Consenting to Sex Isn't Working and It's Killing Us

On Impossible Standards, Protecting Children, and Euthanasia

A university student once asked me to meet him for lunch. It was 2017, and I was the Chi Alpha director at the University of Iowa. This is how I facilitated pastoral conversations, with free food and free coffee. He looked at me across the table with a mix of bewilderment, anxiety, and fear. He told me he had had sex with a classmate. Two weeks later the cops were at his apartment door saying that he’d been reported for rape.

He told me she had consented. He said that he and she talked beforehand. That there wasn’t alcohol involved. And that while they were having sex she didn’t express any desire to stop. But then she ghosted him. And then the police came.

I don’t know how the story ended. The male student also ended up ghosting me and Chi Alpha. But I tell this story because it demonstrates in most certain terms that we’ve got a problem with consent in our sexual ethics.

The increasingly paganized West has reduced all sexual ethics to whether one consents to a particular act. “Do I give this person permission to sleep with me,” is (supposedly) the only question one needs to ask to decide whether it is good to do so. It’s the accepted standard amongst non-Christians, but it’s also leaking into the church. You all know the line: “Whatever happens between two consenting adults is nobody’s business but theirs.”

I think that’s a load of bologna. And not only because this student, like no doubt many students across the country, thought they were engaging in consensual sex only to have the police come knocking. Ultimately, I think consent has become a destructive ideology that’s taking root in all sorts of unfortunate and horrifying ways. But it all begins with how we’ve come to think about sex as being a mere matter of consent.

There are a number of ways to get at why making consent the sole and sufficient standard for sexual relations is dangerous and destructive, but let me begin with the case study I’ve already presented.

I’ll admit that I have no idea if this young man was lying to me. It’s possible he didn’t get consent from his classmate. It’s possible that he was a psychopath, only concerned for himself. I don't know why he wanted to talk to me about his situation if that was the case. All he asked for was emotional support. But I’ll admit it’s a possibility.

Nevertheless, let’s assume for argument’s sake that the young woman with whom he had slept had in fact verbalized, “I consent to have sex with you.” If she had said those words, there seems to be a few scenarios we can imagine that led her ultimately to contact the police. First, he might have done something untoward—violent, kinky, or something else—during the act itself that she felt she didn’t consent to, which, in her mind, meant that she didn’t consent to any of it anymore (and retrospectively). Second, she regretted her encounter with him, and she interpreted her regret as evidence that she couldn’t have consented to what happened even if she had given a verbal “yes.” Or, finally, she just didn’t have enough information or was somehow incapacitated from making an authentic decision.

Regardless of what happened, the result is that neither party could know in the moment that consent had actually been given. Even if he had done something untoward, if she didn’t say “no” to that particular moment or “no” to the event of sex itself, he couldn’t know. And clearly she couldn’t know if she had consented because she said she did, but then later said she didn’t.

The pickle this hookup found themselves in is symptomatic of the incredible difficulty of defining what we mean by consent. Search for university policies on consent, and you quickly realize both that there’s no standard definition and that every definition only engenders more questions. That, and they’re lengthy. Looking at some of the policies, I wonder how someone is supposed to account for all the elements of consent without having a list to check off before disrobing.

Take, for example, Loyola Marymount University, which has four tenants of consent: Clear, coherent, willing, and ongoing. There are ten bullet points under these tenants defining each of them. Not only does this turn every romantic encounter into a litigation, but the bullet points also engender impossible standards.

For example, one cannot be emotionally manipulated and consent. But what is emotional manipulation? How does one recognize it? And what if we deceive ourselves that we’re infatuated, not manipulated, but then realize months later that we’ve been sleeping with a narcissist who brought us into their orbit with charm only to control and conquer us?

Another standard is that one cannot consent if there is “an unbalanced power situation,” which would seem to prohibit most heterosexual relations. Are not most men physically more powerful than most women?

