Social nudity has demonstrated its value in so many areas of life. While all human endeavor could benefit from more and better research, there has been much research demonstrating the beneficial effects of social nudity on our emotional and mental health, and on the nurturing and growth of our children.
Children who grow up in families that practice nudism mature with better self-esteem and a more mature understanding of the phases of life. Seeing people grow older, become ill or infirm, recover health, seeing a mother's body make all the changes of pregnancy and childbirth all give a more realistic image than the highly made-up, sexually charged advertising images of too handsome men and too beautiful women. The lack of reality testing has led us to beauty contests for six year olds and girls of ten years making themselves up as sex objects.
While I no longer do so, I did lead nude workshops for body-image improvement as well as for general emotional dysfunction. My experience was that participants often became aware of emotional levels that were usually outside their awareness. Those emotions drove dysfunctional behavior and surface emotions yet were not susceptible of change.
For many, this was the first time they had ever seen the reality of other's bodies and could begin to deal realistically with the fact that their's did not meet some imagined perfectionist ideal. Not even the television actresses look, in daily life, like they do on TV after hours of make-up. Most people create their ideal image from what they see in the Sephora cosmetic, or the Porshe car ads.
(For a better view of reality take a look at this.)
If the benefits are so clear, why is social nudity not more popular? I suggest it is because of the attitude of the religious culture. We live in a culture which associates nudity with sexuality. It is also a religious culture which fears and denigrates sexuality. That fear and that association makes nudism a very difficult leap for many people.
While not every religion in the U.S. is Christian, that is the dominant religion. Christianity has been stained by the prudery of the puritan and Victorian attitudes carried over from the 16th and 17th centuries. Ironically, some of the finest nude art is from the Victorian era.
This prudery was not a part of the previous periods. Much of the great religious art then included nude sculpture and paintings which depicted the nude human form. The famous image of Adam in beautiful Sistine Chapel is fully nude.
Christianity claims to be biblically based. But there are no biblical passages which condemn nudity. To the contrary, when the Ark of the Covenant was recovered, King David danced naked in the streets. God commanded Isaiah to go nude for more than three years. Other prophets also lived naked.
In the New Testament, Jesus was naked to be baptized by John. Peter and the fishermen worked in the nude. Again, Jesus stripped to bathe the feet of the disciples.
The early Church's custom was to baptize men, women and children together and in the nude. Total nudity was required according to Hippolytus of Rome, Cyril of Jerusalem and Theodore of Mopsuestia. "You are now stripped and naked, in this also imitating Christ on the Cross," and "Adam was naked at the beginning, and not ashamed. This is why your clothing must be taken off as baptism restores right relation to God." Not merely the initiate, but also the whole community, all or most participants were nude, including clergy, new believers and witnesses.
Maybe this won't convince many conservative Christians; even though many claim to be Christian, they really don't bother thinking their faith out for themselves, just continue mimicking their favorite mis-guided preacher. But there are several Christian nudist groups. A good starting place is Cheef's website.
Attitudes in other faiths are each different and having less direct knowledge, I am not prepared to discuss them.
To summarize, there is no condemnation of nudity in Christian theology or scripture, indeed it was a common practice in the early church. It was only the contamination with Greek philosophy that believed that the body was corrupt and only the spirit was pure which led to our present attitudes.
The advantages of social nudity are many (I borrow this from another website.):
- Greater experiential appreciation for the beauty and dignity of the body.
- A greater feeling of unity with others, as external fences of clothing are removed.
- A greater appreciation for our masculinity and femininity as we become convinced of how good it is to be a man or a woman.
- Many people suffer from feelings of not being accepted. Social nudity has proven to be marvelous therapy for this psychological malady.
- Unnecessary curiosity about the naked body will be replaced by normal curiosity about differences. The false, puritanical shame ingrained in us by our upbringing is overcome.
- Children exposed to social nudity are more likely to grow up with healthy attitudes towards their bodies.
- Nudity is healthy because it exposes the whole body to the air and sun, and gives people an added incentive to be fit.
- Nudity is more recreative, more joyful, and thus our recreation is more effective. Who truly prefers a bathing suit to a birthday suit?
- By being accustomed to nudity we can react maturely to social situations of nudity that used to embarrass us, such as locker rooms, gang showers, hospitals, and modest nudity in cinema and art.
- We will not hypocritically admire the nude only in art, but in reality as well.
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