“How did you decide to finally take off your head covering?” My question is deeply personal, so I am not surprised when my cousin, Dorcas, takes several moments to respond. 

For women like us, born and raised into the vast conservative Mennonite community in central Pennsylvania, Paul’s writings about the head covering in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 has had an outsized impact on our lives. Many Mennonites, like the Amish, interpret these verses literally. Any woman born into these conservative Mennonite churches is raised knowing that she will start wearing a head covering sometime in her teen years. Confessing faith in Jesus Christ as your Saviour and then putting on a head covering is a rite of womanhood and a tangible sign of your salvation. Nonconformity is not an option. According to our church doctrine, female salvation and entry into heaven rests on obeying these commands. 

When my aunt Sarah passed away suddenly in 2019, our family grappled with the reality of these beliefs. While Sarah chose to leave the Mennonite church altogether in her late teens, she never abandoned her love of Jesus. In fact, her faith grew exponentially over the years, so much so that she became an inspiration to her more open-minded but still Mennonite family members. 

After she passed away, several of her more conservative nieces and nephews—my cousins—loudly expressed their views on her salvation. Did she make it to heaven? They certainly thought the answer was no, and they boldly voiced these convictions during her funeral. They were tactful enough to not make this declaration in front of her four children or the many mourners who came to pay their respects. But they did emphatically share their views with our aunts and uncles, not even excluding my mom, who is a devout Mennonite and was also unashamedly best friends with her beloved sister, Sarah. Their foundation for making this judgment: Sarah never wore a head covering. My mom, normally a staunch defender of the authenticity of Sarah’s faith, admitted to wondering whether Sarah’s critics might be right. These uncertainties were overcome, she joyfully reported, when God reminded her of 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, where Paul tells the Thessalonian Christians that they do not grieve like unbelievers, who have no hope in the resurrection. Even though Mom still believes God has called her to wear a head covering, she is also convinced that she will see her sister Sarah again. Despite the many testimonies of Sarah’s staunch faith during her funeral service, I know that several of my cousins remain unconvinced. For the sake of familial unity, it seems that we have all silently agreed to let the subject drop. 

Despite having left the Mennonite church ten years ago, I am often surprised at the tendency among churches that otherwise emphasize fidelity to Scripture to gloss over the first part of 1 Corinthians 11. The various churches I have attended in my adult years—a Southern Baptist megachurch in Mississippi, a small non-denominational church in Colorado, an Anglican megachurch also in Colorado, and most recently a tiny, nominally Baptist church plant in Philadelphia—have certainly all chosen this path. These are relatively conservative churches, yet neither in the pulpit nor in conversations with fellow attendees did the mention of head coverings ever arise. 

On the one hand, coming from a Mennonite background, I find it almost shocking. Yet on the other hand, I suppose I am also sympathetic. After all, in his commentary on 1 Corinthians for the NIV Application Commentary series, Craig Blomberg notes that these verses constitute one of the most inscrutable and opaque passages in the entire New Testament, and he warns interpreters to proceed with caution. 

I appreciate both his honesty and his word of warning. My fellow Mennonites growing up left no room for questioning either the text or its interpretation. However, even while I was still a Mennonite, I often reread this passage, trying to make it make sense. The standard Mennonite interpretation never fully convinced me. There were two verses I found particularly confusing. One is the odd reference to the angels in verse 10. And the second is the end of the passage, where Paul states that “long hair is given to [a woman] as a covering. If anyone wants to be contentious about this, we have no other practice—nor do the churches of God” (1 Corinthians 11:15–16). This verse seemed to contradict the entire Mennonite doctrine of the head covering. It sounded as if Paul were saying my hair was covering enough, and that I did not need to wear anything extra on top of it. Of course, I dared not ask my questions aloud. I would be questioning the entire basis of a long-standing practice central to Mennonite belief and identity, and I did not care to be labelled a heretic. But if these verses were perplexing to my Mennonite-indoctrinated ears, I can certainly understand why many contemporary Western Christians find them unpalatable and easy to ignore. 

This passage is the only mention of head coverings in the New Testament. That alone would seem to suggest that the issue is not foundational to female salvation. While many members of my own family wholeheartedly disagree with me about its importance, I also know all too well the real-world implications this passage has had on the lives of many women, me included. Because of this, I think it is well worth at least acknowledging its existence, as well as wrestling through what, if anything, it might mean for us today. 

I wore my head covering under duress. As a Mennonite woman, I knew certain actions were required of me—and that my gender precluded my questioning them. So, at the age of thirteen, I reluctantly conceded. I declared my faith in Jesus Christ as my Saviour, and as the physical sign of my belief, I put on a head covering. Outwardly I pretended sincerity, but internally my heart doubted. 

