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?”

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