Campus Confi dential

...Lewis described two kinds of religion: the apprehension of the Numinous— the fear and awe of the sublime— and the following of a moral code...

...She notes that evangelical women do fi nd ways to evade or subvert the passivity they’re assumed to embody—even a Sadie Hawkins dance offers more diverse gender expression than these women’s dating manuals and campus culture!—but she doesn’t detail those methods, preferring to emphasize the fears and silences which make it hard for evangelical college women to date, and nearly impossible for them to understand how they might respond to a premarital sexual encounter...

...The culture of “committed relationships”— as journalist and recent graduate Helen Rittelmeyer puts it, “Like marriage, only smaller”—seems more like an underspiced, self-comforting mix of these infl uences than a sign of spiritual depth...

...In his introduction to The Problem of Pain, C.S...

...Freitas several times describes evangelical students as “smug...

...non-moral religion, and non-religious morality, existed and still exist...

...Moreover, and perhaps more troubling even for anything-goes deans and college presidents, Freitas found that students at the “spiritual” colleges were shockingly inarticulate when they tried to grapple with the interaction of body and soul...

...The spiritual colleges produced students who fumbled and fell back on clich?s...

...Anyone with any interest in mentoring young people should read this book and its recommendations, because there’s great hope and wisdom in them...

...In her evangelical interviewees, the moral may crowd out the numinous...

...BY EVE TUSHNET Recently, Charles Murray and others have argued that too many people go to college...

...Freitas argues that the hookup culture is maintained largely through embarrassed silence: Although most students don’t feel great about it, they have no language for confronting it, and a great deal of shame over not being suffi ciently good-time-girl or stud-guy about it, and so everyone assumes that hookup culture is as good as it gets...

...But despite Freitas’s obvious discomfort with ring-by-spring culture, it’s hard not to think that the Catholic and nonreligious colleges come off even worse in her account...

...So far, maybe so obvious...

...But a similar air of self-satisfaction can be discerned in the “spiritual” students when they say things like, “I decided that it is perfectly plausible that people developed the idea of a Higher Being because of the fear of the unknown...

...In Freitas’s “spiritual” interviewees, the numinous and the moral have re-separated, to the benefi t of few...

...She assumes a standard of sexual “health” which seems to mean something like “ability to fi nd meaning in one’s sexual choices, whether that means sex in a loving and demicommitted relationship or whether that means no sex ’til marriage...

...Freitas portrays “spiritual” students as prone to exoticism, glib in regard to the traditions in which they were raised, intensely misogynist despite their best efforts, and—most poignantly—utterly tongue-tied when asked to connect sex and God...

...Getting these two elements back together would be the most intellectually stimulating “hookup” of them all...

...Her fundamental position is in favor of intellect, in favor of open discussion, in favor of explicitly and rigorously connecting the spiritual and sexual realms...

...I think that a man like Gandhi or Jesus did not act virtuously because of a belief in a higher being, rather they were virtuous because that is the best thing to be...

...She delineates the gossip culture common to both evangelical and “spiritual” schools— even though, for the evangelicals, such gossip ought to be as sinful as premarital sex...

...Students of both sexes long for romance, but since dating is so dated, their only path to romance is through anonymous hookups which leave them confl icted at best...

...These are the schools of “hookup culture,” where oral sex is less intimate than handholding and undergraduate women attend theme parties in which, no matter whether the men are “CEOs” or “Sports Pros,” the coeds are always some variation of “ho...

...Freitas grouped the nonreligious and Catholic schools together as “spiritual” schools, because no religious ethos pervades or even chastens their students in the sexual realm...

...At the “spiritual” colleges, the promise that sexual liberation would walk hand-in-hand with women’s liberation has been effectively debunked...

...Sex is treated as a marker of Extreme Sin in a way that many other sins aren’t, Freitas argues, and this creates a campus culture of quiet neurosis, in which repentance and forgiveness are rarely modeled and therefore rarely practiced...

...It is not unnatural that many sections of the human race refused it...

...Of all the jumps that humanity takes in its religious history this is certainly the most surprising...

...Fortunately, Freitas is willing to give practical advice to both evangelical and “spiritual” colleges and their likely customer bases...

...Eve Tushnet, a writer in Washington, blogs at eve-tushnet.blogspot.com...

...She offers a series of questions with which parents, professors, and administrators might fruitfully challenge colleges of both stripes...

...If enough parents read Donna Freitas’s fascinating, fl awed, and provocative new book, that problem will solve itself...

...It’s conditioned in large part by my biology, by wishful thinking, and by pride...

...And interestingly, these are the schools where very bright students become incoherent or clich?d when asked to describe how their spirituality and their sexuality interact...

...Perhaps her greatest fault in Sex and the Soul is that Freitas doesn’t bother to articulate her own sexual and spiritual ethos...

...But Freitas doesn’t spare the evangelical schools, either...

...How I feel is conditioned in large part by my society and its messages— the very thing Freitas wishes to combat...

...And he noted how bizarre it was that Judaism and Christianity had brought the two together: We desire nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous...

...The one area where “spiritual” colleges’ students found their voices was in their rejection of any religious authority, especially or perhaps most emblematically the authority of the Roman Catholic Church...

...This is really not up to any standard of intellectual rigor, and it’s sad to fi nd it at the heart of a book otherwise so passionately in favor of the body, the mind, and the soul...

...Freitas is keenly aware of how the evangelical-college pressure to fi nd a spouse by graduation falls most heavily on women...

...She gives poignant examples of the anxieties and confusion caused by the evangelical colleges’ “senior scramble” for (in what’s become a campus proverb) “ring by spring or your money back...

...Freitas takes an indepth look at the sexual and spiritual cultures of seven colleges—two Catholic, two evangelical, and three nonreligious—and paints a picture that should disturb even the most complacent chancellor or alumnus donor...

...The evangelical colleges at least produced students who could discuss sex, bring their intellects to bear on their impulses...