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There is a modest revival of conservative Christian women using veils and other head coverings during worship, reports Gottesdienst (February 27), a journal of Lutheran liturgy. While traditional Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox women have long taken up the veil during their liturgies, this practice is now spreading among conservative Lutherans, Reformed Church members, and Anabaptists, writes Larry Beane. Wearing head coverings is still a widespread practice among Amish and some Mennonite women, who wear veils both for worship and everyday life. The new practice seems most popular among young women, while older women often criticize the practice as subjugating and demeaning women. Beane adds that the practice may be part of a conservative reaction to the blurring of gender and sexual differences. It was only in the 1960s when wearing head coverings was regularly practiced everywhere from Catholic and Orthodox parishes to Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist, and Pentecostal churches. The practice was pronounced enough that the feminist National Organization of Women made a concerted effort to liberate women from their veils in the late 1960s, even proposing veil-burning events. The small but growing revival of head coverings can mean anything from wearing veils in worship to wearing them only in public to wearing them all the time. While Beane thinks head coverings will remain a minority practice, at least in Lutheranism, which allows wide latitude for different worship and devotional practices, he hails the development as a “laudable custom and beautiful ritual of the assertion of biblical femininity.”
(Gottesdienst, https://www.gottesdienst.org/gottesblog/2024/2/27)
