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As another school year begins, many evangelical women continue to wonder why this fashion choice, which fully covers their skin, is being treated practically like lingerie.

Hannah Schultz was fed up, once again, with men trying to control what women should wear in her evangelical community. She was a student newspaper editor at the time, at Asbury University, a Christian college in Kentucky. And she had grown exasperated with the debate over whether yoga pants and leggings were too “immodest” to wear on campus. This was back in 2014, and the university’s administration had finally lifted the ban on such clothing — as long as women also wore a long “tunic-style” shirt that dangled past the waist, down toward the knees.

Schultz, a fan of leggings, was preparing to write an editorial on the topic for the student paper. But first, she sent out an anonymous survey to gauge campus reaction. “As we all know, anonymity is when people really show their true colors,” Schultz said. “I specifically remember one comment made by a male student that read somewhere along the lines of, ‘Girls should not be allowed to wear leggings because I want to be surprised by the beauty of the female body on my wedding night.’ As if the female body is a prize that men win in marriage.”

Over the past decade, the evangelical subculture has had to come to terms with an inconvenient reality: sales of women’s activewear, in the form of leggings and yoga pants, have been skyrocketing nationwide, with no signs of slowing down. In fact, sales of yoga pants have overtaken denim.

As another school year begins, many evangelical women continue to wonder why this fashion choice, which fully covers their skin, is being treated practically like lingerie, with bans in place at many of their colleges. Throughout the country, evangelical colleges have policies forbidding the attire, including at College of the Ozarks, North Greenville University, California Baptist University, Hannibal-Lagrange University, Mississippi College, and Pensacola Christian College.

For example, the North Greenville University student handbook states, “Yoga, tight legging or jegging style pants are not permitted unless a shirt or covering that is mid-thigh in length is worn with them.”

North Greenville University’s yoga-pants policy

At Asbury, Schultz was especially frustrated by male students’ complaints about the clothing. “It is not a woman’s responsibility to dress and act a certain way in order to protect the men of the world from falling into sin,” she said. “The dialogue about leggings/yoga pants should thus exclude men.”

The leggings debate within the evangelical subculture mirrors an international dialogue about the importance of removing men from decisions about female modesty and attire, no matter how pure men believe their intentions to be.

Men in the secular world reinforce victim-blaming by urging women to dress modestly to protect themselves from rape. Meanwhile, men in the evangelical world sometimes urge women to dress modestly not for fear of sexual assault, but to protect themselves from being an object of lust. They argue that they’re merely trying to respect women and not objectify them. After all, Jesus says in Matthew 5:28 that “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

So is this really about respecting women? Dawn Llewellyn isn’t buying it. Llewellyn, who is a senior lecturer in Christian studies and the deputy director of the Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Chester in England, says modesty requirements are still about male power. “You can argue that this is about subverting the male gaze and not letting the male gaze have any object upon which to express its desire,” she said. “Yet, in another way, it still objectifies women. It’s back to that Christian notion that women’s bodies are sites of temptation and lust and desire. It’s been part of Christian discourse since we started interpreting Eve as a temptress.”

She added, “When you don’t give women a choice, that’s a form of objectification, a form of power.”

Nevertheless, many evangelical men can’t help but pontificate about the dangers of dressing “immodestly.” In one example, an evangelical male blogger wrote about trying to avoid lusting over women in yoga pants while in a coffee shop. “While I’m sitting there, I’m literally having this mental conversation with myself, trying to keep my thoughts from maneuvering into carnal precincts. Be…strong. I really don’t want to seem like some perv, but dang if those things aren’t form-fitting!”

Some evangelical women have turned the tables on this discussion, writing satirically about being unable to control themselves when men dress up in a sharp suit and tie. One such post, titled “When Suits Become a Stumbling Block: A Plea to My Brothers in Christ,” a female blogger writes, “Don’t these men have any self respect? Do they even understand how their clothing affects me?”

Above: a satirical blog post by Laura Polk. “Yes, folks: I struggle with lusting after men in suits,” she writes.

Writing in Christianity Today, an evangelical couple called for mutual understanding and respect in the leggings debate last year. “A woman’s attractiveness and her form will inevitably be visible to some degree,” they declared. “Likewise, men will be surrounded by the female form, and it is not evil that he is attracted to it (1 Cor. 7:9).”

But for Schultz, such calls for a truce in the leggings debate ignore a problem deeply ingrained in American culture, both inside and outside evangelicalism. “The leggings/yoga pants issue only served to reflect the rape culture of current society,” she said. “But Christian schools are too busy trying to prevent their female students causing men to stumble than teaching the male students not to lust. Sexual assaults happen when there is someone else to blame, and Christians have armed generations of men with a dictionary of excuses: she was being flirtatious, she was drinking, she was wearing leggings.”

The problem of blaming women for men’s behavior — or urges — has been gaining nationwide media attention for the past several years. Back in 2012, a male dentist fired his female assistant for being too “irresistible,” and thus a “threat” to his marriage. According to ABC News,the dentist and his wife “consulted with a senior pastor at their church” before agreeing that the dental assistant should be fired. In the court case that followed, the Iowa Supreme Court sided with the dentist.

Schultz was not surprised by the dental assistant’s termination. “When you teach a generation of young people that it is a woman’s responsibility to protect herself from a man’s uncontrollable thoughts and urges, a society emerges that makes women live in fear of their bodies and reinforces the idea for men that they cannot control their own lustful thoughts and urges,” Schultz said.

The modesty debate in evangelical Christianity sometimes overlaps with similar debates in other cultures. Asbury’s fashion requirement — that leggings must be accompanied by a tunic-style top — bears a surprising resemblance to another fashion requirement from the conservative corners of the Islamic world: the burkini. Consisting of tight pants and a longer top, the burkini is almost identical to Asbury’s dress requirement except for the head covering. This outfit, according to the manufacturer’s website, “was developed in line with the Islamic code of dressing, and has received official approval and certification from the Islamic community to encourage girls participating in sports.”

Burkini bather in Alexandria, Egypt. Photo by Giorgio Montersino/Wikimedia Commons

Mainstream American Protestantism has typically opposed these kinds of restrictions, said Annie Blazer, assistant professor of religious studies at The College of William and Mary. “This may be an interesting juxtaposition, where evangelicals are perhaps unwittingly using the same standards that conservative Islam is using to enforce modesty,” said Blazer, who studies evangelicals.

Evangelical colleges’ modesty policies have their defenders. One blogger, Phylicia Delta, says she likes yoga pants, but that’s not the point. “There are consequences” to wearing them, she writes. “The pants are skin tight. You can see every curve of my lower body. … From several interviews, comments, and input from other men, it’s a recurring blind spot with Christian women everywhere.” It’s wrongheaded, she says, to insist that it’s the man’s job “not to look.”

“The level of their lust is directly related to how much of our bodies is available to lust after,” she writes. “The less we advertise, the less opportunity we give them to covet our bodies.”

Meanwhile, Schultz keeps wishing the conversation could be re-framed. “What would happen if Christian schools taught their men that they are capable of controlling themselves — that they are not animals without control over their lustful urges?”