Posted by RE on 1/6/2002, 7:42 pm

Don’s moustache-aversion — Part 2 Posted by Dan S. Lovelace on 12/22/2001, 3:07 am , in reply to "You all know how Don’s moustache-aversion originated, don’t you? — Part 1" But, we are told, there was one case when one of the young men in the church succeeded in capturing the heart of one of the young ladies Don was after, and off he walked with her. Now we had an upset czar’s son. And wouldn’t you know it, this young man who succeeded at getting one of the many girls Don wanted, how did he arrange his facial appearance, but with a neatly-trimmed Clark Gable moustache? Oooh, Clark Gable, that movie star, he was an evil man of the world. When he finally told Scarlett O’Hare, at the end of “Gone With the Wind,” that he was leaving her, and she made her famous plea, “Where will I go? What will I do?” and he ended the movie with his famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” yes, he was a very evil man. He said the word “damn”—and in a MOVIE! It wasn’t enough that Don was defeated once. This incident, we are told, even started a fad among the young men of his father’s church—to Don’s pointed chagrin—of growing some of those Clark Gable moustaches. His brother Bob says Don wasn’t really able to grow a moustache—even if he had ever wanted to try it himself. But was Don going to be defeated? No, he had his strategy for a counterattack. It was then that he began to formulate his teaching about why moustaches should not be worn. It was a carnal desire on the part of some men to try to look better. Not in keeping with the humility a man of God should have. (But later in his life a toupee certainly was.) This is the same thing the UPC has often said in its argument against women wearing jewelry, that it is not very representative of the humility a woman of God ought to have. But Don was in favor of women being able to wear jewelry. And in the case of the women, he countered, “A woman has the right to do what she can to improve her looks and make herself beautiful if she wants to.” Then came the book “Dress For Success.” Don loved it. It favored dressing in the formal ways he liked to dress and liked for the people in the church to come dressed in. But there was one thing in it that really touched a raw nerve on him. It was the part that spoke well of a man having a moustache. It said it would give the man a “suave” look. He didn’t quote that in the Bible college handbook, but he did answer it, and quite passionately, in fact (I don’t have the handbook anymore, so I’ll have to do my best to quote it from memory): “It makes people think,” the Bible college handbook said, “ ‘Why is he trying to look suave? Is his spirituality slipping?’ ” At one time it contained the phrase, “...and except for the need to look older, the question is not without basis,” but I remember in later editions, that phrase was deleted. One fellow at Chapel explained, “He really has to expend a lot of energy explaining that when a man grows one, the people think ‘Is his spirituality slipping?’ and therefore, because of that, a man should not grow one. He has often expended a lot of time and energy behind the pulpit explaining that people don’t have to think this or that negative thing about this or that act, appearance, custom or what-have-you (including the wearing of toupees in the eighties). Most people never started off thinking the growing of a moustache meant a man’s spirituality was slipping until Don started teaching the people that that was what people think, and that, therefore, moustaches must not be grown. If he had only spent a portion of that energy teaching them that there was no need to think such a thing, the same way he did with toupees and a lot of other things, the problem would have been all solved. Nobody would have thought it meant a man’s spirituality was slipping, and therefore that reason for not growing them wouldn’t exist.” When Chapel first began, Don took one good, square slug at getting his revenge for that young man who walked off with one of the many girls he wanted, way back in his youth. At first he forbade moustaches—any facial hair at all—at Community Chapel. But then he found that that wasn’t enough. It didn’t do the job as thoroughly in his emotions as he would have liked. So he found a better way to fulfill that craving he had. He changed it and permitted moustaches, but with words that ostracized, in the minds of many people, and made them hate and think lowly of, any man who ventured to have one. That was the way he really wanted it. I remember talking to one fellow at Bible college, years afterwards, who had had one. He told me about the first time he grew one. He had had one when he was 17 and finishing his last year in high school, but then near the end of the school year, he decided he had had enough of a certain bully at school who used to always go around bullying him, so he went home, took an electric drill and carved out a pair of wooden knuckles, and the next time the bully tried to bully him, he hauled off and punched him as hard as he could with them on, breaking open a gash of skin above his eye, splattering the blood and sending him for emergency medical treatment. He got sent through the judicial system, and with the liberal Carter administration in place, got it immediately wiped from his record and all charges dropped, because they couldn’t find the weapon he had used (he says he had taken it and buried it somewhere). But his dad thought it looked better in court for him not to have a moustache—which he now says he thinks was nonsense—and he pressured him to shave it, so he did. Then Bible college began, with him clean-shaven. Then he decided it was time to grow it back. (That was Keith, the guy with the patent-scam who posted a while back to Author Unknown, advising him to be sure his publishers were legit; I just contacted him, and he says it’s all right to say his name here, telling about this.) He told me about the first time Don saw him in church when he was starting to grow it, early in his first semester. He said that first time, Don looked at him with eyes spitting fire, and kept his look of anger fixed on him. “My perception was that it wasn’t just a theology,” he said, “where you just explain theologically what’s wrong with something and why it shouldn’t be done. With that look, I could see that there was some powerful emotion that Don harbored on the issue. I couldn’t help thinking it was a personal thing with him. It was frightening. It wasn’t like somebody just asking him to explain why the Scripture taught predestination was wrong or something. You could see it really upset him personally. As if he were ready to fight. I never would feel comfortable in his presence. I always thought he was a frightening man.” “Like the bully?” I asked, a little tongue-in-cheek. “Hmmm....” Many of the men who had moustaches have said that in the earlier years, in the seventies and early eighties, getting along in the social life at Chapel was all right. Most of the people accepted them as part of the body, with only a few who treated them like pariahs, spiritual outcasts, but most accepting them as brothers and fellow Chapelites. It was in the eighties that Don Barnett started clamping down on a lot of things to have them precisely the way his moods dictated he wanted things. And at one point some of the men who had moustaches told him, “If you’re going to forbid them, fine, then forbid them. And we’ll submit to the leadership of the church and get rid of them. If you’re not going to forbid them, then we’re not in violation of the church’s requirements in having them. But this business about allowing them, then teaching everybody to hate us because of them, just doesn’t make any sense.” But that was just it. Underneath, that was the way Don wanted it. Having it just that way fulfilled a longstanding craving for revenge he had had against that young man who walked off with his prospect, the girl he never got (who probably had no interest in him anyway). Don regretted marrying Barbara and felt like he was stuck with her against his will, and it does appear that he blamed not only that young man for doing this to his life, but in his feelings, he blamed moustaches for it as well. The irony of it was that many Chapelites took it as a spiritual teaching, a perspective as if straight from the heart of God, that even though God made this hair that grows on men’s faces, and even though the men of Israel, the country founded by God, all unanimously had it on their chins, cheeks and upper lips all throughout the nation’s ancient history—and, in fact, even considered it a “shame” of the Gentile nations where men didn’t have them, the same shame as having long hair, confusing their appearance with that of a woman’s—many people at Chapel considered it to be really and truly a thing of genuine evil for a man to have this bit of hair above his lip, when, in fact, from the beginning it was really nothing more than a personal vendetta of Don Barnett’s, against the young man who he felt deprived him of some better life he could have had with some other woman. This was how Chapel’s stand on it ended up being established.