Podcast #186 – The Black Wedding Dress that Shocked the Conservative Homeschool World

My daughter’s black wedding dress shocked a lot of people. Some comments were downright ugly, but they sparked a conversation that needs to be had in the conservative homeschool world – What are we teaching our children about appearances and “fitting in.”

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Resources mentioned:

• Original Facebook post
• She Wears Skirts Series
• Jinger Dugger’s Book – Become Free Indeed

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TRANSCRIPT

I knew when I posted that photo of my daughter in a black wedding dress that there were going to be some comments. And I was prepared for it because there was a deeper truth, behind that photo. And I felt like it was time to challenge some people to think biblically and to dig a little deeper than what’s on the surface of their faith. So today we’re going to talk about that dress, we’re going to talk about the wedding, and we’re going to talk about some deep seeded traditions of man that maybe you are not allowing yourself to think past and to teach your children to also think in a way that is not as concerned with what others think think about you based on outside appearances. All this and more in this upcoming podcast. I’m really going to be speaking off the cuff today, and I hope you will join me on this journey as we dig deep into what it means to be a Christian and what it means to teach our children to think for themselves and to not be so wrapped up in man’s traditions.

Hello, friends, and welcome to the Raising Arrows podcast. My name is Amy Roberts from RaisingArrows.net and this is episode #185 – The Black Wedding Dress that Shocked the Conservative Homeschool World.

So, as I said at the beginning, I’m going to speak a little more off the cuff in this podcast because this is still, you know, pretty new. My daughter got married last weekend and I went ahead and posted a few days later on my Facebook page and my Instagram page.

Now, interestingly, Instagram is a little younger crowd and there weren’t so many shocked conversations as there were on Facebook. However, there were a lot of people who were absolutely appalled and made no bones about it. And I’m sure for every one person who had something to say, there were probably 15 who just kept their mouths shut. But there were a few people who went ahead and said things like, “Looks like a funeral,” “Why would you let her wear that?” “Why the choice of the black dress?”

Some people definitely were just curious and wanted to know more. Some people were outright vehement about their views of this black dress. Somebody even went so far as to say that it looked like a funeral. And I am the kind of person who, I would never say that publicly to somebody.

The post was actually just a beautiful thought from me about the fact that my daughter and her husband were standing on a bridge and how that’s really where my relationship with her is now. She has a life on the other side of the bridge and I Have a life on this side of the bridge where she used to be. And I don’t belong on her side of the bridge, just like she really no longer belongs on my side of the bridge. But we can meet in the middle and we can grow a relationship there. And it’s a new relationship. It’s a new place. And that was really what I wanted to convey.

But I knew in posting that photo of the backs of my daughter and her husband, and they’re both in black, funnily enough, I’m just going to throw this out there. Nobody questions a groom in black, but apparently a bride in black is just all sorts of wrong.

So I post this photo. I knew by posting that photo that I was going to get some flack. There were going to be some people who were going to have something to say, and I knew that I wanted to address those comments. I knew it was time for me to say something, and so I went ahead and I posted it, knowing full well that I was going to have to have a conversation about this.

Now, a little backstory here. Definitely, this dress was a little bit of a sticking point for some of the more traditional members of our family. But as we described what she was looking for and why she was looking for this, they began to come around and understand exactly where we were coming from with this.

So years ago, before my daughter was even involved with this young man, she really wanted to have a black wedding dress. She has never been comfortable in white. She’s rather pale. She feels very washed out. She’s always thought, no, I don’t want a white wedding dress. And she’s liked the idea of this big, flowing black gown. And that was what she initially wanted. And then when we went to try on gowns, she found that this very nice, ruched, beautiful dress that ended up just being so classy was actually what was perfect for her. And she looked absolutely stunning. My husband even said that he wasn’t real sure what to expect with a black dress. And he did not see the dress ahead of time. He did not see the dress until the day of the wedding, and he wasn’t sure what to expect. And he said when she came up to him and he turned around to see the dress for the first time and for the photographer to get the reaction, he said he was just blown away. And he still just raves about it. He’s like, “it’s such a beautiful dress.” She did such a good job choosing that dress. And it was – it was just perfect and was beautiful.

