Nancy Campbell, a Fundamentalist Christian, warned women today about the “sin” of showing cleavage in church. That’s right, with everything that is going on in the world, Campbell is worried about cleavage.
Isaiah 61:10 says: “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God, for He hath CLOTHED me with the GARMENTS of salvation, he hath COVERED me with the ROBE of righteousness.” When we accept the salvation God gives to us, He washes away our sins, covers us with the precious blood of Jesus, and clothes us with a robe of righteousness. It’s not our righteousness for we have none of our own, but it’s His righteousness.
This is something that happens to us spiritually. However, everything that happens in the inward man should be revealed in the outward man. Our physical body emanates what goes on in the “hidden man of the heart.” I believe that if we are truly covered with a robe of righteousness inwardly, we will also reveal this work of righteousness within us by covering our physical bodies.
A robe is not a scanty dress; it covers the body. It doesn’t have to cover head to foot, but at least a robe usually covers the top to below the knee. I grieve as I observe women who confess they are Christians and yet blatantly display cleavage, some a little, some as much as they can! It has become so normal in the Christians church that some young Christians think it is standard clothing! Why would women want to take that which is sacred to the bedroom out into the public market place? And why would husbands. who are the covering of their wives, allow them to leave their home with so much flesh showing? Why do they want the world to see what belongs to them alone (Proverbs 5:15-19).
First, Campbell rips Isaiah 61:10 out if its context and uses the verse to prove her anti-cleavage point. As Campbell aptly shows, the Bible can be used to prove anything.
Second, Campbell believes women should cover their bodies from their necks to below their knees. Why, if Evangelical women don’t do this, horn-dog preachers, deacons, and other church males will be tempted to lust. Think about what she is saying. Showing ANY cleavage is a sin. The slightest glimpse of a woman’s breasts in church will lead hapless, weak, pathetic men astray. As always, women are to blame when men can’t keep their minds out of the gutter.
I call on women to protest Campbell’s anti-cleavagery. 🙂 Proudly show your cleavage. Seriously, Campell’s and Lori Alexander’s obsession with women’s breasts is silly and absurd. Personally, I am a big fan of cleavage. That said, I am not worried that I will want to sexually have my way with women who show theirs. For fuck’s sake, grow up.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
As I have detailed several times before, many Evangelicals have what I call boob-a-phobia — the fear of breasts. This phobia is quite common among Evangelical men who have feasted on a steady diet of complementarian, patriarchal, women-are-Jezebels, men-are-weak-pathetic-helpless-horndogs preaching and teaching. Women are expected to keep their bodies covered at all times lest a glimpse of their cleavage, legs, or feminine shape causes widespread male lust. Women are always viewed as gatekeepers. It’s up to them to make sure that visually-driven Jesus-loving man-children don’t see anything in the appearance of women that might cause them to say to themselves, nice. (Jesus heard that buddy! Repent!)
Recently Fundamentalist morality policewoman Lori Alexander thought it important to write about breastfeeding church women causing Christian men to have non-procreation boners. Here’s what Alexander and one of her acolytes had to say:
It’s amazing how many Christian women think it’s fine and dandy to openly breastfeed their babies and show their breasts to men who aren’t their husbands. It riles women up when I teach them to be modest and discreet even while breastfeeding. They falsely believe that breasts aren’t sexual and it’s men’s fault if they like to see breasts while nursing because they are “perverts.”
Women have told me that Jesus’ mother Mary breastfed openly in the temple and Catholics have shown me pictures of Mary’s breast hanging out in preparation to nurse her baby. There isn’t one single Bible verse that tells us that she breastfed openly! Not one. I am sure she was known as a godly, discreet, and modest woman since God chose her to bear His Son.
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Here is a comment from one wise women on this topic:
It’s like people don’t read the scriptures anymore and do word studies. It annoys me. Men are visual or there wouldn’t be so many verses about the body in Song of Solomon alone! But since this is about breasts here are just a few verses on them.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. — Proverbs 5:19
This verse is implying that the breasts are satisfying and here we are seeing the encouragement for them to always make a man filled with delight. The King James uses the word satisfy which implies that they are satisfying to a man. They aren’t drawn to things that are not satisfying.
