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You argue that purity culture is the dominant mode of thinking about sexuality on evangelical campuses. Why do you find it problematic?

Both young men and women within purity culture experience enormous pressure to erase sexual desire completely. While there's a lot of support for students to think about what purity means and how to maintain it, the real question is, What happens when they don't? What happens when they fall short or make a mistake? It can have a shattering effect on their relationship with God and, often, their relationship with the larger community. For both men and women, this leaves them silent. I interviewed students for whom I was the only person they had told about what they were doing; they had no idea whom to talk to about it.

Then there's the issue of "ring by spring or your money back" or the "senior scramble," which I encountered across the board at the evangelical colleges. It is largely something that falls on women's shoulders. In purity culture, college is a place where women are supposed to find a husband, almost to a point that to them it seems more important than their education. I encountered a real fear among women that they wouldn't have that ring. Even though they didn't necessarily agree with this standard, they all experienced the pressure to get engaged. I think this expectation is amazing—that to be married by the time you graduate is not only part of what it means to be a good Christian girl, but also a good Christian college graduate.

But there are also positive elements of purity culture, especially born-again virginity. A lot of people in the non-evangelical world laugh at the idea that a person could wake up one morning and declare themselves a renewed virgin. But I met students who spent years becoming born-again virgins. I feel like it's not widely advocated enough: people who spend a lot of time reflecting on their sexual experience, repairing their relationship with God, doing so with a mentor, and then getting themselves in a place where they're not denying they were sexually active, but they're owning it. They're saying, "I'm spiritually pure again, and I'm going to be confident about it."

I may not love all of [born-again virginity], but I think it's a way out of hookup culture. People need conversion or redemption narratives for their sexual experiences and their sexual pasts. Those are really absent on the spiritual campuses.

Most evangelicals would say that students on spiritual campuses not only need redemption narratives—they need redemption itself. In a sense, students need more than the story that makes change possible.

This is to me where the real hope lies for students at spiritual schools. The other piece of my survey was that I found that students across the board register a tremendous amount of religious desire during their college experience, and some begin to see spirituality as a way they can begin to change their lives and their pasts. The question is, Will universities pay attention to that religious desire and try to give students resources to have conversations about what to do with that desire?

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August 2008, Vol. 52, No. 8