But there were family members who initially were kind of, you know, surprised by the black dress. And I know initially I kind of had this, you know, gut reaction, like, is this a good idea? And I had to check myself because we have taught our children to think for themselves. We have taught our children to measure everything biblically and not by man’s traditions and not by what people might say. And there’s a reason for that.

If you are facing real persecution for your faith, you are not going to be able to stand up under it if you are concerned about what other people think. So we have tried really hard to instill in our children that it’s their hearts that matter and that they need to be pointing back to Christ.

And yes, sometimes what you wear and how you act and things like that absolutely speak volumes about who you are. But this dress was not immodest. This dress was not satanic. This dress was not for a funeral. Nobody wears that kind of dress to a funeral. It really was not any of those things. It was a black dress that she wore to her wedding, much like Laura Ingalls Wilder wore a black cashmere dress to her wedding.

In fact, back in the day, most women wore what they had, or they made a dress that was not white because that’s not very practical. They needed a dress that they could continue to wear because fabric was not cheap.

It was Queen Victoria who made the white wedding dress popular. Prior to that, not many women were wearing white. It just wasn’t practical and it just wasn’t feasible. Most women were wearing their best dress. And my daughter had grown up with stories about Laura Ingalls Wilder wearing a black cashmere dress. She’d grown up with stories about depression era women putting on their best navy suit and getting married and then going house to house to have dinner and open presents with each of their family members. And my daughter was enthralled by those stories. She felt like that was so much cozier and more wonderful. And that is really what she wanted to do.

She wanted to have only her closest friends and family at the wedding. She only wanted to have people there who were there to support her and her husband. She wanted it to be an intimate gathering. She wanted it to be fun. She wanted it to be a celebration of who they are as a couple and who we are as two families coming together. It was very, very much that.

And in fact, this is her first full week being married and she is actually going house to house with her husband. They are going to the houses of friends and family members who were not able to come to the wedding just to visit them, have a meal with them and enjoy some time with them. And that is really the epitome of what she wanted in this celebration of their new life together. And I am super proud of that. And I feel like that is fantastic.

They are both God fearing, wonderful Christian young people and we are excited for their life together. And so in my mind, a black dress does not negate who they are. In fact, there are a lot of women standing up at altars in whitewashed tombs. They are wearing that white, but they are dead and empty on the inside. I don’t want that for my children. I am more concerned about their hearts. I’m more concerned about their focus. I’m more concerned that they are following Christ than that they are wearing what the rest of the world, or probably just our culture deems to be appropriate for, for the occasion.

Now, my daughter is strong willed and she’s fun and she’s spunky and she would be the child who would decide to buck the system. That’s just who she is. It’s who she’s always been. And so I’m not surprised that, you know, she ruffled some feathers. In fact, I think that sometimes that might be why she was put on this earth, was to just ruffle some feathers and make people think. Because she’s the one who astutely pointed out to me, not because I was questioning the black choice, but because, she had had other people say something and that was that the groom wears black. The groomsmen often wear black. Nobody bats an eye, nobody says anything. Nobody says it’s a funeral. And I mentioned that earlier, that that has really been something that I’ve been able to take away from this that I didn’t even think of. So that was a really fascinating thought to me.

And I am so appreciative when my children voice things like that, where it shows me that they are thinking outside the box, that they are thinking biblically, that they are taking what they’ve learned from Scripture and applying it no matter what other people say or do. Because again, if my children are ever in a place of severe persecution, I want them to be able to stand up under it. I don’t want them to worry about what other people are saying or thinking. I want them to be able to stand for Christ and Christ alone.

We often get so wrapped around the axle about externals. And I have seen it back in my younger years of homeschooling. It was very common for homeschool moms to look the same. There was this whole homeschool mom denim jumper thing where it seemed like all the homeschool moms were wearing denim jumpers and then sometimes it was denim skirts and then you had a lot of little homeschool boys running around with plaid button down shirts tucked in with a belt because that was the “proper way” to look. Our family has never quite fit into that scene.

