Being raised in an Apostolic Pentecostal church, I grew up trying to meet certain “holiness standards” that distinguished people in my religion from people in other Christian denominations. Such standards included watching my language, wearing skirts, not cutting my hair, practicing abstinence, staying away from drugs and alcohol, and generally trying to live a life that showed my dedication to following what I read in the Bible. These standards all had some sort of Biblical support to them that justified the beliefs to myself and helped me to explain my actions to others when I was asked about why I always wore skirts or never cut my hair. When I would go to youth camp every summer, I would see fantastic ways that the girls and women would do their hair everyday and the even more elaborate ways their hair would be styled for church services. I would come back from the camps attempting to copy the hairstyles I saw but with little success. I always wondered why the women at my own church never did their hair so elaborately and I never came to a clear conclusion.
Over the past six months, I began to speak to a woman in my church who is writing a book about women of color and hair. As she explained to me what hair meant to her and to some of her informants, I began to understand how important hair is to negotiating a person’s identity. As I used this understanding to think about the role of hair my own religious community, it became clear that hair could possibly be an indicator of race, class, piety, and even a way of enforcing gender roles in the community. However, my own views and experiences are insufficient to explain the role of hair in this particular community. Therefore, this ethnographic research begins to explore how hair is used to negotiate piety in the Apostolic Pentecostal community.
"The Bigger the Hair, the Closer to God" 