In this article…
What garments are supposed to make Latter-day Saints think about
In General Conference of April 2024, Sister J. Annette Dennis told us what she thinks about when she wears temple garments, the church-manufactured long underwear that adult members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) are required to wear “day and night” in all seasons and climates, during nearly all activities.
Our temple garment reminds us that the Savior and the blessings of His Atonement cover us throughout our lives.
—Sister J. Anette Dennis, Put Ye On the Lord Jesus Christ, April 2024
President Dallin H. Oaks also described the temple garment as a spiritual reminder:
It reminds endowed members of the sacred covenants they have made and the blessings they have been promised in the holy temple.
—President Dallin H. Oaks, Covenants and Responsibilities, April 2024
Both church leaders phrased their statements as if they were describing what all church members think about while wearing garments, and certainly, garments do remind many Latter-day Saints to think spiritual thoughts.
What else do Latter-days Saints think about when they wear garments?
However, other thoughts are just as likely to result from mandatory, all day everyday garment-wearing, and many of these garment-induced thoughts are distractions that make it even more difficult to focus on Jesus.
- Feeling hot and uncomfortable
- Wondering if their garments are showing
- Preoccupation with fussing with the garment and tugging it back into place as it bunches up or slides out from under clothing
- Worry about leaking menstrual blood or breastmilk onto their garments
- Frustration about having to clean up menstrual blood and breastmilk that already leaked onto their garments
- Coping with pain due to urinary tract infections (UTIs), yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis, mastitis, hot flashes, rashes or boils that may have been relieved or prevented by wearing underwear of their own choosing
- Experiencing body image issues exacerbated by always wearing unflattering underwear, even during foreplay with their spouse
- Internal debates about whether they can or should wear the garment for this or that activity
- Mentally sorting through the many rules they have been taught about wearing the garment and wondering if they are compliant
- Resentment that church officials are policing such a private matter as their underwear
- Irritation about the extra time, expense and hassle required to shop for and tailor clothing to cover garments
- Envy of non-Mormons who get to wear more convenient, weather-appropriate, and attractive clothing
- Strategizing about how to discretely reach up or bend over without their garments coming into view
- Embarrassment because they just realized their garments (underwear) are showing
- Fixating on other Latter-day Saints’ hemlines and checking to see who is wearing garments
- Nothing, because putting on underwear is a daily routine performed nearly on autopilot
- Nothing, because they are wearing garments at night as required and they are asleep
If reminding people of Jesus Christ and their temple covenants is the goal, is a strict garment-wearing mandate the right strategy?
Why wouldn’t church leaders choose another strategy to remind people of Jesus and their temple covenants that doesn’t come with such a long list of unhelpful side effects? What benefits come from the garment mandate that might be important to church policymakers and more logically derived from universal, mandatory, day and night garment wearing?
Three other rationales for the LDS garment mandate
I can think of at least three reasons church leaders might choose to enforce a strict garment-wearing mandate, regardless of whether it is effective at reminding people of Jesus Christ and their covenants.
1. Garments enforce a strict dress code, especially for women.
There are no sacred symbols on the sleeves and shoulders of the temple garment to serve as reminders. So, what is their purpose? Why doesn’t the church offer garments with spaghetti straps?
If the purpose of mandatory, day and night garment wearing is to enforce a dress code, the sleeves make a great deal of sense. Compliant garment-wearers cannot wear clothing that is strapless, sleeveless, or otherwise fails to cover the shoulders because the garment would be exposed.
Mandatory, day and night garment wearing is particularly useful as a strategy to control women’s clothing. The garment is patterned after male underwear and fits easily under typical male clothing worn by non-Mormon men in many parts of the world, so enforcing the garment mandate does little to change the clothing choices of most male members of the church.
In contrast, the garment mandate is extremely effective at forcing Latter-day Saint women to choose clothing styles with lots of coverage, even when these styles are unpopular, hard to come by, expensive, or inappropriate for the occasion. The garment is nothing like women’s underwear sold at stores, and covering it precludes women from wearing many styles that would be considered modest and appropriate within their local culture, but not by LDS church leaders.