Another thing that was really popular was to be working for yourself. And so if you weren’t working for yourself, you were working for the man. And you should be trying to get out onto a homestead and farm for yourself and have all your own food and make your own clothing and bake your own bread and mill your own wheat, not work for anybody but yourself. And this would make you completely self sufficient and this would make you more godly. And my husband was never really into that. My husband has been a police officer, he’s been a soldier, and he’s worked for a private company. He’s just not the guy who’s going to work for himself or, you know, farm the ground with his own two hands and a tractor or whatever. That’s just not his scene. He once said to me, it’s just not feasible for everybody to work for themselves. We wouldn’t have any law and order, we wouldn’t have workers to work for the people who own the companies. It just wasn’t feasible. But yet that was touted as holier than, like I said, working for the man.

So our family has always been a little different in that respect. I was never real into my boys having their shirts tucked in because daddy didn’t like to have his shirt tucked in, so why would I tuck all their shirts in? I guess I kind of felt like it looked a little pretentious too. Like it was trying to give off this certain vibe. But I’ve always been hesitant about that vibe and so it just wasn’t something that we were interested in.

We tried skirts for a while. If you look back on the blog, you’ll see there’s a She Wears Skirts series where I absolutely was trying to go all in with the skirts. I came out the other side of that series realizing that that was not a sign of godliness either.

And there’s so much more to this and I am certain I’m going to step on toes during this podcast, but I feel like these are things that need to be said and whether or not you decide you just cannot listen to me anymore and cannot read my blog anymore because I have said things that are against what you firmly hold true, I am sorry for that. And I realize that there are convictions. People have convictions that are different and those things are our liberty in Christ. They are non essentials and we have liberty in those things.

I love St. Augustine’s quote about in the essentials, unity, in the non essentials, liberty, and in all things, charity. We need to be able to be kind to one another and to recognize that we all have different convictions that are all within the body of Christ. Absolutely, I have convictions on things that I know other people in our church don’t have convictions on. It’s not my job to lay those convictions on them. That’s the Holy Spirit. And I’m not somehow better than them because of my convictions. We have got to stop doing that in church amongst believers.

When I mentioned the whitewashed tombs, that was aimed by Jesus at the Pharisees. And when we look at Hebrews and a lot of the New Testament letters, in fact, we often see this persecution and we think the persecution is coming from the Romans and sometimes it was, but we see this persecution, it’s like, well, it’s coming from outside. But a lot of times, especially like in Hebrews, that was persecution from the Jews themselves. It was persecution from their neighbors, their friends, the people they had been going to church with. This was not persecution from some random stranger.

So a lot of times the persecution that may happen to your children may be from within the church. It may be from people who hold very strong, passionate convictions about things that are non essentials. And I want my children to know that the essentials are the things they need to stand on. Those are the hills to die on. Those are the things that do not change ever, ever, ever.

But convictions can come and go. God can put you on the mission field and he can take you off the mission field. That is up to God, not up to man, and not up to me personally. Those are things that I need to be listening to the Lord’s leading. But I cannot put those on other people.

I am to preach the gospel. I am to preach Jesus and Jesus alone, not Jesus plus. Your good works, your good behavior, your certain clothing choices, those are not essentials.

Our pastor just preached a sermon about this. We’re going through 1st Timothy and I really appreciated his insight because they’re fellow homeschoolers. But he talked about the fact that both sides, both public schoolers, private schoolers, homeschoolers, they all can have a tendency to say, this is the godly holy way to do this.

So you’ve got homeschoolers saying, “if you’re a good Christian, you won’t send your kids to public school.” You’ve got public school parents saying, “my children are salt and light in the school and how dare you not let your children onto that mission field.”

So see, there’s two sides where we both become a little holier than thou and we think we have the only right way, when really these are non essentials. We need to give grace and mercy and allow for liberty.

Now, I started to talk a little bit there about the whitewashed tombs and I kind of went off on a tangent. I want to come back to that. When Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs, he was obviously talking about the fact that they are dead and empty inside. And all you see is this facade that has been painted white. It looks beautiful and pristine, but it’s not. There’s no substance to their faith because it’s all outward appearances. And that is something that I do not want for my children. I do not want them to be so wrapped up in outward appearances that their faith never sinks to the very core of their being.

