Sissy Surplices and Soft Raiment
by Ross Neir
Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican ministers use the surplice as a liturgical vestment. The surplice is a long white garment down to the knee, sometimes with lace insets. They originate over a thousand years ago, possibly for warmth, but over time became standard vestments. Surplices can symbolize simplicity or excess, conformity or difference, masculinity or femininity, the purity of baptism or the splendor of heaven. Like most liturgical vestments they are symbols in search of meaning, and so, many meanings have been devised. Here I want to consider one such meaning: that surplices are effeminate and therefore symbolize gay.
In November 2018, popular pastor, speaker and Idahoan Douglas Wilson argued that “surplices are for sissies.” He defines the surplice as “a fetching little ecclesiastical number, with lacey-like accents.” He argues that clergy are seen as a third sex, that “the eras in which the most masculine, the most talented, the most aggressive men have been attracted to the ministry have been rare.” Wilson gives an example, littered with purple prose, of a boy who is pure, wholesome and cherubic, who rather than catching frogs, likes to read books. The
“canoe of this young gentleman’s masculinity is kind of wobbly in the water. Rocking back and forth, as it were. Now imagine that the climax of this small set up is that he is eventually ordained in a communion that fits him out first thing in a white surplice. Think of that white surplice as a couple of effeminate cinder blocks thrown into that already wobbly masculinity canoe. Such an event is gonna sink that boy right to the bottom of the great pond of Gay.”
Of course this is gender essentialism, through and through, uncritically examined and asserted with hegemonic force. What makes Wilson’s piece worth consideration, though, are the connections he makes to the Biblical text. He points to Matt 11:8 / Luke 7:25 and Matt 23:5 / Luke 20:46 where Jesus condemns the Pharisees for their long, elegant, soft robes. The connection is immediate. Surplices are also long, elegant, and soft robes. They must also signify showy piety and extravagance. Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for “the temptation to look fabulous.”
One common tactic to undermine Wilson’s reading would be to note the discontinuity between Palestine in the first century and Idaho in 2018. However, that tactic does not work here because Wilson, like the proverbial broken clock, has stumbled his way into several useful continuities with the historical Jesus’s mission and strategy. Consider what James Crossley and Robert Myles argue in their book Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict. In their reading, Jesus was not the cisheteropatriarchy-subverting Messiah who has come to save us from gender, as many queer Christians today want him to be. Instead, Crossley and Myles think that the historical Jesus fits into a recognizable pattern of influential religious leaders from rural locales who respond to their changing material conditions using traditional gender and sexual concepts. They write that
“Settings of significant socio-economic upheaval would have generated challenges to expectations concerning gender, but which were then negotiated within the constraints of a patriarchal world. By negotiating these issues, they utilized gendered stereotypes to promote their own agendas, but in ways that often ironically reinforced existing norms” (145).
And so it was with Jesus, who responded to the twin crises of Roman imperial dominance and Galilean economic change with what Crossley and Myles call the “butch millenarianism” of the early Jesus movement (151). Jesus declares the impending end of the world, gathers together twelve men to reconstitute the twelve tribes of Israel, and intensifies halakhic teachings to create a stronger, more masculine, new Israel. And that vision is not so far away from Douglas Wilson’s own. He too is a rural religious leader working in a time of (real or perceived) crisis who wants to gather men to vanguard a new White Christian Nation under conservative social norms. There still are discontinuities, of course, the most important being that in the ancient world a single figure gathering a few dozen followers really could threaten the political order, whereas today Wilson’s LARPing has little political meaning outside his town in Idaho. But this aside, their visions are similar and they even use the same tactic: policing the masculinity of their followers by criticizing the out-group’s religious dress as effeminate or gay.
I cannot find any pictures of Wilson in a surplice, but in my professional estimation, he served this rochet-and-stole look fabulously. Over time Wilson has adopted a suit-and-tie look, distinguishing himself from an effeminate vestment style and aligning himself with the masculine vestments of the American professional managerial class.
While Wilson’s gendered entanglement with the Biblical text is tight, his interpretation cannot be reduced to these texts as if the texts themselves have real agency. Matthew Novenson recently remarked that “the Bible is, strictly speaking, neither a good book nor a bad book. It is a protean book, patient of conscription into, and in fact being conscripted into, a variety of causes as wide as human endeavor itself. We, the generation now living, are responsible for how we use it.” Novenson is right. Wilson makes decisions about how to use Scripture and he is accountable for those decisions. The Bible does not and cannot possess him and override his human agency to use the text how it wishes. We might see Wilson’s agency, for instance, in his selecting these verses rather than others. Priests, whose clothes Jesus did not criticize, are instructed by God to wear bejeweled robes לְכָבוֹד וּלְתִפְאָרֶת “for glory and for beauty” (Exod 28:2). What might this suggest for surplices? Might surplices not be flamboyant enough? His very selection of the texts allows him to control the narrative and limit his readers’ Scriptural, historical, and gendered imagination.
Against the surplice Wilson writes that pastors should not be showy, which is “diabolical,” and especially not showy about their piety, which is “diabolical and gay.” What he does envision as masculine dress for pastors is not clear. The surplice covers the body and shrouds it in ambiguity. It is a unisex garment. Unlike most liturgical vestments which are worn only by clergy, the choir members also wear a surplice, which blurs the line between clergy and laity. When the priest’s dress is a standardized uniform, it arguably reduces showiness. At the same time, vestments distinguish their wearer as approved and fitting to execute certain liturgical functions. We then might call Wilson’s criticism of the surplice a “strong misreading” because he not only misconstrues and uncharitably attacks the surplice, but also draws from it something meaningful with which to polemicize.
I haven’t mentioned Wilson’s other arguments, or his extra homophobic comments, or his ghastly insinuation that surplices contributed to the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis. He is a shock artist and he knows his craft. What emerges from all of Wilson’s comments, however, is a conscious rhetorical strategy to marshall Biblical examples to support his gender essentialist project and to further his explicitly White Christian Nationalist vision. Jesus’s “butch millenarian” criticism of the religious elite gives Wilson an opportunity to offer an analogous criticism against high church traditionalists today. Wilson “fashions masculinity” by way of polemic against his denominational rivals, not concerned only with the fashion itself but with its potential to inspire a renewed masculinity: one priestly, heterosexual, Idahoan, and unfabulous.
[1] It is interesting that Wilson fails to notice that Jesus uses the same word (μαλακοῖς) to describe the Pharisees’ robes that modern translators render as “passive homosexual partners” in 1 Corinthians 6:9. A missed opportunity, but Wilson’s argument represents the substance of this point.
[2] After I wrote this piece, Wilson engaged in a month-long defense of the claim that sexual abuse victims bear culpability for their abuse. Whether surplices or the literal abuse victims themselves, Wilson appears committed to shifting the blame onto anything other than violent, patriarchal men whose ideology pleasures and benefits him.
Ross Neir is a student at Western Theological Seminary (Holland, Michigan) pursuing a Master of Theology degree. He is currently completing a thesis on procreative nationalism and ethnic identity in Paul's Letter to the Romans. He resides in Naperville, Illinois.