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“A Church-going People are a Dress-loving People”: Clothes, Communication, and Religious Culture in Early America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Leigh Eric Schmidt
Leigh Eric Schmidt
Affiliation:
assistant professor of religious studies in the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon.
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Extract

When the early nineteenth-century pastor William Henry Foote reflected upon the eighteenth-century Christians who were his forebears in North Carolina and Virginia, he paused at one point to make an observation about the clothes they wore. “A church-going people are a dress-loving people”, he said; “The sanctity and decorum of the house of God are inseparably associated with a decent exterior; and the spiritual, heavenly exercises of the inner man are incompatible with a defiled and tattered, or slovenly mein. All regular Christian assemblies cultivate a taste for dress, and none more so than the hardy pioneer settlers of Upper Carolina, and the valley and mountains of Virginia” As they readied themselves for worship, Foote elaborated, the faithful “put on their best and carefully preserved dress” in preparation for “their approach to the King of Kings”.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 1989 , pp. 36 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1989

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References

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