Rebels Accept No Substitute

It’s a lonely world out there for young conservatives on campus. Finding friends is hard enough, but finding love? Surely that’s impossible. It’s a shared assumption among conservative students that they will find their significant other through church or other institutions rather than at school. The only problem with this strategy is that the churches themselves are often empty of young people.

For the young conservative, the question of finding love can be a depressing one. Yes we have our clubs and small groups where we huddle together and find like-minded people who share our subversive views of the world, but the pool is often small. There is the additional complication that among people who take religion and society seriously, the smallest of philosophical or religious differences can spawn the greatest of arguments. In my undergraduate days, I loosely considered myself a Wesleyan but was already feeling a strong pull toward Anglo-Catholicism. When I began dating a devout Calvinist, it should have been obvious that relationship was predestined to fail. Ties that arise out of political convenience do not necessarily translate into the bonds of healthy romantic intimacy.

Despite the particular hardships faced by conservatives on campus, it still falls to them to witness to love’s power in the world. Conservative philosophy is built on the classical virtues, of which the greatest is love. In an environment where the hookup culture reigns and lust is confused for love, the conservative student stands apart. Rather than the quick and easy method of dating practiced by their peers, we conservatives and Christians must order our lives knowing that love is difficult. It takes work. Attempting to love forces us to come face to face with our own shortcomings. True love makes us more conservative, in that by doing it we bind our desires for the sake of another.

The standard that love sets is a high one, but even in an environment where finding love at all seems impossible, our abstention from the life of hookups and cheap sex can be a testament to the love we believe awaits us. Even if we are not immediately blessed with the opportunity to form a relationship set apart from the culture around us, we can still set ourselves apart. We can rebel against the prevailing ethos by insisting that lust is no substitute for love.