Modesty: A Man’s Perspective

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Our modesty, our right ordering of ourselves, isn’t just clothes, it’s our mind, our hearts, our way of being. When the women of the church and the men of the church can both be held as valued and both sexes see that they are personally responsible for their character and the way they act, no matter how much or how little they wear, we might be seeing modesty in a more correct light. When we see that our words must be modest (the tongue is a fire, remember) our looks must be modest, and our minds, down to the neurons, must be modest, we can see a culture that breaks down the stereotypes of a woman being valued for her skin tone, bra or pant size and a man being the bumbling, sex needy idiot portrayed by our culture.