That is what they need. They need a relationship with Jesus Christ that is at the core of who they are. And that is a lifelong walking it out kind of thing. That’s not an overnight thing, that’s a journey. And I want my kids to go on that journey without the pretenses of, “look at me, I look all perfect on the outside, therefore I don’t really have any work to do on the inside.” And so many young Christians, which I’m not sure they were actually ever Christians, grow up and they’ve got all the right answers, they say all the right things, they look a certain way and they come to a crisis of faith somewhere in their, I don’t know, mid to late 20s a lot of times, and they suddenly realize that they’re not who they thought they were and that their outside facade is not going to save them. And some of them fall completely away. Some of them disentangle themselves. I believe that’s the word that Jinger Duggar used to kind of untangle all those pieces. She likened it to gum in your hair, where rather than just chop your hair off, you’re going to try to pull that gum out of your hair so that you still have hair at the end of the day.

And that is what I see so many Christian homeschoolers doing. They get to a certain age and they’ve got to rethink everything because they were given a Christianity that was full of rules and regulations, and it was all for outward appearances. That is a very dangerous faith. And I would venture to say it’s not faith at all.

Sometimes when we are zealous and we believe we are doing the right thing, we don’t necessarily have much kindness or grace for other people who aren’t doing the same thing we are doing. And so the black wedding dress – back to the black wedding dress – that wedding dress was the wedding dress of her dreams. That wedding dress had nothing to do with death and decay and a funeral. That wedding dress was worn by a very godly young woman marrying a very godly young man. They took Communion together, their first Communion together there as a married couple. That was absolutely beautiful. She made her own challah bread. They were very serious about it. They actually asked that the audience pray for them as they took their first Communion together as a married couple.

They lit a unity candle that my daughter had actually hand poured, and they lit their unity candle from my husband and I, our unity candle, and then his parents’ unity candle. And then they lit their own.

There were many things in this wedding and in the celebration afterwards that were focused on the Lord, focused on truth, focused on a genuine faith, and a faith lived out in a very personal way. They weren’t putting on airs. They weren’t pretending to be people they weren’t. It very much reflected the fun and funkiness that are those two. They are just a hoot. And I love that they are building a new life together. The color of the dress does not matter.

And I did have someone on my Facebook page reference Revelation 19:8. And I want to address that very quickly, because really, the Bible does not lay out a standard for what color of dress you are supposed to wear. This woman suggested that the bride of Christ was to be “white and pure.” And while my version (ESV) says “bright and pure,” I can see where you could maybe translate that into a wedding ceremony that makes sense.

However, I don’t think you can translate that into the color of the dress. I really think, again, you’re looking at a heart issue. And so often we have been focused, especially conservative Christian homeschoolers, we are so focused on the externals, the appearance, making sure that we have all our ducks in a row, that we are not reaching the hearts of our children.

That black wedding dress was a statement in some ways that said the external is not the important part. And if that’s all you see, you don’t know us. You don’t know Christ in me. And that is yet another reason why the people who were invited to the wedding were people who knew these two. They knew their hearts. They knew that they were God fearing Christ followers. And those are the kinds of people they wanted at this wedding. People who knew where they stood and people who did not judge based on externals.

I know there’s going to be people who don’t agree with me on this. I know there’s going to be people who still question the sanity and validity of wearing a black wedding dress. But I hope for even those of you who are still just appalled by this, I hope that I’ve given you some food for thought. I hope that you will go back to your Bibles. I hope you will consider the fact that for centuries women were simply wearing their best dress, something they could wear again. I hope you will consider that Queen Victoria was the one who really made the white wedding dress a spectacular fashion statement. I hope that you will consider what you’re teaching your children when you teach teach them that externals are what matter. And I hope that you will just think outside the box a little bit, be a Berean, get into the Word and consider what really matters, what truly matters. And I hope that you come out the other side of that with Christ and Christ alone.

Thank you so much for joining me this week on the Raising Arrows podcast. We’ll see you next week time.