2. Garments help Latter-day Saints judge other church members, especially female members.
Garment compliance is prominently included in the temple recommend interview, the primary instrument used by the LDS Church to judge member worthiness. The temple recommend script devotes 144 words to garment compliance, compared to an average of 25 words for each other topic addressed. If the interviewer stays on script, nearly a third of the time spent in a temple recommend interview is devoted to garments.
The garment statement included in the temple recommend interview states that wearing the garment “is an outward expression of your inner commitment to follow Him.” In other words, wearing garments makes it easier for other people to judge your level of religious commitment simply by looking at your outward appearance.
Photo by Chris Murray on Unsplash.
Again, this strategy is more effective among women than men. The garment is so different from standard women’s underwear and rules out so many typical women’s clothing styles that a garment-wearing woman must dress differently than her non-Mormon peers. That’s not necessarily true for men. The effectiveness of garment wearing as an indicator of compliance is mediated among men by the fact that the garment is more similar to male underwear and fits easily under most male clothing, making garment wearing less conspicuous for men than for their female counterparts.
In extreme heat, a garment-wearing woman is likely to be wearing an extra shirt underneath her sundress or tank top to hide her garments, which serves as a clue that the garment is present and needs to be hidden. (Wearing three layers plus a bra in hot weather is uncomfortable, but the discomfort of women is a side effect male church leaders seem willing to tolerate.) If other church members spot a Latter-day Saint woman wearing the same summer clothing as non-Mormon women, without the extra layers, they can easily see that she is not complying with the garment mandate. Her lay clergy, who are among her male neighbors, can use this information to deny her temple recommend. Other church members may also use garment compliance as a simple marker to judge which women they should date, fellowship, or avoid as bad influences.
3. Church leaders have dealt with (male) garments for decades, so why should younger people have it easy?
When in doubt, institutional inertia can explain many policy choices in a conservative organization. The LDS Church has invested heavily in the garment program over the course of decades, continuing to enforce the mandate even as official explanations for why church members are required to constantly wear garments have changed over time. Church leaders may be dismayed to see reduced garment sales threatening the viability of a program that has been such a long-term investment, even if the original reasoning for the mandate no longer applies.
Likewise, individual church members have made personal sacrifices to comply with the garment mandate. Garment wearers have worked hard to find spiritual meaning in the ritual to justify these sacrifices. Some have taught themselves to love wearing garments and others have come to accept garments as a hairshirt that invokes spirituality through suffering, and people from both camps may expect newly endowed members to cope with the mandate in the same way they have.
While garment wearing requires sacrifice from anyone who complies, most men haven’t had to sacrifice quite as much as women to comply with the garment mandate.
- Biological males don’t menstruate, lactate, or experience pregnancy and menopause, don’t get vaginal yeast infections or bacterial vaginosis and are much less susceptible to urinary tract infections (UTIs) than women.
- Men are privileged to wear garments that are patterned after male underwear sold on the market, while women are expected to wear garments that are nothing like female underwear and incompatible with many styles of women’s clothing.
- Because garments do not serve the practical purposes of typical female underwear (bras to support breasts and panties to secure winged menstrual pads), most female garment wearers, unlike their male counterparts, must layer secular underwear with garments, increasing their discomfort and cost.
- Only male priesthood holders are authorized to conduct temple recommend interviews, so women suffer the embarrassment of disclosing their underwear choices to a person of the opposite sex, while men are never required by church policy to discuss their underwear with someone of the opposite sex.
The final decision-makers in matters of church policy, including the 24/7 garment-wearing mandate, are men, not women. Male General Authorities with priesthood keys get the final say. And since the garment mandate has proven so useful as a tool to govern women, with comparatively moderate inconvenience to men, why would men change it?
22 Responses
It’s not even just shoulders. It’s the armpits–the sexiest part of a woman’s body. I have a top that has sleeves and is high enough to cover cleavage but the arm holes are wide so if I wear it with garments, you can see them when I raise my arm at all. No one looking at me would know I wasn’t wearing garments, but you would definitely know I was because they’d be obvious. But the top isn’t remotely “immodest.” (Sarcastic quotes because I hate the word and the connotation of it, but you all know what I mean.)
