The People of God: A “Wonderful Fantasy Land?”
April 11, 2008
In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Donna Freitas revealed some of the startling survey results from her new book, “Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance & Religion on America’s College Campuses.” Her findings should stir up at least three responses in the church: we should grieve, hope, and work.
First, we should grieve. The survey Ms. Freitas conducted of over 2,500 college students (from Catholic and nonreligious private and public schools) gives a deeply discouraging portrait of the current “hookup” culture on campus. This trend of engaging in sexually intimate activity outside a committed relationship has become so pervasive that Freitas reports, “Not a single person at these schools said that their peers valued saving sex for marriage, and only 7% said that they felt that their friends wanted to reserve sex for committed, loving relationships.” The author pinpoints these attitudes as being so strong in the campus ethos that she warns parents, “you may have done an excellent job raising your kids with good morals, strong boundaries and high expectations when it comes to romance and sex, but it would take an 18-year-old of superhuman strength to stand up to the pressures of most college environments.”
Despite this ubiquitous immorality on secular campuses, there is great cause for hope. Students may be pleasure-hunting, but they are not happy. Freitas writes, “41% [of students surveyed] are profoundly upset about their behavior. The 22% of respondents who chose to describe a hook-up experience (the question was optional) used words like ‘dirty,’ ‘used,’ ‘regretful,’ ‘empty,’ ‘miserable,’ ‘disgusted,’ ‘ashamed,’ ‘duped’ and ‘abused’ in their answers.”
Not only did students convey regret for their promiscuity, they were also drawn to the ideal of relationships with strong sexual boundaries. While teaching a class at Boston University in which a number of prominent evangelical books on sex and dating were read (including Josh Harris’ “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”), Freitas was surprised to find that her students “were fascinated by [the] descriptions of modesty as a virtue, especially within the context of faith.” Furthermore, “They seemed shocked that somewhere in America there are entire communities of people their age who really do
‘save themselves’ until marriage, who engage in old-fashioned dating with flowers and dinner and maybe a kiss goodnight. They reacted as if these authors describe a wonderful fantasy land.”
If the church is to show these students that such a “wonderful fantasy land” does exist, we have work to do. As married couples and singles, we must evaluate our relationships and ask whether we are pursuing intimacy and purity in a way that would make God’s standards for sexuality look attractive. Furthermore, if the biggest problem on the campus is a culture of sexual license, are we creating a counter-culture where sexual joy is exalted, both by married couples who pursue it and those unmarried who respectfully abstain from it?
God has left the church on earth as an outpost of his eternal people amongst those who reject him and his ways. May he purify our relationships so that we might offer a taste of the “wonderful fantasy land” that exists when God’s people live under his rule and blessing.