SWEAT PANTS BEFORE GOD
Regular church attendance was not on the family roster – not in the time and place where I spent my boyhood. We were Utah expats, exiled, my father thought, to western Pennsylvania, the site of a new job he accepted in 1954. It took him thirteen years to return home to the Far West, but in that time, we made the best of it. Our Utah roots placed us naturally in the domain of the local Mormon congregation in the town where we landed and where I started elementary school – Johnstown, known for floods and steel. My parents were not practicing Mormons but they did have those Utah affinities for the church and at a minimum wanted their kids to be baptized. And I was, dunked whole, body and soul, in the local Mormon branch-house, 1959. I was eight years old, the age when Latter-Day Saints ritually sanitize their young, believing that at eight the child achieves the capacity for conscious moral choice.
In the following years, we did little with the church. Some Easters, some Christmases, a few weddings of friends we had in the congregation. Hunting and fishing were my dad’s religion, and most Sundays they carried him and me afield. I was baptized all over again, in the blood of trout and rabbits and deer. My return to church did not occur until I reached sixteen and our family moved to Denver, re-entering my father’s blessed West. It’s a long story, how I ended up a devout Denver Mormon for a little over a year; how I ended up applying to only one college, Brigham Young University, in 1969, and went there for another year, long enough to lose my religion pretty thoroughly. But that’s not the story I want to tell at the moment.
I want to go back to that time in the Mile High City, my junior year of high school, when I did attend church regularly – the L.D.S. 13th Ward, Denver, Colorado – and I mostly want to pay attention to the congregation’s attire. Everything we wore to church – clothes, shoes, cologne, accessories, hair appointments – and the attitude that went with it. I want to go there in remembrance of grace.
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It was a new building, our place of worship, containing all the services and events of Wards 6 and 13 on the west side of the city – the fast-growing suburb of Lakewood. Mormons build buildings to share. Where Saints are populous, as they were in Denver in 1968, that’s how they divide their ranks, into full congregations known as wards, two to a chapel, staggering the meeting times. Each ward in Denver had around 400 members, as I recall, but not all were active, so actual church attendance fell far short. I remember around 200 active in Ward 13. Lots of young families, lots of babies. Mormonism is a religion of full immersion – not just the literal method of baptism, but home life as well. A teenage boy like me attended Seminary every school morning ahead of academic classes, car-pooling in the dark from home to ward house to high school, and then three main religious services every Sunday – Priesthood Meeting before breakfast (all Mormon males are ordained into the priesthood, starting at age 12); then Sunday School midmorning; and then the central worship event of the day, Sacrament Meeting, always in the afternoon. On the first Sunday of every month, Sacrament Meeting went extra-long, conducted as Fast and Testimony Meeting, when members are encouraged to rise one at a time, if so moved, and proceed to the pulpit to bear witness to Jesus Christ in their lives. Testimony was also the culmination of a 24-hour period of fasting, which added a touch of belly-rumbling drama to the baring-of-souls.
You would never see an under-dressed person in the congregation – not even then, in the late-1960s, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the shaking off of all taboos, and the shaking down of hair and bellbottoms. Our chapel on any given Sunday was a citadel of the well-dressed – all boys and men in sober suits and ties, buttoned shirts, often with cuff links and pins; all women and girls in dresses-down-to-the-knee or modest skirts and blouses. Nor was the clothing drab. Silly ideas about Mormons abound to this day: they don’t dance or sing, they dress like Pilgrims, they all have multiple wives, they aren’t Christians. . . . The truth is that Mormons do dance and sing – Mormon Tabernacle Choir, anyone? The capacious gymnasium built into the center of every ward house hosts innumerable balls and mixers. Mormons, moreover, are deeply, intensely Christian; only the apostate sects practice polygamy; and they love color. I remember beautiful women in beautiful pastels; I remember shimmering sports jackets mixed in among the pinstripes; I remember plaid suits, on women as well as men. The attire was not always tasteful, not in the Bostonian or Upper East Side fashion; on any given Sunday, our congregation in Ward 13 looked like we were dressed for the set of the “Lawrence Welk Show.” But the sincerity was there in full, our hearts were in it. We were told to dress as if we were about to appear before God. That was the militation against mere pride, though there was surely plenty of that. We dressed Sunday-best, in a manner that revealed our respect for the Creator. And we were a virtual nursery of floral scents – an invisible fog layer of perfumes and colognes was the first thing that hit you when you entered the chapel. It was like Creation’s every summer sucked in through the nose, a cacophony of nectars. Hair combed, pomaded, and sprayed; lots of stiff beehives atop the women; high collars and sparkling barrettes. No facial hair on the men; none. At that moment in time, a silent talking-back to the woolly-faced Aquarians. Shined dress shoes, no boots, no sandals. On Fast and Testimony Sundays, virtual flash-floods of running mascara – Mormons are great weepers, the most openly emotional people I have ever been around, but only so in the privacy of their communal chambers.
I don’t know if the attire is still like that today – it has been dozens of years since I set foot in an LDS chapel – but I doubt that much has changed. Sweat pants and flip flops may dismally dominate American daily life, and it would not surprise me to find the ugly fad of down-dressing in some church congregations, too. Every other young turk I see on see on the streets of my town now seems to wear the same black beard above the bulging belly shirt worn outside cargo shorts. They head to the office looking ready to overhaul a carburetor.* Every third person boasts tats – some I see in the locker room are full passages from the Bible permanently inscribed on the back. An alarming number of Americans jingle with body piercings so extensive as to suggest they fell into a tackle box.** But I imagine the Mormons still show up in the attire of respect. I imagine any sincere Latter-Day Saint would balk at the idea of placing sweat pants before God.
*image stolen from Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal; thank you, Jason
**image stolen from John A. Baden of Gallatin Gateway, Montana; thank you, John