I can just imagine that marketing meeting at the Gillette Company. A group of well-dressed young urban professionals are seated around a mahogany conference-room table wrestling with the issue of the declining sales of their razors.

“How are we going to raise sales of our razors?” one male executive asks.

“We’ve done triple blades, quadruple blades and battery-power shavers. What else can we possibly do?” questions another male executive.

There is a long pause in the room. Then a female executive floats a risky trial balloon: “Hey, let’s convince men to shave their entire bodies! They’ll go through razors like crazy!”

“That will never work,” replies one of the men dismissively, “Men will never buy into such a thing.”

But another male executive, with bushy eyebrows and chest hairs protruding from his shirt collar, sounds forth, “You know that just might work. Men are shallow, vain and not that bright. Let’s give it a try!” And thus “manscaping” was born and quickly took root among a new class of “men.”

This trend has resulted in hairy men becoming the Hester Prynne of our culture, forced to wear a scarlet letter “H” for their sin. Whereas T. S. Eliot was concerned about hollow men, our culture is concerned about hairy men. Whereas C. S. Lewis was concerned about men without chests, our culture is concerned about men without chest hair. We live in a culture obsessed with male hairlessness.

Because I am a 40-year-old male of Mediterranean descent, a group not known for being “follically challenged,” you might think this is just a cranky rant of a hairy middle-aged man who is still pining for the days when Tom Selleck was the epitome of male beauty. After all, does hair (or the lack thereof) really have any biblical significance? Christians have been fruitlessly fighting about hair forever. Should women have short hair? Should men have long hair? Who really cares about this trend toward male hairlessness? Does it really matter?

While I am certainly not contending that “manscaping” is the unpardonable sin, I do think this cultural obsession with male hairlessness raises a few spiritually significant concerns. First, there is the fact that this trend is being marketed to us by our culture. This is a worldly idea conveyed by people who are, for the most part, not seeking to glorify God in all they do, but rather simply seeking to sell us something. As Cameron Stracher put it in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial entitled “Receding Hairlines”: “The same people pushing hairlessness are the ones selling the products. In the best tradition of hucksterism, we must have what we don’t need.” Second, this move toward male hairlessness is being marketed based on the not-so-subtle message of vanity and sexual idolatry. Frankly, some of the marketing for this trend would make the Temple of Diana look pious.

Finally, this move toward male hairlessness appears to me as just another not-so-subtle step toward neutering the male identity in a culture that has systematically emasculated the male in so many other ways.

In 2 Samuel 10:4-5, we read an account of the disgracing of some of King David’s men. One of the ways these men were disgraced was having half of their beards shaved off by the hands of their enemy. This act greatly humiliated the men. David told them, “Stay at Jericho till your beards have grown, and then come back” (2 Sam. 10:5). The interesting thing about our modern trend toward hairlessness is that it is not our enemy who is placing the razor to our skin, but rather we ourselves.

So guys, next time you lather up to shave an area that your father would never think of shaving, think about the marketing room at Gillette, think about David’s disgraced men, and think most of all about your own motives. That’s how God’s Word speaks in your world.

—Anthony T. Selvaggio

Anthony Selvaggio is an RPCNA minister and member of the Rochester, N.Y., RPC. He is visiting professor for the RP Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pa. He also is a conference speaker and author.