What Some Christians Don’t Seem to Get About Olivia Culpo’s Wedding Dress

Once more on "modesty culture"

Photo by Oleksandr P: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wearing-wedding-gown-holding-bouquet-342257/

(A five-minute read.)

A few weeks back, Olivia Culpo made some waves because of the dress she wore during her wedding ceremony when she “tied the knot” with football megastar Christian McCaffrey in her native Rhode Island.

Culpo, a former Miss Universe, wore a very modest dress, showing very little skin, and explained to Vogue that she “didn’t want it to exude sex in any way, shape, or form,” adding that when she thinks of her husband and “what he loves and the moments that he thinks that I’m most beautiful, it’s absolutely in something like this: timeless, covered and elegant.”

Such comments set off a bit of a firestorm, with social media influencer Kennedy Bingham saying Culpo’s reflections were “a conservative campaign” and an implicit critique of anyone who didn’t follow her lead.

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting a modest wedding dress, or just modest attire in general,” Bingham clarified. “But the way she was talking about it went beyond just wanting something modest for herself, and pushing this idea of what she thinks all brides should look like.”

The little episode blew up even more because both Culpo and McCaffrey, who’s Roman Catholic, responded to Bingham’s post, calling her an “evil person” and saying her comments were “extremely hurtful.”

It’s not my interest to weigh in on the dramas and feuds that take place in the make-believe world of Hollywood.

I’m also not very interested in getting caught up in the cross-fire of the “culture wars,” which this little episode seems to be a part of.

Neither is this a critique of Culpo’s sartorial decisions or Bingham’s response. Culpo can wear—and say—what she wants, and Bingham can respond according to her convictions.

I also don’t know if this little episode is garnering a lot of discussion or not, or whether it’s just a proverbial tempest in a teapot.

But the reason I do bring it up is because I did see a few Christians responding—and their reflections gave me pause.

Some of those Christian responses went something like this: in a world that celebrates exposing more and more of the female body, we should give Culpo props for choosing to cover herself up.

I certainly don’t want to be critical of anyone who has those convictions, nor do I want to shame people who prioritize “modesty.”

But I do think it would be well to briefly review why it is that the idea of female “modesty” might be triggering for some people.

Simply put, as I wrote almost exactly a year ago, religious communities—and especially conservative religious communities—have spent hundreds, and even thousands, of years strictly policing and regulating female dress. And they’ve often blamed female beauty for male lust.

As I said, I wrote about this a year ago, so I don’t necessarily want to cover all the same ground. But it does bear some repeating.

I’ve yet to find any passage in Scripture—either in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament—that tells women that they must make their dress-decisions in the light of sexual propriety.

I haven’t come across a text that even remotely hints at the idea that how much skin a woman shows has anything to do with her sexual desire or availability—and that she should alter what she wears accordingly.

Instead, when Jesus talks about lust, he doesn’t tell women to cover up; he tells men to pluck out their eyes if it’s a problem for them (see Matthew 5:29)—which would have been absolutely revolutionary and subversive in his day.

Back then, as with now (though perhaps even more so back then), victim-blaming was the norm, with most societies placing the onus on women for the purity of men’s thought-life—which is what prompted these modesty dress-codes to begin with (though, interestingly, even with such norms, I’ve not read any law in the Torah that tried to regulate female dress as a way to promote sexual purity).

Thus, Jesus subtly subverted such norms, informing men that they were the masters of their own domain and that they had no one to blame but themselves for their behavior and thought-life.

Again, not to belabor the point, but it’s absolutely staggering how utterly silent the Bible is—from cover to cover—when it comes to female modesty.

It simply ignores such a cultural norm—and when forced to weigh in on the topic, chooses to blame men for their lust rather than women for what they wear.

It’s therefore strange—and, quite frankly, a bit maddening—how religious communities, which claim to base their views and practices strictly on the Bible, have spent so much time blaming females for male behavior.

Among other things, it’s just one of many examples of how “Bible-believing” Christians have read cultural norms into the Bible, all the while claiming to be unaffected by and opposed to non-biblical thinking and practice based on cultural influences.

All this is to say, yeah, I understand why so many women had such a visceral reaction to Olivia Culpo’s choice of wedding attire—and, more specifically, her public declarations of why she wore what she wore.

I don’t really know much about her political or religious views—nor her new husband’s. I do know that her background is Roman Catholic, as is his, and many people may have therefore connected her declarations about modesty with the conservative values that often accompany certain segments of Roman Catholicism.

Perhaps women who felt triggered by her reflections could have been a little less reactive and chosen to dig a little deeper about the potential nuances of her position.

But, either way, in the light of how repressive and restrictive conservative religious communities—led by men—have historically been when it comes to female attire, I totally understand the visceral reaction.

And I end with a similar appeal to how I ended my reflections on this topic a year ago: let’s stop blaming the female body for male lust, and allow women to make their own decisions about how much of their bodies they do or don’t want to show.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.