Today’s Pearls Before Swine provides a timely answer to your question.
It depends on the church.
My father and at least three of my siblings attend congregations in the Church of God in Christ. There, shirts and ties are expected for men; jackets are preferred, and suits are optimal. Women wear dresses or skirts with hems below the knee and long sleeves. Many of the women wear fairly elaborate hats.
My own church is far more casual. I wear a tie and blazer, but that’s because I LIKE dressing that way; nobody expects it. Pretty much anything is acceptable as long as its clean. About the women full dresses I see worn there are from our cross-dressing members, of which we have had several, being one of the few congregegations hereabouts that is trans friendly. Jeans & shorts are common. I have a friend who used to permit her kindergarten-aged son to wear a skirt to church, because that was what he wanted to wear. No one ever objected.
I usually wear shorts or jeans, tennis shoes, and often a t- shirt. I have bad feet and my clothing options are limited by my shoes. I also live in a hot and humid area. Finally, my church doesn’t care what the parishioners wear. Sometimes they have Hawiian shirt day or something so we can find each other when we meet at various restaurants for lunch. It’s a very casual Unitarian church.
I dress very casually, but I know what “church clothes” means, and I will use the term to my family when were going somewhere and have to dress relatively decently. I have sometimes told my daughter we have to dress like Protestants! They are always much dressier than the Catholic church I go to, and my daughter knows what I mean when I say that.
That’s awesome. I’d totally attend a church like that.
My church was a “business casual” sort of place. The other kids my age always wore whatever they wanted to, but my parents made us dress up. I was usually the only kid in Sunday school who wore a dress. I hated it.
Then in high school I discovered dress pants and my parents stopped caring anyway. Now I make an effort to dress up the few times I go (Christmas/Easter), but I don’t really like to wear skirts.
Catholics around here, at least, seem to have given up on dressing nicely for church. Jeans galore every time I’ve been.
The big thing with church here was that you didn’t wear jeans. But, unless you were older, wearing a suit felt overdressed. And night services are always more casual than morning ones, with non-Sunday services being the most casual.
And, yes, you get more formal if you are up on the platform.
With women, dresses were most common on Sunday morning, pants on Sunday nights, and just “normal” clothes on other service nights (usually Wednesday.) The step up for on the platform was just a more formal dress.
Oh, and everyone wears dress shoes on Sunday mornings, but less on Sunday nights, with sandals popular on Wednesdays.
It’s pretty much anything goes at our church, but most people dress up a bit…for some people, it’s their only chance to wear dressier clothes. I have to wear black, white or gray at work, so Sunday is the only time I can wear something nice and colorful! We run the gamut from jeans and wolf t-shirts to suits and ties, with most people going with business casual. I like wearing a dress to church, even though I almost always have a choir robe over it! And it’s so much fun to see the little girls get all dressed up in pretty dresses. There have been a few too many bare shoulders and low-cut tops among the teenagers for the comfort of the older segment, but they are just glad the kids are coming to church willingly.
No one thinks twice if someone is dressed to the nines in a dress and heels and pearls one week and then in khakis and a polo the next. And I like Pentecost when people try to remember to wear something red.
Is it true that in some black churches they designate days to wear certain colors, other than Pentecost? I overheard two women in my store one day talking about getting chided for not wearing a green outfit, but I only heard part of the conversation.
I’ve heard of this being done. At the larger of the two churches my family attended duiring my youth, there woul dbe periodic “Celebrate X Days” – Women, Men, Youth, Pastor & Wife, Pastor & Wife’s Anniversary, Founders, and so forth – in which all the female members were expected to dress in the same color scheme.
When our mother died, my lunatic sister decided that all the female relatives should wear cream. She gave my baby sister shit for not doing so. Closest I’ve ever come to breaking the don’t-hit-your-sister rule.
Well, from a Christian’s perspective, it was more like, “the type of clothes you wear is 100% cultural, not religious.” Does anyone actually think you are going to impress God with nice clothes?
