Fifty Shades – You Deserve a Better Story

One of the few conversations I ever had with Christian theologian and ethicist Allen Verhey was about consent. He had come to sit on one of the benches just behind Duke Chapel and smoke his pipe and I was on a nearby bench sitting in the sun, waiting for class, and reading his book, Remembering Jesus. I had been thrown off balance a bit by his chapter on sexual ethics and so when he asked what I thought of his book I said as much. In that chapter he suggests that consent is hardly an adequate ethic. I told him that consent seemed like a great ethic to me. Dr. Verhey’s response – “Consent simply keeps it from being assault. That is not a good; and it is certainly not the good to which we are called.” Consent, in other words, is a minimalist ethic – it is the bottom beyond which we should not go, but it is hardly a worthy goal.