So much fabric in the armpit! I recently read an interesting report from 1936 in which a subcommittee of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles made recommendations for garment policy, and one of their recommendations was to remove the sleeves from women’s garments because it would “obviate undesirable exposure of the garment which now so frequently occurs” and it would “greatly please many good women throughout the Church.” But they obviously didn’t do that and here we are today still accidentally showing everyone our garments every time we raise our hands!
You can read that report in Devery S. Anderson. The Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History . https://amzn.to/3YOEraU
I didn’t know that…. interesting.
To me, it is very difficult to proscribe symbols and their meanings to others. As humans, we put a lot of meaning into rather meaningless things at times. (Some people do this more than others.) Ugly art projects from our children, or a thimble inherited from a grandmother. A pressed flower in a book, a $20 piece of jewelry or photograph on the wall. We take inconsequential objects and we provide them with meaning by our own choice. Often, we don’t even specifically choose the object, but it receives that meaning by happenstance as events unfold around us – that stuffed animal from the state fair only ends up meaning something to you when it turns out that was your first date with your spouse.
With garments, both the symbolic object AND the meaning is forced upon us by an outside party. We don’t go through the temple and then choose if the garment is a way we would like to remember that commitment. And apparently we don’t get to chose how, when or where we express that symbolism. As well intentioned as the garment symbolism may be, I find it difficult to connect with because I didn’t chose it. Garments give me very little difficulty; I know that is not the case for everyone. But they also give me very little meaning because of how they are proscribed.
What you’ve said here reminds me of some other wonderful posts here at the Exponent. Liz wrote about how the garment became spiritually meaningful for her when she chose how, when and where she wore it: https://exponentii.org/blog/reenvisioning-my-garments/ and Jody wrote this powerful piece about proscribing the symbolism of the garment: https://exponentii.org/blog/i-dont-wear-someone-elses-underwear/
Maybe the rationale is to keep people from using carry-on luggage?
Okay, I know that’s ridiculous. But the fact remains, garments take up a lot of space! I don’t travel as much since I changed jobs, but there was a time when I was on the go at least once a month, and I was forever trying to figure out how to pack in seven, eight, ten sets of garments and still leave room for actual clothes without having to take a bigger suitcase that would require checking (my favorite travel bag is an over-the-shoulder duffel). I finally just started taking half the number I’d need and doing some handwashing in the sink, but then there was the problem of getting them dry enough to put away before I left the hotel room for the day and the maid came in. (It also did not work on a couple of rare occasions where I was sharing a hotel room with a non-member colleague. I suppose I could have explained but…I just didn’t want to. I really don’t feel that trying to explain garments is the best missionary tool.)
I realize suitcase space is actually an issue for men as well, but they can, and do, wear the same suit for days on end, so they don’t necessarily need to pack as many clothes. I couldn’t look like I was wearing the same thing every day – okay for men, not for women.
Actually, I’m surprised this is not an issue for GAs, who are always on the go.
🤣 Explaining garments as a missionary tool
It’s hard to think of a worse tool for recruitment.
Amen to this! As I’m trying to reduce my luggage on some trips, I realize that garments do take up a LOT of room! And generally you can’t count on buying them where you go.
Preach! So many well articulated points.
I find the “outward expression of an inward commitment” justification so strange as garments are literally UNDERwear, not outerwear. And once you poke holes in that idea, the reasoning reads more like a mask for something less palatable and less defensible that the church would rather not discuss or make clear.
On the church website it says, “In our day the garment encourages modesty…”. I think it’s absolutely spot on that you use the word “enforce.” “Encourage” means that we have a choice. When wearing garments, our choices in clothing are limited. That’s not encouragement; that’s enforcement.
I recently sent a big long letter as a response to a survey that I received about my garment purchase (they were asking about the timeliness and if the whole order was received, not about the design of garments or anything like that) and all of the points you mentioned mirror my letter so closely. I’m so glad I’m not alone in these thoughts and struggles!