Both satisfy and delight mean to be filled, take pleasure in. It is the same delight that is used when it says God delights in His people. The way God delights in His people is the way a man is to be about his wife’s breasts only. But like everything that is beautiful in God’s Holy Word and ways, it gets perverted by the world we live in and you have men delighting in other women’s breasts and you have women practicing zero discretion. Zero.
If that wasn’t enough to show that men like breasts here is another verse:
Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies. — Song of Solomon 4:5
Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples. — Song of Solomon 7:7-8
How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O noble daughter! Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master hand. Your navel is a rounded bowl that never lacks mixed wine. Your belly is a heap of wheat, encircled with lilies. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.– Song of Solomon 7:1-13
The man in Song Of Solomon was clearly attracted to this woman’s breasts. Why did God allow that to be in His word for everyone to read? Because men love breasts and in the context of marriage it is a beautiful thing! But again the perverted world we live in would like to believe this isn’t true or simply don’t care like they do with homosexuality. They believe it simply isn’t true that God hates it or they don’t care.
Alexander oh-so-wrongly believes that men always view female breasts in a sexual manner. The same with legs or the feminine shape. Evidently, the men she and her followers have been around are unable to distinguish between breasts that are being sexually satisfying and breasts used as milk wagons for junior. In their minds, any exposure is an open invitation to lust. Perhaps this says more about these men than it does breastfeeding mothers who dare to do what is natural and normal when breastfeeding their babies.
One commenter on Alexander’s post had this to say:
This commenter doubts whether breastfeeding “exhibitionists” are True Christians®. Why, no True Christian® woman would ever expose any part of her breasts while breastfeeding. Think of the children! uh, I mean the men. Evidently, this woman’s husband has an eye or two for breasts. Why, church women have exposed their breasts to him millions of times! Makes me want to reconsider Christianity. Now, where’s this church so I can go and investigate their sized DDD — Father, Son, Holy Ghost — faith?
Alexander’s post and its attendant comments are a reminder of how infantilized many Evangelical pastors, churches, and congregants have become.
Let me conclude this post with a couple of stories I think readers might find funny. In 1994, I was the co-pastor of Community Baptist Church in Elmendorf, Texas. On Wednesdays, the church gathered for prayer. Not a typical five-minute Baptist prayer meeting, but one that lasted upwards to two hours. We would sing a few songs and then get on our knees and send our prayers upwards to the ceiling God. (This was the only time women were permitted to speak during church.) Polly and I have six children. At the time, our girls were five and three. Being the daughters of fine upstanding Fundamentalists, the Gerencser girls wore dresses to church, and everywhere else, for that matter. As prayer meeting droned on, it was not uncommon for us to place the girls on the floor for a nap. One evening, a fire-breathing Calvinist — who is still a church member — came to me and said that she could see my daughters’ underwear while they were lying on the floor. She thought I would went to know so I could cover them up. Instead, her new pastor told her, don’t look. That went over well!
I had a similar experience in the 1970s while attending Sierra Vista Baptist Church in Sierra Vista, Arizona. I was eighteen at the time, and I was dating a twenty-year-old church girl named Anita. Anita irritated the hell out of then-deacon Chuck Cofty (now a Baptist evangelist) with her short skirts. One day, Cofty came up to me, filled with righteous indignation, and said, Your girlfriend’s skirt is too short and it is immodest. Cofty expected me to tell Anita to wear longer skirts. Trust me, even if I wanted to pass on Cofty’s edict — and I didn’t; I liked her skirts — Anita wasn’t the type of woman you could badger into compliance. I told Cofty the same thing I told the woman at Community Baptist, don’t look.
And here we are in 2018. I have two words for Alexander, her followers, and their menfolk, DON’T LOOK!
About Bruce Gerencser
Bruce Gerencser, 61, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 40 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.
Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.
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Many young women today believe that it’s fine to nurse a baby in public and have other men see their breasts because feeding a baby is much more important than what men think or being modest and this is why breasts were created. I disagree. In my grandmother’s generation, women were always careful to cover themselves when they nursed their babies. It was the same for my mother’s generation. They wouldn’t have dreamed of allowing other men besides their husbands to see their exposed breasts.
