I agree with the general concern here.
When I was commissioned as a 2nd Lt in the Marine Corps in 1990, it was well understood that Marine officers did not get tattoos. That was not because every officer had a carefully footnoted biblical argument about Leviticus 19, nor because every tattoo was treated as some uniquely damnable sin. It was part of a broader officer culture that still retained something of a gentlemanly ideal. Tattoos were viewed as transgressive. The people you most commonly associated with tattoos were sailors, bikers, and others who were, in one way or another, outside the respectable mainstream.
Now that cultural memory is almost gone. Tattoos are everywhere, and because they are everywhere, it becomes very difficult to argue against them without immediately being accused of legalism. If a person asks, “Where is the verse?” the discussion often ends there. Unless you can produce a specific proof text that settles the matter in one sentence, the assumption is that the practice must be morally indifferent.
But I do wonder whether that way of reasoning has left us unable to notice cultural decay except in the most extreme forms. As the culture becomes more pagan, anarchic, and expressive of rebellion against givenness, even basic inherited judgments become harder to defend. No tattoos. No marijuana. No casual use of ketamine, LSD, or magic mushrooms. Increasingly, the burden of proof seems to rest entirely on the person saying, “Perhaps Christians should not normalize this.”
Part of the issue is that we have largely lost the category of transgression. If the broader culture accepts something, and if we cannot immediately quote a verse that forbids it in exactly those terms, we tend to conclude that it must be obviously indifferent. But prior generations often had moral instincts formed by a larger Christian social imagination. They understood that not everything unwise, immodest, rebellious, or culturally disordered appears in Scripture as a neat itemized prohibition.
That does not mean every person with a tattoo is wicked, or that every tattoo has the same moral meaning in every circumstance. But it does mean we should at least ask why a practice once widely regarded as transgressive became normal at precisely the same time the culture was becoming more self-expressive, body-modifying, authority-rejecting, and pagan in its assumptions.
Maybe the question is not merely, “Can I find a verse that absolutely forbids this?” Maybe the better question is, “What sort of people are we becoming, and why are Christians so often only one step behind the culture in declaring yesterday’s transgressions today’s matters of indifference?”
When I was commissioned as a 2nd Lt in the Marine Corps in 1990, it was well understood that Marine officers did not get tattoos. That was not because every officer had a carefully footnoted biblical argument about Leviticus 19, nor because every tattoo was treated as some uniquely damnable sin. It was part of a broader officer culture that still retained something of a gentlemanly ideal. Tattoos were viewed as transgressive. The people you most commonly associated with tattoos were sailors, bikers, and others who were, in one way or another, outside the respectable mainstream.
Now that cultural memory is almost gone. Tattoos are everywhere, and because they are everywhere, it becomes very difficult to argue against them without immediately being accused of legalism. If a person asks, “Where is the verse?” the discussion often ends there. Unless you can produce a specific proof text that settles the matter in one sentence, the assumption is that the practice must be morally indifferent.
But I do wonder whether that way of reasoning has left us unable to notice cultural decay except in the most extreme forms. As the culture becomes more pagan, anarchic, and expressive of rebellion against givenness, even basic inherited judgments become harder to defend. No tattoos. No marijuana. No casual use of ketamine, LSD, or magic mushrooms. Increasingly, the burden of proof seems to rest entirely on the person saying, “Perhaps Christians should not normalize this.”
Part of the issue is that we have largely lost the category of transgression. If the broader culture accepts something, and if we cannot immediately quote a verse that forbids it in exactly those terms, we tend to conclude that it must be obviously indifferent. But prior generations often had moral instincts formed by a larger Christian social imagination. They understood that not everything unwise, immodest, rebellious, or culturally disordered appears in Scripture as a neat itemized prohibition.
That does not mean every person with a tattoo is wicked, or that every tattoo has the same moral meaning in every circumstance. But it does mean we should at least ask why a practice once widely regarded as transgressive became normal at precisely the same time the culture was becoming more self-expressive, body-modifying, authority-rejecting, and pagan in its assumptions.
Maybe the question is not merely, “Can I find a verse that absolutely forbids this?” Maybe the better question is, “What sort of people are we becoming, and why are Christians so often only one step behind the culture in declaring yesterday’s transgressions today’s matters of indifference?”
