Culture Friday: “Consent is not enough”

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, October 9, 2026.

This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio, celebrating 15 years.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday.

Joining us now, author, speaker, and co-host of Reality Check on WORLD Watch, Katie McCoy.

Katie, good morning to you.

KATIE MCCOY: Good morning, Nick and Myrna.

EICHER: Well, Katie, we need to begin with a really difficult story. This has to do with disturbing allegations out of Cornell University. A former student says that seven fraternity members sexually assaulted her in 2024 after she became heavily intoxicated with alcohol and drugs. Cornell expelled or suspended some of the students, but no criminal charges followed that. Well, now there is a lawsuit, a reopened criminal investigation, and tremendous pressure on the leadership of Cornell. The allegations, of course, contested. There are legal questions still to resolve.

But I want to get at something deeper, Katie. We have built a sexual ethic around a single word. The single word being consent. If consenting adults are involved, that’s all that matters. But how did we get there, and what does it leave out?

MCCOY: This story is so disturbing on so many levels. We won’t get into the legal issues of it. Obviously, it’s so entangled legally, but we can speak concretely about the moral issues. Broadly speaking, our culture views sex only as a physical act; that there is no intrinsic meaning to it, that there is nothing higher than satisfying a biological urge, and what we see is that sex has been disconnected from any type of responsibility, and that freedom means complete freedom from obligation.

As a result, the only thing that is determining whether an act is legal or not, or even moral or not, is simply whether the people involved consented. But you can have situations where people have consented, and yet it is still violating their dignity. It’s still a situation where a person was used as a sexual object, or perhaps the person didn’t feel free to leave.

Louise Perry, before she professed Christ, wrote an incredible book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and she described how consent is not enough. Consent and honor are different categories, so consent may help as a legal defense, but it’s not a moral defense.

She says there are a few other aspects to this, Nick, that I think the story is bringing up to our cultural consciousness. One particular aspect for me is what I think about this in relationship to all of Christian history, and here’s what I mean by that: the reason that we find this so reprehensible, the reason that you saw protests on Cornell University’s campus, is because of the influence of Christianity on our own cultural history.

What we’re seeing come out of this story, it is reminiscent to me of classical Rome, a culture that viewed whether something is right as whether you had the power and status to do it, and the culture into which the church was born believed that the bodies of the physically and socially weaker people, they just existed to serve the urges of more powerful people, and that the intrinsic vulnerability of the female body is just a tool to serve the more physically powerful.

At base level, people were just commodities, and we hear some of the things coming out about this story. We see the texts that refer to this woman as “a shop that was open.” That is a distinctly pagan view of sexuality. I don’t just mean that it’s not religious or not Christian or not godless. I mean pagan in the sense that it is all about power.

The reality is, had the Cornell Seven case happened in ancient Rome, no one would have batted an eye. It wouldn’t have even registered on the scale of social outrage because sexual objectification in a pagan mindset is what women are for. It is only because of the influence of Christianity that people are outraged, and here is where this rubber meets the road for us, Nick, is that we cannot have Christianity’s effects on society without Christianity’s claims on reality.

You cannot have the influence of the Christian faith without the moral framework that produces it and the obligations that that plays. If we try that, we just end up with what Os Guinness and others have called that cut-flower situation. You’ve severed it from your roots, and it’s just dying a slow death. And that’s what we’re seeing.

BROWN: Katie, I want to ask something that I think we’ve become—I don’t know—almost afraid to say. Here it is: Women have agency too. We make choices, and some choices carry terrible risks: alcohol, drugs, putting yourself in a vulnerable situation.

Now, hear me. None of that excuses sexual assault. Absolutely not. But Katie, how do we talk honestly to young women about prudence and personal responsibility without being accused of blaming the victim?

MCCOY: Such a great question and a very delicate one because, as you said, these young men had agency as well. None of them stopped what they witnessed happening. In fact, they allegedly encouraged it among each other.

I saw a fascinating article in The Free Press to that very question, Myrna, is that apparently women are actually more difficult on other women for putting themselves in those situations, and it’s because we understand our intrinsic physical vulnerability. That is something that is by God’s design, that we are physically more vulnerable, and also by God’s design is that men who are physically stronger would protect the vulnerability of women.

