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On the first night of December, an unseasonably cold one in the Ozarks, the boys and girls of John Brown University primped in their zoot suits, suspenders, waistcoats, spats, faux-hawks, pompadours, knee-length pleated skirts, nylons, snoods and inch-high black heels and marched through snow drifts to their gymnasium in the Walton Lifetime Health Complex, one of northwest Arkansas’s monuments to the Wal-Mart family’s generosity. Inside, the gymnasium was decorated with rows of Christmas lights strung overhead across the width of the basketball court, from one railing of the mezzanine jogging track to the other. The occasion, which would last from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., was a dance, the first of its kind at this small, nondenominational Christian college.
Taking the Sin out of Swing Students at John Brown University in Arkansas high-stepped into the school’s first dance ever last month.
As if to make up for 90 essentially dance-free years on campus, the 14-piece Jack Mitchell Big Band began playing early, shortly before 8, and from the first note of “In the Mood” the best dancers clustered up front, where they performed aerial lifts, between-the-leg slides and precarious dips, looking like a reasonably good audition for “So You Think You Can Dance” or the great “khakis swing” Gap ad from 1998. These joyful, loose-limbed performances concealed a rather startling truth. The young men and women of this 1,200-person college were dancing alongside, and in some cases bumping smack into, their president, dean and chaplain — the men who only six months ago could have expelled them for doing so. From the school’s founding in 1919 by John Brown Sr. — not the abolitionist but a Salvation Army itinerant turned preacher — until last October, dancing had been seen at J.B.U. as a gateway to sin. Students danced, but in private.
The school’s “community covenant” had prohibited, in addition to smoking, sex outside of marriage, drinking and gambling, all on-campus dancing except “folk or square dancing and choreography as part of a dramatic production.” Distinctions were not made — the Viennese waltz was as forbidden as the electric slide, the achy-breaky as taboo as the lambada. The week before J.B.U.’s first dance, Tracie Faust, a senior, told me about one night her sophomore year when a popular song came on the radio. “And before you knew it,” she said, “there were 10 of us dancing, and the R.A. came out of her room and told us to stop.” The offending song? “Breakaway,” by the adult-lite American Idol Kelly Clarkson.
J.B.U.’s about-face, while abrupt, was not totally unexpected. In the past 10 years, several of America’s most established evangelical schools, including Baylor University in Texas, Wheaton College in Illinois and Cornerstone University in Michigan, have lifted restrictions on dancing, even as they have kept various rules against activities like drinking,gambling, smoking and, of course, premarital sex. They are opting to allow formal dances, like swing or ballroom. Of course, it’s unlikely there will be hip-hop or bump-and-grind at J.B.U. They will not be krumping. But for millions of evangelical Protestants, dancing has become increasingly acceptable. There are still conservative Christians, particularly in Baptist, Pentecostal and independent Bible-church traditions, who don’t dance, but they are growing scarce. The old joke about why Baptists won’t have sex standing up — because people might think they’re dancing — has become antiquated.
“I was part of a group of girls who would put on music in our rooms and dance, and were asked to stop,” Jennifer Paulsen told me. Paulsen is the student-government president who helped persuade the trustees to overturn the ban. It was three days before the dance, and we were talking in the Walker Student Center, J.B.U.’s main hub. “We knew there was ‘no social dancing,’ but what did that mean? We knew folk and square dancing was allowed, and people will always move a little if a good song comes on, but how many people makes a dance?”
In my week at J.B.U., I met students who had never had a drink, had never kissed a boy or a girl and had no doubt that dinosaurs and men walked the earth at the same time. But I didn’t meet a soul who thought dancing was sinful. And nearly all the students I spoke to danced in high school. So last summer, newly elected to her post, Jennifer and her cabinet decided that it was time for dancing at J.B.U. to come out of the closet. Jennifer is an activist by nature — raised in Seattle, she looks like the outdoorsy girl you see on every campus in the Pacific Northwest, the one on the climbing wall who lobbies for more vegetarian dishes in the dining hall. Her three big passions in life are “infectious diseases, the environment and women’s issues.”
When Jennifer raised the issue of dancing with Steven Beers, the dean of students, he was surprisingly receptive to a change. “The subculture had shifted,” Beers, a quiet man who avoids seeming like the campus disciplinarian he is, told me. Beers, who is 47, knows the subculture well: his father was a dean at Taylor University, a Christian college in Indiana that still forbids most dancing on campus. “Christian junior highs or high schools, even churches, were allowing swing dancing on their property,” Beers said. “The evangelical subculture is no longer seeing all forms of social dancing as evil.”
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