Jason King’s students at Saint Vincent College, in Pennsylvania, so often want to discuss the thorny issues of romance and sex that he decided to write a book about their concerns: Faith With Benefits: Hookup Culture on Catholic Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Speaking by phone, from his home, he said he found through surveys and interviews that at his and other Roman Catholic institutions, “students want to have good relationships, and are struggling to figure out how to do that.”
Mr. King, a professor of theology, concluded that a major impediment for the students is the influence of so-called hookup culture, characterized by no-strings-attached sexual activity between just-barely acquainted fellow students. He found that the specter of those practices shapes the thinking of students on his and other Catholic campuses even though it isn’t nearly as prevalent there as the students believe.
[[relatedcontent align="left” size="third-width”]] He learned by conducting surveys at 26 Catholic campuses, and following up in more depth at six of them, that students so believe that “hooking up” is a college norm that they weigh their own romantic and sexual activities against those expectations, even though the “hooking up” they describe veers more toward casual kissing than sexual intercourse.
Students do resist the pressure to be part of the hookup culture, he says. That is particularly so at “very Catholic” institutions, where a countervailing culture of “Catholic evangelism” holds sway. At “somewhat” — nominally — Catholic institutions, which draw many enrollees from minority, rural, and poor families, most students do try to dodge hookup culture’s influence as they seek to shape social interactions because they shy away from behavior that might jeopardize their opportunity to progress in life by finishing college. Mr. King found that it is only at “mostly Catholic” campuses that students come close to acting out hookup culture as it is most commonly defined. Institutions were classified as “very,” “mostly,” or “somewhat” Catholic based on students’ responses to questions about the religious atmosphere on their campuses.
Among his heartening findings, Mr. King says, is that at all types of Catholic campuses, many students demonstrate great ingenuity as they muddle along: by, for example, instituting styles of dating that are less intensely sexual than those that they hear are common among their non-Catholic-college peers.
That Catholic-college students “are always reacting to or rejecting or withdrawing from” hookup culture demonstrates, he suggests, just how influential popular culture has been through such media as news reports about the phenomenon, college-themed movies, and online pornography that Mr. King says is consumed by many students at Catholic institutions, as at others.
Previous studies on hookup culture have not parsed out, as Mr. King does, how it plays out on different kinds of Catholic campuses. One of his goals, he says, was to inform Catholic-college administrators who worry about cultural forces that harm campus social life. The matter is also a concern, he says, for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, which fears a weakening of the institution of marriage and of adherence to church teaching on sexuality.
Mr. King did not find that students at Catholic institutions doubt the moral authority of church leaders, despite many years of revelations of sexual abuse of children by members of religious orders worldwide. “The sexual-abuse crisis hit when I was in graduate school at Catholic University, and it really affected me, so I was keeping an eye out for that,” says Mr. King. He says, however, that for today’s Catholic-college students, “my sense is that it just is not on their radar.”
