“God Didn’t Change His View: We Did”

When what God called good became something we learned to fear, hide, and shame.

I recently had a conversation with my son and his best friend after church that started with a discussion from their Sunday school class and caused me to think about something much deeper.

The topic in their class was attire and the freedom students have to wear what they choose to school. I asked them how they felt about having that freedom, and they both agreed that they liked being able to wear what they wanted.

But someone in the class had expressed that giving students that much freedom with attire wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

That led me to ask the boys another question:

“What do you think about having different attire restrictions for girls?”

My son said, “I don’t think girls should have to bend to accommodate the behavior or actions of men.”

His friend had a different perspective. He felt that, to a certain extent, girls should be mindful because we all share a community, and we should be conscious of the different people within that community.

I respected both of their perspectives.

Their answers made me think about how much of what we believe about attire is shaped by the culture around us.

We live in a society where the female, women, and girls have often been viewed through a dehumanizing lens.We have been taught to view certain choices in attire through a lens of shame, judgment, and misjudgment, particularly when it comes to attire.

But I began wondering:

Was attire ever the problem?

I started thinking about different cultures and how they have viewed attire throughout history. In some cultures, less clothing has not always carried the same meaning that it does in Western society. The body could simply be understood as natural—a part of God’s creation.

That brought me back to the beginning.

The Garden of Eden.

Before sin entered the world, Adam and Eve were naked, and they were not ashamed.

There was no embarrassment.

There was no hiding.

There was no sin attached to what God had created.

There was simply innocence.

Then something happened.

Sin entered the picture, and Adam and Eve suddenly became aware of their nakedness. They covered themselves and hid.

But here’s what stands out to me:

God’s creation had not changed.

God’s view of what He had created had not changed.

Their perception had changed.

What had once been completely natural was suddenly viewed through a different lens.

And that made me think about my own life.

When I was a newlywed, I remember struggling with guilt surrounding physical intimacy within my marriage. My then husband and I waited to be intimate on the night of our weddingi, but because of what I had learned and how I had been taught to view certain things, I had difficulty seeing it as something beautiful and appropriate within the covenant of marriage.

I would cry because I felt guilty.

Looking back, I realize that I wasn’t necessarily responding to what God had said. I was responding to what I had been taught.

I had learned to associate something that could be sacred within marriage with something that was inherently unholy.

And that experience taught me something:

Sometimes what we call conviction can actually be conditioning.

Sometimes we carry ideas about our bodies, sexuality, modesty, and purity that we have never stopped to examine.

We can be taught to fear the body rather than understand it.

We can be taught that attraction itself is wrong rather than learning what responsibility looks like.

We can teach girls to cover themselves without teaching boys that they are responsible for their own thoughts and actions.

We can teach modesty without making the female body the source of someone else’s behavior.

And I think there is a difference between consideration and responsibility.

Of course, we live in community. Our choices can affect the people around us, and there is value in teaching our children to be thoughtful, respectful, and considerate.

But we also have to be careful about placing the responsibility for someone else’s behavior on another person’s body.

A girl should not have to carry the burden of a man’s lack of self-control.

A woman should not be reduced to what she wears.

And a man should not be taught that his attraction gives him permission to objectify or disrespect a woman.

We have to teach both sides.

We have to teach responsibility.

We have to teach respect.

We have to teach boundaries.

But we don’t have to teach that the human body is something inherently dirty.

Because when I go back to Genesis, I don’t see God creating something shameful.

I see God creating something good.

The problem came when sin distorted how humanity saw what God had created.

And perhaps that’s why that conversation with two young men stayed with me.

What started as a simple conversation about school attire caused me to wrestle with questions that generations before us have wrestled with:

Who is responsible for how we respond to another person’s body?

What does modesty really mean?

Can we acknowledge beauty without objectifying it?

Can we teach responsibility without teaching shame?

And perhaps the biggest question of all:

What if God didn’t change His view of the body—what if we did?

Maybe part of our spiritual growth is learning to see what God created through His eyes instead of through the distortion that sin, culture, experiences, and shame have sometimes taught us.

The body was created by God.

Beauty was created by God.

Marriage was created by God.

And our responsibility is not to pretend these things don’t exist, but to learn how to honor them.

Maybe we don’t need to be afraid of the body.

Maybe we need to learn how to see it correctly.