My cousin Dorcas did not have the same problem. She was pious and devout, a goody two-shoes even by Mennonite standards. Such devotion won her great favour among the elders of our community, but those of her own generation often gleefully mocked her. I am ashamed to admit that I participated in this ridicule. We did not always look great reflected against Dorcas’s fervent convictions, and we resented her for it. 

As in all things, Dorcas rigidly adhered to the strictest guidelines on wearing the head covering. She wore it at all times, taking it off only to wash her hair and immediately putting it back on to her wet scalp. She even slept in it. I could not fathom a life like this: I waited till my hair was completely dry before putting my covering back on and gladly took it off at night. We attached our coverings with straight pins, and the thought of stabbing myself with them in my sleep made me shudder. 

Needless to say, when Dorcas and her husband left the conservative Mennonite church for a non-denominational church founded by other ex-Mennonites and ex-Amish, many of us were astounded. Today, however, I am extremely glad Dorcas and her husband made the leap, because otherwise I would have missed out on a dear friendship. Unsurprisingly, Dorcas and I were not close when we were both still Mennonites. Her piety and my heresy kept us apart. Now that the issue of the head covering no longer divides us, we have joyfully discovered that we have much in common. 

Despite our closeness, it took me a long time to gain enough courage to ask Dorcas about her own head-covering journey. Perhaps it was my leftover feelings of inadequacy from our teenage years. Perhaps it was apprehension, knowing how deeply personal and sensitive a topic it was likely to be, especially for her. When we finally talked about it, we quickly discovered that our paths to removing the head covering were quite different. 

I removed my covering in my late teens, as I was on my way out of the Mennonite community, and good riddance to it as far as I was concerned. At the time, I had no deeper theological understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 than what my Mennonite upbringing had taught me and my personal study of the passage had given me, which left me with more questions than answers. What I did know was this: there was absolutely no part of me that believed my eternal salvation hinged on wearing a head covering, and I was finally in a place where I could put that conviction into action. 

Dorcas’s new non-Mennonite church did not enforce wearing the head covering, but since their leaders wisely recognized that the majority of their attendees were ex-Mennonites and ex-Amish, they also did not require women to remove it. Most of the women eventually did, but it was often a slow process. I sympathize with these women. They are grappling with lifelong indoctrination about the sanctity of the head covering. It takes time to undo a lifetime’s worth of teaching. 

Dorcas’s journey to removing the head covering certainly followed this path. She and her husband had been attending their new church for some time before she felt comfortable even bringing up the question of removing her covering. The day she took it off, she was so distraught that her husband asked their pastor to come to their house. Under his gentle guidance, she finally felt capable of taking that final step. When we first talked about it, it had been almost six years since she had removed her covering. Dorcas told me that she is still not sure how to interpret 1 Corinthians 11 and that, for a long time, the passage continued to haunt her. 

“It’s really only recently that I’m fully at peace with taking if off,” she admitted. 

For a long time, I was okay with not knowing what Paul meant when he talked about the head covering. Why would I waste my time trying to untangle 1 Corinthians 11 when there were far more relevant portions of Scripture to spend my time studying? In 2024, I finally realized that I was doing myself, my Mennonite heritage, and all my many family members who still wear head coverings a great disservice by not fully engaging with those verses. If anything, the intervening years had made me even more convinced that the Mennonite perspective on the head covering was, at the very least, a gross misinterpretation of the passage. How could I truly support this position, though, if I myself did not wholly understand what Paul was saying? 

As a result, my New Year’s resolution that year was particularly ambitious: to unravel the depths of 1 Corinthians 11 as much as I possibly could. After some preliminary research, I compiled a long list of books and started reading. Even though I thought I had adequately prepared for this adventure, I soon realized what a monumental task I had set myself. The multitude of varying interpretations of these fifteen verses was almost dizzying in its scope. 

I quickly encountered several variations of the same argument, all of which stated that the head covering Paul references was a cultural feature specific to his time and place. One scholar said that likely only prostitutes did not wear head coverings in public. Another scholar said that a head covering was most likely the equivalent of a wedding ring, and therefore these verses mainly applied to married women. Others made similar arguments. One area where they all agreed, however, was in their conclusion: our culture is different, so these verses no longer apply. 

I kept Dorcas apprised of my findings. She had encountered the above arguments in her ex-Mennonite and ex-Amish circles. But I was still unconvinced. It seemed simplistic and almost unfathomable to dismiss these verses on the basis of cultural difference when I had once lived in a community where the head covering was our cultural touchstone. 