My generation was modest about this as well. My friends always covered themselves up when they nursed their babies. This generation is different. Nakedness no longer brings them shame and nursing a baby is “natural” and so are breasts, so no big deal, right? Wrong.
You can bet I sure wouldn’t want a woman coming into my home and openly showing her breasts to my husband while nursing her baby. I nursed four babies for over a year and no man besides my husband ever saw my breasts. God commands that older women teach the young women to be discreet and part of being discreet and shamefaced is not drawing attention to ourselves and covering up.
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Nakedness and shame continually are linked together in the Bible. “…and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear” (Revelation 3:18). We are not to show our nakedness just because we live in a culture that tells us it is acceptable. We are to be discreet in all of our behavior, yes, even when nursing our babies. If most of the generations before this generation could do it, so can you. Breasts are not to be displayed in public by godly women for any reason.
Yes, breasts are sexual for men or God wouldn’t have written this in His Word: “Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love” (Proverbs 5:19). Men are highly attracted to women’s breasts no matter how much women don’t want this to be true. I wouldn’t even nurse in front of my sons if they were older than five years old. No, breasts are to be covered and private. It’s what God has called us to do
Another day and yet another reminder of Evangelicals and their fear of female mammary glands. Today’s story comes from cool, hip, loaded-with-cash Steven Furtick and his monument to Evangelical excess, Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Last Sunday, a woman who has been attending Elevation Church since 2015 was discreetly breastfeeding her baby when a church volunteer asked her to leave the auditorium and go to the designated — exposed breasts allowed — baby feeding area.
The Charlotte Observer reports:
A group of mothers who breastfeed plan to stage a “Nurse-In” during Sunday worship at Charlotte’s Elevation Church this month to show support for a South Carolina woman who said she was asked to leave the church’s sanctuary because she was breastfeeding her baby.
Last Sunday, Amanda Zilliken of Lancaster, S.C., sent out a Facebook post saying, “I just got kicked out of church for breastfeeding with a cover on and directed to the bathroom. … Shame on you elevation.”
Her Facebook post, which also featured a photo of the bathroom at Elevation’s Ballantyne campus, has since been shared by more than 1,500 people.
On Wednesday, Zilliken, a 29-year-old stay-at-home mom, told the Observer that she “definitely” plans to participate in the “Nurse-In.” But it’s up in the air whether she’ll decide to continue as a regular at Elevation, a church she’d driven an hour to attend most Sundays since 2015.
As much as I love hearing the word of God from Pastor Steven (Furtick) … I’m not sure at this time if I’ll feel comfortable going back because of the way this was handled,” she said. “If anything difficult arises (at Elevation), they try to hush it up.”
Elevation Church said in a statement: “We do not have a policy that nursing mothers can’t be in the sanctuary. A volunteer had a conversation and felt both parties arrived at the same conclusion to exit mutually. We are sorry that this in any way offended anyone. We welcome everyone and anyone to attend Elevation church.”
Elevation, one of the fastest growing churches in the country, draws more than 20,000 worshipers to its nine Charlotte-area sites every weekend. Furtick, who launched the Southern Baptist church with wife Holly and seven other couples in 2006, speaks most Sundays in person at the Ballantyne campus. At the other sites, he’s on screen.
Zilliken said she did last Sunday what she’s always done since the birth of her youngest child, Idamae, who’s now 4 months old and breastfeeding. Zilliken said she dropped off her two other children – ages 5 and 4 – at the church’s eKidz child-care area. Then she went to the church auditorium’s second floor, headed for the last row and took the seat nearest the door. From there, she thought, she could quickly exit in case Idamae caused any disturbance during the service.
As she’s done many times before, Zilliken said, she then waited until Furtick’s sermon to begin breastfeeding “so she’s quiet.”
That’s when a volunteer approached her, Zilliken said, turned on a flashlight in the dark auditorium and asked that Zilliken follow her to the “mother’s area.”
“It embarrassed me, and drew people’s attention,” said Zilliken, who was led to a restroom to finish her 20-minutes of breastfeeding. “To take me to the mother’s restroom was totally unacceptable, humiliating – and illegal.”
