College students hook up and have sex. That is what many students expect to happen during their time at university—it is part of growing up and navigating the relationship scene on most American campuses today. But what do you do when you’re a student at an evangelical university? Students at these schools must negotiate a barrage of religiously imbued undercurrents that impact how they think about relationships, in addition to how they experience and evaluate them. As they work to form successful unions, students at evangelical colleges balance sacred ideologies of purity, holiness, and godliness, while also dealing with more mainstream notions of popularity, the online world, and the appeal of sexual intimacy. 

In From Single to Serious, Dana M. Malone shines a light on friendship, dating, and, sexuality, in both the ideals and the practical experiences of heterosexual students at U. S. evangelical colleges. She examines the struggles they have in balancing their gendered and religious presentations of self, the expectations of their campus community, and their desire to find meaningful romantic relationships. 
 

DANA M. MALONE is an independent scholar and consultant in the Philadelphia area.

 

"Christian college and university administrators, staff, faculty, and student leaders will all benefit from considering the results of Malone’s study."

"Sometimes insider information makes all the difference. Dana Malone does not disappoint in this carefully analytic description of the relationship culture on evangelical Protestant campuses. Malone painstakingly describes the dating—and sometimes mating—rituals that characterize this American subculture. It is, as she says, about navigating 'a minefield of contradictory messages,' rules, norms, and codes. Conventional ideas of masculinity and femininity are certainly not dead. The book reminds me of the ways in which American youth aren't just polarized politically, but culturally around the oldest of institutions—marriage—and the most primal of practices, sex."