Over a decade ago (have I really been blogging that long?), I wrote a couple of posts (2011, 2014) where I counted up articles in Church magazines that talked about modesty in dress. Briefly, I found that modesty rhetoric had really ramped up since the turn of the millennium, and not surprisingly, was aimed more at women and girls than at men and boys.
In this post, I’m updating my 2014 post to include ten more years of data. I used the same scoring method that I did in 2014. (The gist is that I used Google to search for articles from magazines on the Church website that used forms of the word modest, and then scored each article for roughly what fraction was about modesty in dress, and also whether it was targeted at women/girls, men/boys, or both.) This graph shows what I found.
The bottom line, like I said in the title, is that there’s been a dramatic decrease since about the time I wrote my last post. This has been particularly noticeable for teen girls, who as far as I can tell haven’t been talked to about modesty since before the pandemic. This trend seems consistent with the Church’s introduction in 2022 of a new For the Strength of Youth pamphlet that is generally less prescriptive and more principles-based. And I noticed in reading the articles that do talk about modesty that they seem much more matter-of-fact and less frantic than previous ones. For example, here’s a good one from the New Era in 2019.
Adult women, on the other hand, have seen a modest 😉 increase in rhetoric aimed at them in the past few years. This also seems consistent with increased focus from the Church on the importance of wearing temple garments, with for example J. Anette Dennis and Dallin H. Oaks talking about it in Conference last year. Of course this focus is mostly on women, as women’s garments are less compatible with commonly available women’s clothes than men’s are with men’s clothes, and in a patriarchal church like ours, women’s dress will always be seen as more of an issue than men’s.
So, two cheers for the results, for teen girls and children in general anyway. It’s definitely a positive step when we can back off body shaming young people who are often the most psychologically vulnerable among us. And for the adult women, I can hope that the new sleeveless-leaning ones will maybe reduce the friction between garments and typical clothing styles a little, and perhaps encourage GAs to worry about something more substantial in their Conference talks.
The changes in the last decade are undoubtedly striking, but it’s also striking to see that the millenial generation still got 3-5x the modesty rhetoric that I would have as a GenXer.
FWIW, I worked for the church magazines for a while (shortly pre-pandemic). I’m not terribly surprised at this, for a few reasons:
– Many of the articles are written by interns who are either in college or recent grads, who may be more reticent to write topics on modesty. (For example, I once worked on a piece about a girl choosing whether or not to attend a certain event and what to wear. I cut all of the discussion on modesty of dress.)
– Some of the magazine publication staff are quite a bit more liberal than you’d think. (In particular, the folks at The Friend were always in trouble with correlation. The New Era folks were much more by the book.)
– We always had a plurality of submissions to work from and had set themes for each month, so it was largely up to the discretion of the Managing Editor and their staff what got selected.
Another (less measurable) degree of modesty is whatever the Seventy who has been called to run magazines decides is acceptable. He could add pressure to pick up more of certain topics and he could modify publication guidelines to his taste. For example, it was “immodest” for a while to publish printed pictures of women in jeans – we’d have to photoshop their pants to be slacks. This is just one example. Those guidelines were entirely up to the Seventy with little oversight.
I’d be curious how many more articles on tithing have been published in the last few years. They even wanted us writing content on tithing for 2-3 year olds!
And the correlation department was terrible to work with, as you might imagine. They quashed a lot of would-be-published work and topics that were more liberal than you’d guess.
This is a long and rambling comment, so in short:
there are a lot of staff at church magazines who would rather write about almost anything other than modesty. There are a lot of staff who want to write about topics that would be a great change of pace, but it’s unlikely it’ll publish anytime soon. And I’d be curious if tithing and temple mentions have changed over time.
Quentin, yes! I think it’s so unfortunate that anyone was targeted with so much modesty rhetoric, even if it’s come down since then.
short girl, thanks so much for all the background! I think it’s unfortunate from the perspective of how meaningful the data is that it’s a Seventy running the magazines. I like looking at Church magazines as a kind of barometer of the zeitgeist of the leadership, what they’re concerned with. But if it’s just a Seventy running it, I’m sure he’s probably an indicator of what the general feeling is, but not as much as if it were a committee of GAs, or a Q15 member.
And your tithing question is an interesting one. I’ll have to give that a search sometime. My memory is that I looked up tithing mentions in Conference talks once, but didn’t end up writing anything about it because there weren’t any interesting patterns. Maybe the magazines will turn up something different.
So who are the correlation committee members? It seems they hide behind a curtain.
jc, when I worked for the church, I never met with anyone who worked with correlation directly, but I was definitely on the bottom of the totem pole. I can attest that they are just as stern of hard-liners as you would think based on their feedback.
You’re gonna lose your mind when you start seeing bare shoulders in sacrament meeting! New tank top style garments coming in Q4 2025! Finally!
I wanted to also share some feedback regarding your “explanation” (e.g. your personal inferences) of the church’s new logo. Calling our fellow Christians “so called Christians” and calling the symbol of the cross the “satanic symbol of his death” is *flat out wrong*. My fellow Christians look to Christ as their savior just as faithfully as you and me. They love Jesus just as much as I do, and see the symbol of the cross as a reminder of the lord’s great sacrifice.
Your “explanation” that long hair today is “deeply inappropriate” is laughable. Not the norm for missionaries and GA’s? Sure. “Deeply inappropriate”? Not hardly!
We need to do better with finding and building upon common ground with our neighbors and with fellow Christians. The church may have priesthood authority and continuing revelation, but we don’t have a corner on spirituality, relationships with Jesus, or the blessings of heaven. …What we do have is a responsibility to love our non-Mormon neighbors, to honor their faith, and to strengthen one another as we navigate mortality during these challenging times.
Thanks for your interest in reading a years-old post, Dan! I’m sorry tone can be so hard to read, especially online, but I can assure you that it was 100% satire.
https://zelophehadsdaughters.com/2020/04/25/explanation-of-the-churchs-new-logo/