In the frenzied process of college admissions, few students, parents, or college officials are asking the right questions about the college experience itself, or helping students think about what really matters and what they truly want once they arrive on the campus. Parents offer counsel; faculty and staff members are available to advise.
Some applicants will consider the religious life of a college — although, aside from evangelical Christians, most will do so only in a cursory way. The vast majority of parents focus on education and the prestige of the institution, and some probably think about athletics, too. But almost no one gives serious thought to whether one college or another will be more suitable for finding love and romance, or even which institution is best suited for seeking an adequate spiritual path.
I interviewed dozens of students about those subjects at secular, religious, public, and private institutions for my study, “Spirituality and Sexuality in American College Life,” and I concluded that religion and spirituality need to be priorities in college-related discussions — as do love, sex, and romantic relationships. Poor guidance, alienation, and regrettable experiences in those areas can make or break a student’s college experience. It’s a mistake to ignore them, even if they may seem unorthodox topics for precollege discussion.
An institution can have all the prestige in the world, offer the best education and an impressive swath of majors, and have a great basketball team — but what if the female students there dress up as “secretary ho’s” on Friday nights? What if that college harbors a peer ethic that leads students to believe that finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend is like playing the lottery? (You have to hook up with 99 people before you hit the jackpot and find someone who will stick around.) What if it leaves its students to develop a split between sex and the soul, or even dump one for the other, because what else are they going to do?
When it comes to sex, the campus resources available to students — religious, spiritual, or otherwise — seem, for the most part, to be ineffective. The cultures, attitudes, and practices related to sex and sexuality, at both evangelical colleges and their Roman Catholic and nonreligious private and public counterparts, are extreme: On one end is a narrow, strictly monitored purity standard that forces many students to deny their sexuality altogether; at the other, a free-for-all hookup scene. Far too many students feel as if they are faced with an either/or proposition, as though religion and sex were two powerful and jealous gods. When they interact, as they do among evangelical Christians, it is a battle to the death: Either religion wins and sex withers away (until marriage, theoretically), or sex wins and faith founders.
The alternative, evident among students at Roman Catholic, nonreligious private, and public colleges, is for the two gods to remain isolated from each other, warriors in entirely separate realms. Both options leave students in the lurch, consumed in many cases with anxiety about sex — and, in some, about the state of their souls.
Not helping matters is the fact that, short of policies about sexual assault, at all but the evangelical colleges that I have visited, few efforts are made to deal with sex and sexuality on a personal level, either inside or outside the classroom. Some nonreligious colleges sponsor lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender programs that provide mentors and other resources and activities geared toward, though not exclusive to, sexual minorities. But those groups operate in much the same way “parachurch” organizations do in working collaboratively across denominations — they create a subculture that is meaningful to students who take advantage of them but have little to no influence on the college curriculum or the wider campus sexual ethic.
Students may feel uncomfortable about where “sexual freedom” has led them, but they learn to keep this disquiet to themselves, much as evangelical students are afraid to say that they want (or even need) more sexual freedom. In either case, the result is silence in a community badly in need of greater communication, and students are forced into unrealistic models.
Plainly, sex and the soul matter intensely to the overwhelming majority of human beings, no less during the college years and regardless of sexual orientation or religious/spiritual background. So it has been for millennia. Why do colleges resist taking on those topics directly and explicitly inside the classroom?
For many colleges and universities, the answer is that religion and sex are private matters. Yet that approach results in a campus conversation about sex that is often vulgar and uncritical, and almost entirely uninformed by faith. “Religious tolerance” often really amounts to embarrassed silence. Sex is degraded, and young women along with it. We should expect students, faculty members, administrators, and clergy members on campuses to engage those subjects with as much intellectual rigor as they do any other.
At evangelical colleges, the opposite is true. Sex and religion are so public, so inseparable, and so overdetermined by religious and communal rules, boundaries, and standards that students have no personal space in which they can assess where they stand on the relationship between the two. Those who question the purity culture, or who want to be or already are sexually active, live in fear of being ostracized and even expelled. We need to think about what happens when sex and sexuality are degraded and suppressed outside of marriage and heterosexual orientation, and when a single sexual act can jeopardize students’ relationships with God, their faith commitments, and their education.
Together, however, all colleges can transform the relationship between sex and the soul on campuses.
Evangelical colleges, for their part, offer a compelling core culture. They protect their students from losing the benefits that most religions and spiritual disciplines offer: sexual boundaries; a sense of right and wrong; rituals, activities, and processes for making decisions regarding sexuality and the pursuit of romantic relationships; and forgiveness and redemption.
Catholic, nonreligious private, and public colleges also have something important to contribute. They foster an ethic of sexual freedom that, if offered along with spiritual and moral values, confers two important benefits that religious communities and traditions typically do not: the right to cross a boundary and say yes to a forbidden experience or relationship, and the tolerance of sexual diversity.
Religious traditions and spiritual disciplines may indeed be diverse and difficult to navigate at nonreligious private and public colleges, but that does not mean those communities should discourage their public expression. If communities of higher education would openly acknowledge and cultivate the high levels of interest in religion and spirituality on all types of campuses, students could view religious faith not only as a strength rather than an embarrassment, but also as an avenue for analyzing both the culture of sexual excess and the culture of excessive sexual restraint. If everyone on a campus fosters a culture of tolerance and forgiveness, students will learn how to find a healthy balance between those two extremes.
It is incumbent upon faculty members, administrators, and members of the clergy to encourage college students to ground themselves somewhere, to put their religious and spiritual desires into practice, to tap into their undeniable energies, because religion and spirituality have something important to offer. More than any other resources, they can help students to recognize who they are and to pursue who they want to become — not just as bodies or minds or souls, but as whole people.
Donna Freitas is an assistant professor of religion at Boston University. This article is adapted from Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses, to be published in April by Oxford University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: Commentary Volume 54, Issue 28, Page A33
