RELIGION IN A HOOKUP CULTURE: Donna Freitas

in the Washington Post "On Faith" blog:

...Since my academic research centers on attitudes about sex in relation to faith on college campuses, I'll tackle part two of this week's question: Is religion a useful tool for helping young people navigate the treacherous world of sex, love and relationships?

In my survey work and interviews with college students across the U.S. at Catholic, evangelical, private-secular, and public universities, and subsequent campus lecture visits to discuss this very topic, I found three very different attitudes among young adults about whether religion is useful in navigating hookup culture, sexual decision-making and identity formation, romance, and love:

1) For the committed, evangelical college student, it is impossible to separate your religious affiliation and commitments from anything to do with sexual decision-making, activity, and identity. Your faith is at the core of who you are, and everything you think and do flows from there. With regard to navigating dating, sex, and romantic relationships, the Christian tradition can portray this task as overwhelming dangerous--as a series of extremely important don'ts--which adds enormous stress to an already stressful journey during adolescence. That's the not so good news participants offered in my study. But most evangelical college students want their faith to speak to them about everything, including sex and relationships, so even if they are struggling with what their religion teaches on this (the many don'ts), they are committed to that struggle and they are in it for the long hall because they love their faith tradition. Period.

2) Your average college students at Catholic, private-secular, and public institutions generally laugh at the possibility that religious tradition might have anything to say to them in light of the world they live in: hookup culture, where sex is perceived as simply a casual thing, and they feel pressured to go right along with this attitude, even though for most young women and men, privately they don't like this situation at all. Catholic students especially spoke with great sarcasm about the "don'ts" with regard to sex in the Catholic tradition, which make them feel alienated, and which make them think that Catholicism is utterly out of touch with the realities of what they face in navigating sex and hookup culture today.

3) There is another type of student from across the four institution types who also might fit one of the other two categories as well, who is either really stressed about what religion tells them about sex, or thinks it's useless, but who has a feeling that in the realm of spirituality, there is a lot of possibility, flexibility, and exciting potential for them in the way of making their sex, dating, and romantic lives more fulfilling, meaningful, and generally, might offer more livable rules and is far more inclusive of same-sex relationships and sexually active histories. So spirituality--not institutional, organizational religion, but spirituality--is an exciting space where students suspect they might actually find useful tools for navigation. They just aren't sure how to find them or pursue these suspicions they have.

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Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, Donna Freitas, hooking up, premarital sex, religion, sex, universities

posted by Eve at 9:21 PM VOTE

PREMARITAL ABSTINENCE: Three views

at Christianity Today:
Donna Freitas:

My initial response to the question--and I'm not being facetious--is the following: Stop talking about marriage when you talk about saving sex. ...

The unpleasant, unfulfilling realities of hookup culture have made abstinence more attractive. But tying a discussion about abstinence to marriage, in my opinion, is a pedagogical mistake. Most students need help in seeing their way out of hookup culture for this coming weekend, never mind being asked to see years beyond graduation to the second half of their 20s, when the average college graduate is likely to marry.

There is so much talk about sexual experimentation during the college years. Choosing abstinence is a kind of sexual experimentation. We just don't often discuss it in such terms. But college students love the idea, and, once they have thought about it for a while, are often eager to experiment with it.

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Mark Regnerus:

...What we can change, however, is our widespread misunderstanding of how marriage happens. Christian scholar James Olthuis reminds us that entering into Christian marriage is not a light switch that's flipped on at the wedding, but rather a process in this intended order: a pledge of fidelity, reliability, integrity, and friendship between a man and a woman, a covenant between the two persons and God, a communal recognition of the marriage, and sexual consummation.

In one sense, there's no such thing as premarital sex. There is only non-marital sex and marital sex. When couples skip some of the steps, it's the job of the church to make sure the others occur, or to call non-marital sex the sacrilege it is.

Far too many Christians link sexual morality to the issuance of a legal document by a secular state. But the state does not permit marriages; it only recognizes them. The biblical writers never presumed that marriage was the domain of the state, nor did they presume that it belonged to the church. It was simply an institution among institutions.

Unfortunately, most young Christians move into their 20s without realizing that a vocational calling--to marriage or singleness--has already been given to them by a loving Creator. Instead, they imagine marriage as the capstone to the self and a wedding as its commencement, to take place when they wish it to.

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Richard Ross:
...For teenagers who know Christ, that is a far stronger motivator than a desire to avoid disease and pregnancy. Risk avoidance is a weak motivator during adolescence, since the development of the brain's prefrontal cortex (which governs self-control) lags well behind the development of the amygdala (which drives emotions and impulses). Teenagers need to know about the risks of promiscuity, as well as about the benefits that total life purity brings. But the most powerful way to impact prom-night decisions is for parents, leaders, and peers to more fully awaken teenagers to God's Son, to invite them to make a promise to him, and to walk beside them in a journey toward purity.
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Labels: abstinence, Christianity, Christianity Today, Donna Freitas, Mark Regnerus, premarital sex, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 5:39 PM VOTE