Dress
In North America and Europe, up until the late 1950s it was often expected that worshippers wore their best clothes to church services (known colloquially as the Sunday best). This tradition has declined in many mainstream churches but is still much in evidence in the Southern Baptist and Mormon traditions in the U.S., and in many black evangelical churches.
Those who support more relaxed dress codes do so on the basis that congregants should come to God as they are, and that communion with God requires no special clothing. Those who support more formal dress consider that although communion with God does indeed not require special clothing, a church service is an office of devotion and as a matter of respect, it is therefore appropriate to wear one's best attire.
Even where dress code is more relaxed it is still generally considered proper to dress modestly.
Read more about this topic: Church Etiquette
Famous quotes containing the word dress:
“Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“We give lovely parties that last through the night,
I dress as a woman and scream with delight,
We wake up at lunch time and find we’re still tight.
What could be duller than that?”
—Noël Coward (1899–1973)
“At the milliners, the ladies we met were so much dressed, that I should rather have imagined they were making visits than purchases. But what diverted me most was, that we were more frequently served by men than by women; and such men! so finical, so affected! they seemed to understand every part of a woman’s dress better than we do ourselves; and they recommended caps and ribbons with an air of so much importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off wearing them.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)