Why Care About Your Appearance? Part 1

Anyone who knows me very well will know that I care about my appearance, especially as it pertains to clothes and shoes. Learning about style and finding good clothing affordably is one of my main hobbies. I spend quite a bit of my free time reading about clothing and style, both in books and online. I'll freely admit that I like to look good--and I like knowing I look good.

I hope that anyone who knows me well also knows that I deeply love the Lord Jesus, and desire to honor and glorify him above all else. Any object, love, or passion that would compete with the Lord for my deepest affection is to be despised and given no place in my heart and mind.

Yet to some, these might seem to be competing passions. After all, isn't vanity supposed to be a sin? Of what value is the outward appearance, when the Scripture says, "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart"? Peter indicates that true beauty should and does consist in holiness and godliness, not in clothes and the outward appearance. So what business does a Christian have caring so much about how he or she looks? At the very least, acquiring more clothing than the barest necessities must be "laying up treasures on earth, where moth[s]…corrupt."

In addition to this primary, spiritual issue, there are other reasons why people look askance at a man who cares about his appearance. After all, isn't that kind of…unmanly? It's supposed to be a womanly thing to preen and primp and spend hours in front of the mirror and shopping for clothes. Any man who obviously puts effort into his appearance is usually thought to be less than desirably masculine at best, and a complete fop or homosexual at worst.

Well, I want to take the next several days and weeks to do a series of blog posts answering these objections and explaining why I think it's a legitimate thing for a Christian man to care about how he looks--even a positive good. In doing so, I'll have to go into the nature of vanity, pride, and beauty, think about what it really means to be a man and a gentleman, and examine social conventions and mores that shape our perceptions of style and manners. I'm looking forward to hashing these things out in writing, and I hope it will be a worthwhile exercise.