Loyola Marymount is careful to say (in sum) that “no” means “no.” But consider the University of Iowa’s policy that explicitly says that “no” in fact means “yes” in some contexts, such as in BDSM.

With the length and complexity of definitions, and contradictions from one to another, one really begins to wonder how useful the concept is for hookup culture.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think consent is important, I just don’t think it’s the sole and sufficient standard for determining whether two people should have sex with each other. Every time I preside at a wedding I ask for the bride and the groom’s consent. I, along with the whole church, want to make sure that they aren’t at the altar under compulsion. But all of that is only the precursor to the promise of the wedding vows, which is something significantly more than consent. And all of this is done publicly. Consent is given publicly; promises are made publicly. None of this is happening in the privacy of a college dorm room. Quite the opposite, actually.

There’s a lot more to say about how we define consent, what its place is in human relationships, who all should be involved, and what other verbal and non-verbal acts are necessary for a particular sexual union to be called “good.” But now that I’ve simply exposed that consent is an insufficient standard, I want to highlight a few ways consent has become an ideology that is failing us, hurting us, and ultimately killing us.

First, it’s failing the church as we continue to deal with sexual misconduct from influential leaders. The critique I routinely hear in these matters is that the pastor was in a powerful position. The woman he slept with was not. It’s never really said out loud, but the strong insinuation is that because of the power dynamic the pastor’s victim couldn’t and therefore didn’t consent to what happened. But, equally, I’ve yet to see a pundit simply call it what they’re implying it is: Rape. Why this is the case is probably because no one thinks that word describes what actually happened either. It supposedly wasn’t consensual, but it also wasn’t rape. Which leaves us with the impression that there’s a spectrum between rape and consent that sex can fall into. But in the end, that’s all we can say.

The problem with this approach is twofold. First, it lets one person entirely off the hook while entirely vilifying the other. That’s not to say that one might not be more responsible, but it isn’t proper pastoral care or Christian love to infantilize the laypeople involved by saying they had somehow lost their ability to say no to what was happening and so absolve them of any wrongdoing. We must be able to say that all adults, male and female, are responsible not to engage in sexually inappropriate behaviors, including with clergy. Some leaders are predators, there’s no doubt. If they’re predators, let’s call what they’ve done “sexual assault” and “rape” or some other word that describes the crime accurately. Clergy sexual misconduct is extremely serious. My point is that consent is an inadequate moral category to evaluate it. And, second, when we make consent the controlling element in the narrative, we lose moral ground to stand on when the parties involved end up saying that everything was in fact consensual. We’ve all heard of pastors who leave their spouses to marry someone else in the congregation. I worry we’re losing our ability to say that’s wrong.

Second, the ideology of consent is hurting our children. The claim that consent is the sole and sufficient standard for interpersonal relationships has rooted itself so deeply that the Iowa City public school was going to teach my second grader last year about the importance of consent. But children can’t consent. When I take my son to the doctor for a vaccination, I consent to the vaccine, not him. Even worse, one of the hallmarks of sexually abused children is that they think they were complicit in what happened to them. So by teaching children about consent, we’re really lending a hand to pedophiles whose regular tactic is to make the child think they’re in on what’s happening. After protesting the curriculum, I excused my son from the class. But they still taught it to the others.

Third, and finally, the ideology of consent is leading us to death. I wager that if we, as a society, had never decided that consent was the sole and sufficient standard for sex then we wouldn’t be legalizing euthanasia. The logic of euthanasia is straightforwardly, “I consent to dying, so you must let me die.” Euthanasia is merely our half-bake sexual ethics applied to end-of-life care.

How people in our churches think about sex has immediate consequences for how they think about all sorts of other things in life. We’re doing them a disservice by letting paganized society give them an anemic moral framework to make sense of their sex lives. The task is not only to deconstruct the absurdity of consent ideology like I’ve done here, but also to provide a better vision for our sex lives: Keep it in marriage, and keep marriage in the church. That way we keep things public, and we don’t limit our options for restoration and redemption to calling the cops.