By RAY WADDLE

At a secular college, students go to a party feeling pressure to find someone to spend the rest of the night with.

At an evangelical college, students go to a party under pressure to find someone to spend the rest of their lives with.

One of the nation’s great, unspoken cultural divides has a back-to-school theme: the separation of sex and religion on college campuses, as scholar Donna Freitas discovered.

On secular campuses students talk openly about sex but not religion. At evangelical schools, references to God abound alongside vast silences about the hormonal complications of romance.

The pattern reflects parallel campus universes. Call it hookup culture versus Bible culture – the secular expectation of casual sex, versus a doctrinal culture that instructs kids to skip dating and get ready for wedlock.

In her new book, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America’s College Campuses, Freitas says she didn’t realize how marginal religious influence is in sexual matters today.

“Evangelicals aside, most students live their sexual lives as if … their religious and spiritual commitments simply do not matter,” she writes.

“This separation of religion and sex … has important consequences, not least of which is the inability of most religious affiliations to effectively empower youth to resist the sexual excesses of both college hookup culture and mainstream American popular culture.”

Freitas, who teaches religion at Boston University, surveyed hundreds of students and visited seven (unnamed) colleges. Nowhere did she find many students who could talk about both God and sex.

One student, Amy – attractive, straight A’s -- reluctantly endures hookup culture, a series of superficial physical encounters (not always sex). She sampled a theme party – “CEOs and office ho’s” – where guys wear business suits, gals mere lingerie. Amy wants a serious relationship but says women dress sexy to boost their own self-esteem and wield their power. (If this is feminism, never has it been so welcome by the traditional college boy.) She is religious, but never got sexual morality from church.

By contrast, evangelical schools nurture strong faith communities and mutual support. But talk of sex is often agonized. There’s an expectation to marry – soon. There’s ambivalence about ideals of purity. Pornography isn’t unknown. One boy said female sexuality can destroy a man’s spirituality.

Perhaps daily life has gotten too fast and sexy for religious teaching to challenge. Corporate profit is built on the quaint idea that easy sex is uncomplicated and does no damage to young women or young men.

Freitas charts the new campus landscape frankly and sensitively – a useful book to students, parents, administrators and the churches that apparently fail them.