I have a serious question about a silly topic: preachers who wear toupees. I am not dogmatic about very many religious things. I’m pretty easygoing and tend to think, as a rule, grace is always better than judgment.
Except for this. I am judgmental about this one thing, almost all the time: I personally have a hard time respecting a preacher who wears a toupee. Seriously. In the town where I live, there are at least a couple of highly visible (and well-respected) senior pastors of large churches who disguise their baldness under a synthetic rug. They’re not fooling anyone. Pretty much everyone knows. And yet they continue to perpetrate the fraud.
The guy below is not one of them, but it makes for a good illustration, in an insane televangelist kind of way:
Anyway, toupee-wearing ministers really bother me.
Here’s the dictionary definition of the noun “lie“:
lie (n.)
1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood.2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.
So according to those definitions, when it comes to preachers who wear toupees — aren’t they chronic intentional liars?
Anybody else got a problem with that?
I do. Not that I’m not a liar and an egotist and a sinner myself. I am all those things. But I’m also balding. I’ve had a receding hairline for years, and you know what? I’m cool with that. I’ll eventually be bald. But you’ll never see me wearing a toupee, so this is the one stone I can throw. My opinion: Hairpieces are vain. Hairpieces are a form of lying. To me, a preacher who wears a hairpiece might as well be wearing a sign that says “I am vain and I am a liar.”
I want to trust you, Pastor Hairpiece. But I can’t, because I take one look at you and think: Liar.
I bring this up because an emailer took me to task recently for complaining about a toupee-wearing preacher in this article. Who are you to be so mean about a person’s appearance? she demanded. I felt kinda bad. For about a second. But then I realized I wasn’t mocking the preacher’s natural appearance — his natural appearance (baldness) was not on display during the church service. It was artfully hidden beneath an obvious hairpiece. I wasn’t mocking the way God made him. What I was mocking was his need to conceal the way God made him. (Anyway, mocking a bald prophet of God can have disastrous results.)
So, I want you to weigh in the issue. Am I off-base here? Am I being a jerk? Anyone else feel this way about pastors with toupees? I want your honest opinions. Comment away…
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