Good Morning POU! I found this article from 2011 to be very interesting.
There’s a deep tradition behind wearing your Sunday best
The way we experience religion largely is shaped by our theology. But, the living religious experience also is shaped by aesthetic elements such as music and visual arts. In thinking about the “look” of the African-American religious experience, Anthony Pinn argues that attire – how the black body presented itself in the context of the worship service – has significant religious, political and culture meanings.
In other words, in the mainstream African-American churches, you go to church and present yourself in your Sunday best. This representation intimately is tied to both the historical expression of black religion in the United States and issues of embodiment.
Pinn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold professor of Humanities and professor of Religious Studies at Rice University. He’s also the editor of “Black Religion and Aesthetics” (Palgrave Macmillan). Pinn will give a lecture on the look of the African-American religious experience, “Putting Beauty to Work,” at 6 p.m., Wednesday, April 20, at the Houston Arts Alliance Gallery, 3201 Allen Parkway. The lecture is part of the HAA Folklife & Traditional Arts program, “Sacred Songs, Sacred Sites,” a series exploring Houston’s diverse faith communities.
Within the context of European colonization and slavery, Pinn argued that the dominant modes of aesthetics, such as painting and clothing, presented the black body as a metaphor for physical ugliness and moral decay.
“Historically, the visibility of black bodies, or black bodies taking up time and space, could be dangerous,” said Pinn. “Think of lynching and mob violence during which what was preferred was the invisibility of black bodies. In those early images of African-Americans, beauty is represented as something different than the look of blacks.”
This purported aesthetic of black physical ugliness and slavery’s “confinement of corporality” was challenged in the context of black worship. Pinn said black worship services became an expression that spoke for the visibility and importance of black bodies within the dominant social context.
“African-Americans presented themselves in their finest and connected themselves to the divine,” said Pinn. “The suits and the dresses become a visual statement similar to the verbal statement, ‘God made me, and God doesn’t make junk.’ Such an explicit connection was spoken about as early as the development of the African Methodist Episcopal Church under the leadership of Richard Allen.
“Allen argued in sermons and public addresses that African-Americans must present themselves well; that doing so was consistent with their relationship to God and consistent with their demands for freedom and full inclusion in the life of the nation. This still was during the period of slavery since the church denomination developed in 1816. So, from early on, the presentation of African-Americans was important.”
Pinn added that we also have testimony from former slaves who argued that during the course of the week, their clothing and presentation was meant to present their bodies as a tool for the benefit of others. But during black worship services, these former slaves testified how they were able to alter that understanding of their bodies visually by changing their clothes.
“From early on, church is a space in which African-Americans connect to the divine and to each other in ways that allow them to rethink and re-imagine their relationship to the nation. In part, that’s done visually, which makes perfect sense. For the first several hundred years of African-American presence in North Africa, they were denied systematic access to the written word. They would have to think of ways of expressing themselves and proclaiming their importance in nonwritten ways. They showed and sang their importance. Their very bodies became a living text.
“Aesthetics became, on one level, a religious expression. There’s a meaning behind how African-Americans presented themselves to the world, and it’s often meant as a critique of racism, the efforts to render them unimportant or ugly. Through aesthetics, they counter those arguments. They present themselves as vibrant and beautiful. And, if the personal can be political, it can also be religious.”
Consider the images of young black people in photographs taken during the civil rights movement. In the images of young people sitting at lunch counters, you don’t see them in T-shirts and jeans.
“Although there was no formal dress code,” said Pinn, “they wore their best as a way of indicating their seriousness and importance. It forced people to move beyond the stereotypes of blacks and black bodies. In the presentation of these bodies, what they wore, how they conducted themselves, there was deep meaning in the political realm. That meaning was tied to the religious realm.”
Today, this aesthetic is changing. For one thing, there has been a decrease in the number of African-Americans under the age of 30 who are part of black church life. Secondly, there also has been a general move to de-emphasize formal church dress.
“It also seems to me, there is a shifting sense of African-American importance within the nation,” said Pinn. “As African-Americans re-think their position in the nation, they often feel they have a variety of mechanisms for expressing their importance. And so they need to depend less heavily on presentation as a particular approach. But, that doesn’t mean that within the context of church worship, they are still not presenting themselves in ways that visually argue they are made in the image of God.
“Each church has its own code of what is an acceptable dress code. Those visual markers are reinforced through the preached moment. And, there are signs of it in the written materials of that church. Examples would include materials found within the church bulletin and photographs of church leadership on their website.
“It doesn’t take long for the dos and don’ts to be informally shared. If a young person were to wear something too revealing for example, someone in the church leadership might have a conversation with him or her. But, if that young person is going to church with someone who was part of that church, chances are they have been given a sense of the dos and don’ts.
“We have at least one generation of African-Americans who have grown up without the assumptions that the church is the center of black life. If churches are going to attract young people, they have to meet them where they are. I think that accounts for the growth in hip-hop churches that are marked by the aesthetics of hip-hop culture. That doesn’t necessarily involve suits but involves jeans and Nike Air Force Ones.”