People wear nice clothes to church because that used to be one of the few times a week they were seen by lots of people in the community. People wear clothes to impress other people, not God.
I wear nice clothes at work every day, and I don’t have anyone I need to impress at church, so yea, I’m wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and sneakers.
I was at a church for the first time in years last month, for a christening. Well, first time in years other than weddings, where obviously the dress code is a bit difference.
It was Lutheran, Missouri Synod, which is somewhat… conservative. Conservative enough that the pastor referenced the “evil” of “certain lifestyles” in his sermon, even though he knew half the congregation that day would be made up of visitors.
I wore a suit. The wife wore… I don’t know what it’s called. A cocktail dress? A frock? A knee-length dress which covered the shoulders, at any rate.
The first person I saw when we got there was the father of the kid, who was wearing a polo shirt and jeans. :smack: I was the only one there who didn’t have white hair wearing a suit.
My father does, and I think that is the official stance of his denomination, the Church of God in Christ. That is, they take it that anyone not dressing up for church is demonstrating their inward disrepect for God (and thus sinfulness). I have heard this viewpoint taught in sermons and kids’ Sunday school.
My mother also takes it as a Respect for Jesus kind of thing. While I can kind of see that, I don’t see why clean and neat, but casual, clothes are disrespect, and why you have to show up in a fancy dress and pantyhose. I can see not wearing cut-off shorts, but anything that passes for casual Friday at the office should be okay.
My father gets on my ass for not wearing a suit to MY church, even though he also thinks my church is in a state of sin for (a) being accepting of gays (and trans, though he’d not make any distinction, (b) performing sprinkling rather than immersion baptisms, and (c) letting an open agnostic like me attend services without being rebuked or pushed to get right with Jesus.
I’ve rarely attended church for the past few years, but when I do, it’s a Unitarian church. There, you’ll see anything from cargo / safari type clothing from some of the crunchies, to artsy or goth type dress from some of the earth centered folk, to business casual from the majority to suit / conservative dress from a few. I tend to go business casual.
When I was a kid in the RC church, it was always a dress and in the late sixties, we (Mom and us girls) wore a hat. Things got a bit more casual before I left the church, but the majority were still dressed in a fairly conservative manner.
like others, I’ve only been to church for weddings and funerals since, oh, 8th grade or so, so it was suit & tie. the people I know who still attend mass (RCC, obviously) wear what I’d say is pretty close to business casual.
seems to me that the whole “Sunday Best” thing was little more than the usual trying to show-up other people. i.e. “I can be a better Christian than you.”
Maybe it was that way in your church, but I’ve never, ever gotten that kind of vibe at any of the churches I’ve attended. I’ve never gotten any feeling of “I’m a better Christian because I’m wearing a better dress” ever. In the 70’s there was a tiny bit of push-back about women wearing pants to church…but we had just recently been allowed to wear pants to SCHOOL*, so it was a whole cultural thing that the oldsters were having problems with. Occasionally someone will show up wearing something a bit over the top, and you wonder what they were thinking when they got up that morning, but there was never any competitiveness that I saw.
*yes, kids, back in the late 60’s, early 70’s girls were not allowed to wear pants of any kind to school ever, unless the outside temperature was below, if memory serves, 20’F. Then there came a day when we could wear pants, but not jeans…I think that was 1972 or 73. The Pep Club would raise money by having Jeans Days where boys and girls could wear jeans by paying a quarter, and you’d get a little paper note to wear all day that said you supported PepClub!
I dress in a tie, slacks, and dress shoes. I’m stunned with the way some people dress going to church.
My little girl is an altar server and in the church choir, btw.
This reminds me of a term that is even more meaningless today than “church clothes”–“School clothes”. When I was in school (early 80s) everyone had a set of designated “school clothes” that were less nice than “church clothes” but certainly nicer than “play clothes”. Back to school shopping was for a new set of school clothes. We changed into play clothes every day after school, to keep the school clothes nice (and they were less comfortable). Somewhere around middle school this distinction disappeared, and I think the idea that you would dress up just a tad for school would be really alien to kids today.