Thanks for sharing your voice on this issue!
I think church leaders view female modesty, and by extension garments, as a way to prevent premarital sex. Even though young unendowed women don’t wear garments, the expectation of wearing garments in the future creates a culture of female modesty. I really think male church leaders are worried that young men are already tempted by secular young women in a hypersexualized culture. They want the LDS culture to be different. I also think church leaders may believe that having to remove garments before sexual activity will make some young people think twice before breaking the law of chastity. This would be my guess. I definitely think garments are a control mechanism about modesty and sexuality.
Another angle is that if garments are no longer important or necessary, leaders may fear that members will think temple attendance is no longer important or necessary. Maybe it’s like a domino effect with garments, temple attendance, tithing, etc.
I definitely think there’s worry about a domino effect. We’ve put so much stake on “if one thing is true, it’s all true,” and the less-said-but-still-there converse: If one thing is not true, none of it is true. So someone taking one step off the rigid path has to be framed as wrong/sinful, as opposed to exploring what works for that individual in finding and maintaining a relationship with God.
One thing that’s really bothered me in recent years is just that there’s no space for people engaging with the gospel in different ways. I know a lot of us do that functionally, which is good, but that only works as long as you remain below the radar/have good leadership/don’t cross any major lines. If instead the church just allowed people to follow those things that they feel work for them and didn’t subsequently punish or threaten eternal salvation, I think of how much stronger the church could actually be. How much safer it could be.
Yeah that would be nice. Sadly I think church leaders believe enforced compliance is the only way to maintain the church’s survival and longevity. I would imagine they see people engaging on their own terms as the road to schisms within the church. The lack of imagination and exclusionary dogma is really sad because I think more people would want to stay involved with the church if it weren’t for that.
Regarding the need for gusseted underwear to secure winged menstrual pads to, such menstrual products have only (!) been around for 40-50 years. Prior to adhesive backing, the pads had elongated “tails” at both ends. Women wore elastic belts with attachments at the front and back, to which the tails were secured. I began menstruating after “stay-free” pads became available, but had to use up the pads with the belted getup in our two-year supply before mom would buy the newer kind. Periods were quite the production in those days. Anyway, the glacial rate of change in the church, plus the male lack of understanding of the nuances of menstrual products is why younger women still have to wear these archaic items of clothing.
Yup – and I was endowed during the one-piece era of garments. So it was the belted menstrual pads, the garment, then usually a gentile pair of underwear over top to keep everything in place and then possibly pantyhose over that. I can’t believe I was so compliant. Where I lived at the time, summers were hot and humid.
“Feeling hot and uncomfortable
Wondering if their garments are showing
Preoccupation with fussing with the garment and tugging it back into place as it bunches up or slides out from under clothing
Worry about leaking menstrual blood or breastmilk onto their garments
Frustration about having to clean up menstrual blood and breastmilk that already leaked onto their garments
Coping with pain due to urinary tract infections (UTIs), yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis, mastitis, hot flashes, rashes or boils that may have been relieved or prevented by wearing underwear of their own choosing>”
Suffered every single item on this list over with increasing frequency for nearly five decades. When will our collective pain even be acknowledged?
When my shelf tumbled I had several close Christian friends who were very loving and supportive as they listened to my story. When I came to the part about finally being able to choose my own underwear…I stopped dead, felt ridiculous and realized just how cult-y or at least, high demand, the church had been for me. There are many ways to show devotion to God. Individuals should be able to choose for themselves what makes the most sense to them. Ya know, personal revelation.
I have a non denominational friend of more than a decade who has spent countless hours talking about faith—good bad comparative. I finally mentioned garments and she about fainted. She had no idea I wore them or what they were. Then I mentioned worthiness interviews. It was good to see that this person I trusted knew immediately that this was not right. Seeing things from the outside allowed me to heal.
I do know people that love garments (I don’t understand but that’s great for them). It is not my symbol of choice to remember Jesus.