another argument it is the don't-argue-over-non-essentials argument. This abomination to God isn't an essential, you see---to us it isn't.

The second event that directed me to think about this enough to write about it was something that happened in our school. A woman who is not a member of our church mentioned to us that wearing pants exclusively was a conviction for her. She would not wear skirts or dresses, didn't even own any. I won't comment further, but you can see how this may have gotten me contemplating this.

The third happening was a recent article by Kevin Bauder, which was published at SharperIron. This was an essay just before one he wrote has garnered a lot of attention, and I'm planning on writing about that one myself in the near future, but in the previous article, he mentioned the pant-skirt issue. He wrote:

For instance, one of my earliest written pieces was a response to someone who was trying to impose the “no pants on women” theory on our church. I regarded Fundamentalist speculations about music as simply pathetic.

I have recently seen potshots taken at this particular point, as a reason to be dismissive of separatists. These separatists have these, you know, strange standards. They were normal for most of Christian history. But now we have just subjugated ourselves to the world's way of behaving on this.

What the church has done is what Jesus spoke about in Matthew 15:6: "Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition." Deuteronomy 22:5 is a command that was kept by the church for centuries, but it has been voided now by Pharisaic tradition, tradition intended to make the Christian life "easier." Christians won't have to 'stick out' so much. They can fit in quite nicely with the world and many think this is a good thing. Why did we all take that position for so long, keeping the distinction? What were we thinking? These new theologians and teachers are so much more enlightened, seeing things in the text that people never saw before. It just took a little digging to find some way to void the teaching.

Alright, I'm done for now. No, wait, one more thing. These individuals who do this, all those girls on the basketball floor at Maranatha---they're an abomination to God. Alright. Now I'm done.