Why Clerical Collars

 One question I hear often at UUCE is why I wear a clerical collar when I preach, so I thought I’d take a little time to explore that here. I first began wearing a collar during my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), which is a structured chaplaincy training program, typically based in healthcare settings. CPE invites seminarians and spiritual leaders-in-formation to practice real-world pastoral care, supported by intensive reflection with peers and supervisors. It’s a formative and often transformative experience, where we’re encouraged to experiment with different aspects of ministry, including how we present ourselves. My own CPE unit took place at Legacy Emmanuel Hospital in Portland, a major trauma one center that I already had quite a bit of personal experience with as a patient and visitor. Returning there in a voluntary chaplain role, now as a minister-in-training, felt incredibly empowering. My supervisor, one of only two ACPE-certified Humanist chaplains in the country, brought an open-minded, supportive presence that made space for all kinds of exploration, including how each of us might choose to “look” like clergy.

CPE experience involves claiming authority and being seen as a spiritual leader, even when we’re still learning how to do the work. To that end, we are encouraged to experiment with vestments and visual cues beyond our chaplain badges to help others recognize our role. I honestly didn’t expect to like wearing a clerical collar. I grew up in a lay-led Unitarian Universalist congregation, where we didn’t really have clergy, and the idea of a minister in robes or a collar felt foreign. I remember meeting my first UU minister at Seabeck when I was around ten years old, and not really grasping what their job was. My instinct was that whatever this minister did, surely a committee could do it just as well. I associated collars with a narrow, often Christian, tradition that didn’t feel like mine. For a long time, the collar symbolized something I thought I wasn’t part of.

But once I started wearing one, I was surprised by how right it felt. The collar helped me feel seen as someone with a spiritual role, as someone whose presence was meant to be grounding and trustworthy. I started wearing my preaching dress on overnight shifts, and I found that it helped patients and staff alike identify me as clergy without needing to ask. More than that, it offered a chance to challenge assumptions about what a religious leader looks like. It turns out, I really value both the comfort and the subtle disruption that come from seeing someone like me in a collar. Wearing it felt like a form of embodiment, a quiet claim that I am here and I am real in this role. And although I am not a woman, I rarely corrected patients who assumed I was, because I sensed that something about seeing a woman-presenting person in spiritual authority mattered deeply to them, and I didn’t want to take that moment away.

The choice to wear a collar is also both personal and political. For many, the collar is tied to Christian traditions that have excluded or harmed queer, femme, and pagan people, identities I hold with pride. As a Unitarian Universalist ministerial candidate rooted in antifascist and liberation theologies, I reclaim the symbol for a ministry that centers justice, inclusion, and collective liberation. My presence in the pulpit, collar and all, interrupts assumptions about who gets to be a minister and what ministry can look like. It becomes a visible challenge to the idea that religious authority must conform to narrow, hierarchical norms. For those of us historically pushed to the margins of faith communities, wearing the collar can be an act of sacred resistance. It tells a different story about belonging, leadership, and the divine.

Beyond its symbolic weight, the collar also carries practical meaning in my day-to-day congregational work. It serves as a visual cue that I’m engaged in a spiritual role, helping others understand when we are moving from casual interaction into something more intentional. While Unitarian Universalist spaces often lean into informality, the collar invites a sense of reverence and grounding. It helps me show up with clarity and reminds me of the accountability I carry, not just to myself, but to the people I serve, the wider UU tradition, and the liberation movements I’m part of. In moments of pastoral care, it can be a source of comfort for those who associate it with safety, even if they don’t come from traditions where clergy wear vestments. It’s a small thing that opens big conversations.

The clerical collar has a long and complex history that stretches across denominations, cultures, and centuries. Though many today associate it with Roman Catholic or Anglican clergy, the collar actually originated in the mid-19th century with a Presbyterian minister in Scotland named Rev. Donald McLeod. He introduced the detachable white collar as a way for clergy to visually signal their ministerial identity in public life. The Anglican Church quickly adopted the style, and it soon became widespread among Protestant denominations. Initially a practical innovation, the collar took on symbolic meaning over time, representing a life set apart for sacred service and moral leadership. By the early 20th century, it had become a normative part of ministerial dress in many Western Christian traditions. It evoked respect, discipline, and spiritual presence, though it also carried associations with hierarchy and institutional authority.

