God Loves Hair

My roommate has amazing hair. It’s brown, curly, and until recently it was fairly long. Over the summer, she cut it to about shoulder length. When I asked her why, she told me that her hair was becoming a little too “Duggar-ish,” referring to the TV show, “19 Kids and Counting.” I immediately knew what she was talking about—the implied or explicit "hair clause" in some religions, where one mandate or another is given about hairstyles.

The leader of the beard-warfare, Sammuel Mullet.

This was recently brought to the public’s attention with the  infamous Amish beard-cutting attacks, in which a breakaway group of Amish chopped off the beards of other Amish people due to religious differences. The distress this act caused the victims  illustrates the importance placed upon hair—to the Amish, hair is sacred. They believe that, according to the Bible, women must grow their hair long and men must grow out their beards.

While most other Christian denominations don’t require men to grow beards, there are many women with excessively long hair in the stricter, more cult-like, sects, such as Pentecostals and conservative Mennonites. They base their belief on a passage in the New Testament claiming that for a woman, long hair is “her glory;” the same passage also calls long hair on men a disgrace. Considering the number of people in the atheist movement with "inglorious" and "disgraceful" hairstyles, in contrast with conservative Christians, it seems safe to assume that a lot of them are influenced by this passage, either directly (being instructed to wear long/short hair by the church) or indirectly (simply because it's the social norm that good Christian men have short hair and good Christian women have long hair). 

Rockin' a beard and turban.

Living in America, we are most frequently exposed to Christianity and its doctrines about hair, but there are other religions with “hair rules” as well. Many Buddhist monks shave their head as a sign of holiness, and the Sikh tradition of Kesh involves letting the hair grow out as one of their five tenants of faith (although more and more Sikhs are cutting their hair and abandoning the turban, partly due to Westernization and a changing culture in Sikh countries such as India).

One of the most interesting religious hair trends, however, is found in Islam. Traditionally, Muslim men grew their hair to shoulder length to emulate Muhammad (who, according to one of the holy books, had hair hanging over his shoulders), while women tended to grow their hair even longer. This was not necessarily a rule, but it was an accepted cultural tradition. Recently, however, some  Islamic countries(such as Iran) have been railing against long hair, making male citizens keep their hair short. This is partly due to fighting the growing Western influence in the Middle East, and partly to prevent men and women from appearing similar. Interestingly, this was the reason why women originally grew their hair so long — to ensure they were not emulating men with shoulder length hair.

Whether or not hair is mentioned in a religion’s holy book(s) seems almost irrelevant to the rules — for the Amish, a Psalm that merely mentions a beard is the basis of a commandment, and for Muslim men, it’s now considered unacceptable to wear hair the same way the prophet supposedly did.

In general  it seems that rules concerning hair are really a product of the times, gaining holy or unholy status somewhere along the way. 

One of our beloved ISSA members at Brother Jed Bingo,
taunting him with her satanic haircut.