The volunteer returned to the restroom to inform her she could go back to her seat “when you’re done,” Zilliken said.
But Zilliken said she was so upset by then, crying and angry, that she left after sharing her feelings with other staff members at Elevation. She said they were “unsympathetic” even though they agreed the volunteer should not have pulled her out of the service.
“I drive an hour to this church … and I missed the whole sermon,” she said. Zilliken cited laws that allow women to breastfeed in public and said she saw no one in the church complain about her quietly feeding her baby, with a cover, in the dark.
And yet, Zilliken said, the volunteer told her, “Honey, you have to understand that my job as a volunteer is to make sure everyone is comfortable, not just you.”
Elevation added in its statement: “We have several designated areas for nursing moms at Ballantyne specifically – one private to allow pumping and it’s close to the auditorium for convenience and the other in the actual baby area with a TV to allow mothers to still be part of the worship experience.”
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What drives this irrational fear of female breasts? Notice what the volunteer told the offending woman, “Honey, you have to understand that my job as a volunteer is to make sure everyone is comfortable, not just you.” There ya have it. Someone in the church might be offended by seeing her breast — a supposedly God-given gland used to feed precious little Christian babies — and if it is a man, he might not be able to contain his sexual urges. Once again, a woman is punished because some men are unable to keep their minds on the sermon.
Don’t think for a moment that this volunteer was acting on her own. It is clear, at least to me, that nursing mothers who attend Elevation Church are expected to feed their babies in rooms other than the auditorium. Steven Furtick would have had to sign off on such a rule, so the blame, in the end, rests with him. Furtick needs to make a clear, unambiguous statement that states women are free to nurse their children in the auditorium during church services. And those who are “offended?” Grow Up, and start acting like adults.
Ever the voyeur, Evangelical culture warrior Franklin Graham took to Facebook to slut-shame Duchess Kate Middleton for bearing her breasts on a private French beach. Pictures of the topless Middleton were made public in 2012 by French magazine Closer without her permission. Middleton and her husband, Prince William, have filed a $1.6 million suit against Closer and regional newspaper La Provence for violating their privacy.
Prince William, in a written statement submitted to the court, had this to say:
In September 2012, my wife and I thought that we could go to France for a few days in a secluded villa owned by a member of my family, and thus enjoy our privacy. We know France and the French, and we know that they are, in principle, respectful of private life, including that of their guests.
Graham, feigning sympathy for Prince William and Kate, used the violation of their privacy as a pretext to preach the Evangelical gospel of “No Boobs Allowed.”
What’s with Evangelical preachers and their obsession with and fear of women’s breasts? Are breasts the reason Franklin’s Daddy, Billy, refused to be alone with any woman who was not his wife? Billy’s no-boobs-allowed policy — called the Billy Graham Rule® — is followed by countless Evangelical preachers and male weaklings. Vice President Mike Pence made the news several months ago when it became known that he too followed the Billy Graham Rule:
“In 2002, Mike Pence told The Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.”
Perhaps it is time for women to picket Franklin Graham’s rallies and other red-meat-for-Evangelical-zealots events. Off go the tops and bras, exposing to Franklin and his fellow school boys a beautiful plethora of female mammary glands. Wouldn’t that be a sight to behold, especially when the women are arrested for public indecency? If men did the same, no arrests would follow. Men baring their mammary glands is legal, but women doing likewise is criminal, a reflection of Christianity’s influence on our laws. Yet again, women are held to a different standard from that of men.
Count me as one person who is absolutely T-I-R-E-D of Evangelical moralizing by men such as Franklin Graham and his fellow misogynists. Sadly, Graham’s slut-shaming of Middleton received thousands of likes. The good news? Hundreds of people voiced their objections to Graham’s words in the comment section. Graham will likely view the negative comments as a sign of fall of Western Civilization. Just wait, Franklin, until the Grandmas of America picket your meetings and unleash their breasts. You will then, for sure, see the FALL of Western Civilization.
Ever the voyeur, Evangelical culture warrior Franklin Graham took to 
