The church in which I grew up had an implicit 11th commandment: thou shalt not air dirty laundry.
I was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, in a place where the air is clear, except on trash-burning days and manure-spreading days. When the weather cooperates, many households dry their washed laundry outdoors on clotheslines. The Amish have the longest lines for their laundry: jeans spread like upside-down Vs waving high on a pulley system between telephone poles, button-down shirts hung by their tails as high as the barn roof and reaching for the ground with their long sleeves. The rest of us have clotheslines strung in our backyards between much shorter poles, maybe only six feet tall with lines sagging low enough that my ten-year-old self could reach up to pin clothes during her after-school chores. Clotheslines are intended for laundry that’s been washed, of course. No one wants or expects to see their neighbors’ dirty laundry flapping in the wind. Besides, what good is the fresh air to stained and stinky clothes?
The same principle was sacred in the social expectations at our church. What good was saying life’s problems aloud in the open, or naming worries or messes or raw moments unabashedly, except to embarrass those who heard it? Of the struggles that members might consider sharing with their church family, any topic that carried even a blush of sinfulness, by socially and theologically conservative measures, was too taboo to air, like daring to dangle lace panties on the clothesline instead of plain cotton ones. Concerns that were circumstantially beyond control and did not imply guilt could be shared discreetly and without detail. Thus, in worship it was acceptable to ask for prayers related to illness or death, but there were no prayer requests about suicide or sexuality, marital or financial problems. If they were said aloud at all, it was in private to the pastor, or the pastor’s wife, or your dearest church friend.
