Today’s counterculture speaks with the voice of tradition, virtue, and religious commitment. There are now more than thirty LFN student groups from colleges across the United States (and Mexico). They uphold the idea that sex comes after marriage, that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that the natural family is the irreducible foundation of all civil societal associations. Like the ’60s radicals, they refuse to keep quiet. Yet unlike the ’60s radicals, they refuse with civility. They carry themselves with decorum and respect.

Hip. Suave. Chic.” These are not the words from a car commercial. They are what Princeton student Christian Say wants to pop into people’s heads when they think of the Princeton Anscombe Society. Named after the late British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, the Princeton Anscombe Society was started by Cassandra L. Hough and other Princeton undergrads in 2005 as a reform-minded reaction to the fact that on campus casual sex had become the norm. They chose Anscombe as their inspiration because, while bearing the trappings of an independent modern woman with her cigars and monocle, she defended so well Christian Sexual Ethics to secular audiences through reason alone. Likewise, the PAS sought to provide a rational voice for sexual integrity, conjugal marriage, and the significance of the family. Eventually, Mrs. Hough and others began receiving emails and letters from students across the country asking for advice on how to establish their own chapters. Thus the Love and Fidelity Network (LFN) was created.

When I first heard of Anscombe Societies, I recalled another generation of students: the ’60s counterculture student radicals. What formed their habits was a warlike refusal of silence. The dominant university culture of their time consisted of a form of technocratic liberalism. The students called it “The Establishment,” and denounced it as bourgeois and utilitarian, racist and sexist. They drew direct lines between their professors, labeled “New Mandarins,” and the experts running the war in Vietnam. Their reaction to the Establishment wasn’t reasoned protest, however. Instead, they acted adversarially, rejecting not just bourgeois values, but academic ones as well. They adopted bohemian lifestyles and behaviors (sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll . . .) added a splash of anarchy (taking over the dean’s office), and demanded that the elders respect them for it.

Needless to say, their success was swift and thorough. Today, the whole set-up is reversed. The counterculture of the 1960s is the culture of the 2010s. In 1951, Bill Buckley complained that Yale professors did not sufficiently revere individualism and God. Today the ’60s counterculture has long marched beyond that through collegiate institutions. Sexual liberation, Irving Kristol writes, “is always near the top of a countercultural agenda,” whose real object “is to disestablish the family as the central institution of human society, the citadel of orthodoxy.”

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