Baptism and Protestant Bathing Phobia

Sorry that I've been lax in my posting of late. I've been quite busy with one or two other concerns, the least important of which is Second Life (which I won't attempt to explain here). However, I found the following little snippet in my archives and thought it might be amusing to post. Here it is. Enjoy.

Let me say something you’re probably not expecting and which I hope doesn’t sound too ludicrous. I’ve done some research on the Reformation and the history of the Church and am confident that there is a close connection between those subjects and the beliefs and customs that surround bathing and personal hygiene as they were practiced in Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain. I think that it is possible that the reason there is so little recognition of baptism as immersion in the WCF and other Reformation documents is partly because the Jacobean Reformers had both a cultural and theological aversion to bathing.

For instance, during the Middle Ages the Church discouraged bathing in Roman style public baths, fearing the spread of syphilis and the plague. During the Reformation baths were associated with entertainment and immorality. Philip II of Spain is said to have authorized the destruction of the public baths built by the Moors on the grounds that washing the body was a heathen custom dangerous to Christians. It was believed that hot water especially dilated the pores and allowed harmful organisms to enter the body through the skin. Even newborn babies were not washed, and until the eighteenth century they were swaddled in bands of cloth that were changed twice a day at most. After 1760 baths and bathrooms began to spread very slowly, and as late as 1835 a young man asked through an American reform journal whether he should continue his habit of taking a warm bath every three weeks.

And Will Durant, in his The Story of Civilization, says “Cleanliness, in the Middle Ages, was not next to godliness. Early Christianity had denounced the Roman baths as wells of perversion and promiscuity, and its general disapproval of the body had put no premium on hygiene.” And again, describing the age of Reformation, Durant says, “Social and individual hygiene hardly kept pace with the advance of medicine. Personal cleanliness was not a fetish; even the King of England bathed only once a week and sometimes skipped.” The same historian, after describing the dress­ing manners, writes, "How clean were the bodies behind the frills? A sixteenth-century Introduction pour les jeunes dames spoke of women ‘who had no care to keep themselves clean except in those parts that may be seen, remaining filthy...under their’ and a cynical proverb held that courtesans were the only women who washed more than their face and hands. Perhaps cleanliness increased with immorality, for as women offered more of themsel­ves to view to many, cleanliness enlarged its area.”

I don’t know if anyone else has made this connection. I don’t know but that it is a completely outlandish idea, devoid of merit, yet I find it more than coincidental. It would certainly not surprise me if the Reformers, many of whom were Puritans, found the whole idea of immersing ones body in water to be repugnant for two main reasons: firstly it probably was seen as a way of increasing, not decreasing the likelihood of disease and secondly (and perhaps more importantly) it was probably associated with the public baths of bygone eras, especially of pagan and then Catholic Rome, and which public baths had a reputation as centers of worldliness and immorality. Certainly, for whatever reasons, Jacobean and Reformed England was largely unwashed and unsanitary. Given this argument, it does not seem unreasonable for the Protestant Divines of the Reformation to have repudiated the immersive mode of baptism due to their own cultural bias and not simply on the biblical evidence.