Perhaps personal bias influenced my perceptions of these scholarly arguments. But I think something else was going on. For one thing, I kept coming back to verse 10, which says, “It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels.” It did not make sense to dismiss this reference to angels as solely relating to the cultural norms of the time. To me, the mention of angels signified a potential supernatural connection with the wearing of a covering, not something that could easily be explained away as a cultural difference. Admittedly, I had no idea what this connection might mean in practice. 

And so I kept reading. When I picked up Lucy Peppiatt’s Unveiling Paul’s Women, I thought I was just checking another book off my to-read list. It was a small volume, and that appealed to me after finishing a thick, dense book that did nothing to untangle the thorny knot of Paul’s teaching. I ended up reading the entire book in one sitting. 

I had found the first scholarly analysis of 1 Corinthians 11 that made sense to me. Peppiatt posits that a large portion of 11:2–16 is Paul’s quotation of the Corinthians, based on earlier correspondences with them that have not survived. Since ancient Greek contained no quotation marks, scholars today must use various clues to discern where these quotations occur. She argues that verses 4–5 and 7–10 are Paul’s direct quotations of the Corinthians’ doctrine of the head covering and that they were strictly enforcing it for all the women at their church. Paul is actually refuting their theology of the head covering, not endorsing it. 

Immediately after finishing the book, I opened my Bible to 1 Corinthians 11 and reread the passage through her interpretive lens. For the first time in my life, it finally made actual, logical sense to me. Even that odd bit about the angels is accounted for as part of the Corinthians’ cosmology. Before reading Peppiatt, I would have hotly refuted anyone who said I had residual guilt from taking off my head covering. But maybe I did still have some angst about it, because my newfound understanding of the passage lifted an unexpected weight off my shoulders. Or perhaps it was just the relief that came from finally having a theology of the head covering that made sense. These verses had haunted me my entire life, and only now was I at peace with them. 

A very real part of me wanted to run to my family and broadcast my discovery. Good news, our church totally misinterpreted the passage on the head covering! Of course, I knew that doing so would deeply offend them rather than start thoughtful conversations. But a few of my cousins are on the threshold of the church, with one foot out the door. When the opportunity arose, I broached the topic with one such cousin. She is a busy mom, so finding the time to read a book is not something she can easily do. But she was so impressed by our conversation that she found a podcast episode in which Peppiatt was interviewed regarding her scholarship. 

“It all makes so much sense!” she told me excitedly afterward. And while she still wears her head covering, I would not be surprised if she eventually chooses to remove it. 

I recently spent a summer term at Southborough L’Abri, a branch of L’Abri Fellowship near Boston. L’Abri is a residential facility that welcomes anybody with deep faith questions to come live in community and discuss these hard topics. During a meal, one of the workers and I discovered that we had both read Peppiatt’s work, so naturally the conversation turned to the head covering. 

“I would like to believe her interpretation, but I just don’t,” he said, shaking his head. 

“Why?” I asked. 

“It’s too perfect. It makes everything fall into place a little too well. Like I said, I’d like to believe it, but I just can’t.” 

“Well, then, what do you think Paul means in that passage?” I asked, curious to hear if he had a new theory I had not heard before. 

“I don’t know.” He shrugged his shoulders. 

And with that declaration, our conversation abruptly ended. He seemed content never to grapple with the passage further, and I cannot fault him for his attitude, since it is one I also inhabited for many years. 

I have since encountered almost identical reactions to Peppiatt’s interpretation of the passage in various other places. I find it interesting that, so far, all those who have expressed such reservations have been men. I also think it telling that, aside from my acquaintance at L’Abri, none of them have acknowledged any background experience with groups like the Mennonites—that is, communities where women cover their heads because of the belief that it literally affects their salvation. It is, unsurprisingly, easier to ignore such an opaque passage of Scripture if the stakes are low for you personally. This tendency to overlook certain parts of Scripture is a common part of the Christian experience, one we are hesitant to acknowledge because it can be uncomfortable. Recognizing such omissions leaves the door open to wrestling with both our individual faith and our inherited religious traditions. A daunting task at the best of times. 

In the case of women like my cousin and me, for whom 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 has played such a profound role in our spiritual development, Peppiatt’s scholarship is a breath of fresh air, sweeping away the cloud of tradition that has haunted our lives. I am both willing and interested to hear other interpretations of the passage, but for now I delight in finally having a sound theological reason for laying aside my head covering.