In Unitarian Universalist circles, the collar’s history has been more complicated. UUism emerged from liberal Christian traditions that questioned clericalism and rejected rigid liturgical norms. Many early Unitarian and Universalist congregations were lay-led, and even as professional ministry developed, formal vestments remained rare. There is no standard dress for UU clergy, and ministers are given wide latitude to determine how they show up visually. Some avoid the collar altogether, concerned that it might suggest hierarchical authority or theological positions inconsistent with UU values. Yet others, especially those working in chaplaincy, military service, or interfaith spaces, have embraced the collar as a helpful tool. It communicates spiritual presence in environments where visual cues matter and where people expect to recognize clergy on sight. Over time, a number of UU ministers have used the collar not to reinforce traditional power structures, but to reimagine what spiritual leadership can look like.

Today, the collar is increasingly visible in progressive, queer-affirming, and nontraditional religious spaces. Clergy from a variety of traditions, including womanist, pagan, and Humanist paths, are reclaiming the collar as a symbol that can be separated from its patriarchal or exclusionary roots. Rather than signaling separation from the community, the collar now often represents presence, accessibility, and moral accountability. It helps people identify someone they can turn to in moments of crisis, grief, or transition. In hospitals, during pastoral visits, and at public actions, the collar conveys a readiness to serve. It also reminds the person wearing it of their responsibility to act with care and integrity. Its meaning is not fixed by history, but shaped by the values and commitments of the wearer and the communities they serve. For many of us in modern religious leadership, the collar is not about creating distance but about forming deeper connection.

On a personal level, the collar helps me step more fully into my role as a minister. It functions as a spiritual and vocational anchor, reminding me that my work is not just a job but a calling. When I put it on, I am preparing to show up with intention, presence, and care. In a tradition that often blurs the lines between ordained and lay leadership, the collar provides a subtle but important cue that something sacred is being asked of me. It helps create a boundary between my personal identity and my pastoral responsibilities, while still allowing me to show up authentically. The collar calls me into accountability; to my faith, to my community, and to the values I strive to embody. It does not make me more important, but it reminds me to be more intentional. For me, it is both a spiritual tool and a physical marker of trust and responsibility.

Additionally, wearing the collar connects me to a lineage of ministers who have used their role to advance justice and challenge systems of oppression. Clergy across traditions have long worn collars at protests, in jails, and on the frontlines of social change. During the Civil Rights Movement, ministers in collars marched for voting rights and faced arrest with quiet resolve. In more recent years, clergy have stood in Ferguson, at Standing Rock, and in migrant justice movements, using the visibility of the collar to offer protection, bear witness, and challenge unjust power. The collar has served as both symbol and shield, allowing spiritual leaders to stand between police and protestors, to draw media attention to injustice, to facilitate and mediate between authorities and protesters, and to offer care to those in crisis. 

My presence, marked by the collar, says that faith can and must serve liberation. Throughout history, clergy have been present at the frontlines of human rights struggles, offering spiritual care, emotional grounding, and moral clarity. The collar communicates to police and bystanders that this person is there in a pastoral role, and it tells protestors that they are not alone. It opens the possibility for presence without words, for holding space in silence, and for bearing witness in dangerous places. In antifascist organizing, where symbols of faith are often co-opted by oppressive forces, reclaiming religious imagery is itself a political act. I wear the collar not to sanctify myself, but to signal that ministry belongs in the streets as much as it does in the sanctuary. To wear it is to declare that my faith is not abstract; it is lived, it is public, and it is driven by love.

This is especially significant in our current moment, when fascist and authoritarian ideologies are increasingly cloaking themselves in religious language and symbolism. When I wear the collar, I am offering a direct counter-narrative to those who would use faith as a tool of exclusion or violence. I am saying that religion does not belong solely to those who uphold domination, patriarchy, or nationalism. My collar represents a ministry that is committed to collective freedom, to queer and trans flourishing, and to the dismantling of systems that harm. It is not a costume, and it is not neutral. It is a subversive claim on a symbol that has been used both to oppress and to liberate. When worn with intention and in alignment with liberatory values, the collar becomes a visible sign of sacred resistance. It is not about purity or perfection, but about showing up again and again in the service of justice.

Wearing the collar is one of many ways I try to live into the values I hold most dear. It is a practice that invites me to move through the world with care, clarity, and courage. Whether I am in a hospital room, behind a pulpit, or standing beside others in protest, the collar reminds me that ministry is not just about belief but about presence. It is a way of signaling that I am here to listen, to serve, and to be transformed alongside the people I accompany. It is an indicator, in these trying times, that fundamentalists and Christian nationalist do not own this symbol; progressive clergy who show up in social justice spaces need to be able to reclaim what has become a toxic symbol for so many. While not every UU minister chooses this symbol, for me it has become a meaningful part of how I show up to the sacred work of justice and care. The collar does not define my ministry, but it helps me live more fully into it. It is one small part of how I seek to be accountable to love.