Truth, Grace, and Carrie Prejean
By Stan Guthrie|Published Date: August 06, 2009
At first the narrative seemed straightforward, the moral clear. At a beauty pageant, a judge with an agenda sets up a Christian contestant, asking whether she supports gay marriage.
The contestant, initially taken aback, recovers her wits enough to take a stand for traditional marriage.
The judge, a flamboyant homosexual, berates her, and the title alights elsewhere. The Christian contestant, amid post-competition verbal attacks from supporters of gay marriage, wonders aloud whether her answer cost her the crown. Prominent Christian leaders and organizations rush to her defense, calling her a courageous Christian who stood up for the truth.
But then other truths emerge. Some Christian observers say her answer wasn’t distinctively Christian. Others suggest that beauty pageants themselves are taboo for Christians, in that they encourage the exploitation of females. Then comes news of breast implants, racy, revealing photos from her modeling career, and, finally, the defense by the pageant director, who sees nothing wrong with the photos: “We are in the 21st century,” he says. “We have determined the pictures taken are fine.” Then the beauty queen’s state crown is also lost.
Those Christians who hitched a ride on her 15 minutes of fame in our celebrity-obsessed culture, using her name as surely as the swimsuit merchants used her body, are forced to double down on the beauty queen or relinquish their headline-grabbing trophy in the culture war. Supporters of same-sex marriage—and opponents of Christians in the public square—are quick to crow about hypocrisy.
But is this really fair? Just how morally pure must we be to speak out on the moral issues of the day? Does pointing to a moral standard that we cannot keep indicate that we are hypocrites—or human?
In one sense, we are called to act as salt and light in the many gray areas of culture. Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which has many members who serve in vocations possessing some moral ambiguity, argues for “cultural presence.” He believes Christian presence in these professions is a risk worth taking. Certainly the rest of us need to offer both truth and grace to fellow believers who face difficult career choices.
In another sense, of course, the critics of biblical Christianity are right. How can we fulminate against homosexual marriage when we Christians seem nearly as likely to commit fornication, adultery, and divorce as any pagan?
Perfection may be too high a standard in 21st-century America—but walking our talk shouldn’t be. How do we do so? Dusting off the Christian virtue of modesty might be a good place to begin.
The dictionary defines modesty as “reserve or propriety in speech, dress, or behavior.” When was the last time you heard a sermon on modesty? In our fear of being labeled as repressed puritans in the third millennium, perhaps we have jettisoned modesty.
Our well-known participation in the culture’s easy embrace of infidelity and divorce—not to mention suggestive lingerie ads—suggests that the old fundamentalist prudery wasn’t all bad. The destructive campus hook-up culture, especially for young women, could never have happened if modesty were alive and well. Neither could the 60 percent of births to women aged 20 to 24 years going to unwed mothers.
Even feminists such as Mary Pipher might reluctantly admit that the danger is not too much modesty, but too little. In A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, author Wendy Shalit quotes Pipher as saying, “Girls today are much more oppressed. They are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture.”
We Christians—men and women—need to recapture a sense of modesty. Admittedly modesty is partly culturally defined. Wearing a modest swimsuit that may be perfectly fine by the pool would be perfectly ghastly in the boardroom. But such contextual considerations should not keep us from aspiring to live a modest life that honors our Lord and keeps others from stumbling.
Modesty, however, means more than simply covering up our bodies. It also involves a certain reserve and propriety in our speech and behavior. Perhaps it’s time to tone down not only what we’re wearing, but what we’re saying—and how we’re saying it. We need to better balance our boldness in defense of truth with a personal modesty among fellow sinners in society.
Our newfound modesty may not win us every argument, but it could bring us something that is even more valuable—respect.
Stan Guthrie is freelance writer, editor, speaker, and teacher, and a Christianity Today editor at large. He and his wife, Christine, and their three children live near Chicago.
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