Some of what we are seeing is the result of a very sex-positive culture, and you can go online and read how Cornell University was encouraging these things among their students. I don’t mean encouraging sexual assault, but I mean encouraging just total license, free from obligation.

And it is as though it is so disconnected from reality to think: Do we not believe that has consequences when we hear about the alarming number of young girls who report being choked during sexual activity because of a results of pornography? When we hear about a 2020 study done on the heterosexual content on Pornhub found that 45% of it included sexual aggression, some type of sexual violence?

We live in what some secular people are calling a pornocracy. We are being ruled by pornography as a political and cultural force, and this has massive effects on our view of human dignity. It certainly reinforces the idea that sex is just sex; it’s just satisfying a bodily urge. That there’s no innate dignity to human bodies, and so this question of agency, we cannot separate it from how pornified our culture has become, how normalized it is to accept sexual violence, and then how our culture has told women that even putting themselves in a situation like this can still somehow, as long as they consent to it, not be a violation of their dignity.

The reality is, even if she had consented, it still would not only be wrong, but it would have been dehumanizing and degrading to her.

BROWN: Well, Katie, last month, women from around the country gathered in Rochester, New York, to launch what they’re calling a new women’s movement. Scholar Erika Bachiochi helped organize it, and you mentioned Louise Perry. I’m pretty sure she was one of the speakers at this event.

They signed something called a Declaration of Interdependence, deliberately echoing the women’s rights movement that began at Seneca Falls in 1848. Here’s their argument: Modern feminism has gone badly wrong in treating independence as the highest good, and they want to recover a view of women, men, marriage, children, and family obligations as goods worth protecting.

Katie, you know feminist history. Is this an effort to recover something the original women’s movement understood, but later feminism lost, or is it really something new here?

MCCOY: When I read the statement, I was very impressed. It’s incredibly scholarly, philosophically grounded. What the argument of interdependence has to rest on, however, is something that we find exclusively in Genesis one and two. Now we know it from common sense and human nature. Human beings are sexually reproducing species; they are interdependent upon each other.

However, the connection between interdependence and design, the fact that we are made to be interdependent, not just to produce children, that is something that is deeply ingrained in us at the cellular level, and it is established in the creation narrative.

I have to tell you, Myrna, I wasn’t able to make it to the conference that led—that was this event, but it’s probably good. I would have embarrassed myself fangirling over all of the female scholars there. It was a who’s who of conservative women scholars, an incredible lineup.

The one thing I would say, and I think many of them would probably agree, is that you cannot have the moral claims that that statement rests upon without transcendent theological truths to ground them in. Secularism will not produce the view of humanity that their declaration espouses.

Now, the good thing about it, I think we can learn from history, is back in 1995, a group of individuals created something called the International Bill of Gender Rights, and it was some 25 years later that their assertions became mainstream. And so, one thing that I think we could find with this declaration is it might take about a generation. It could take decades before we see advocacy and publishing follow suit.

But it could signal a concerted cultural effort, one that we have certainly seen in secular issues, things that normalized transgenderism, transsexualism, and all of the so-called rights for gender identity. Could we be seeing that in a different direction with this particular declaration? Time will tell, but it’s a really good step.

EICHER: Katie, before we go, I want to talk about a story out of Canada that really caught my attention. It had to do with a woman in her 70s. She was the matriarch of the family, and you can imagine this—presiding over these great Sunday dinners, and that was one of the great joys of her life: cooking Sunday dinner for everyone.

But she got sick, and illness took away her ability to do that, and with it, she began to lose her sense of worth. Now, the medical condition she had qualified her, and I use that term advisedly, qualified her for assisted death under Canadian law. But after conversations with her family and doctors, she decided to postpone the assisted death.

But that detail about Sunday dinner, I couldn’t shake it. Katie, what happens to our understanding of human dignity when someone can no longer do the things that have given meaning to their lives?

MCCOY: Yeah, this was a heartbreaking story. First, I’m really glad that her family helped reinforce to her that she mattered more than her ability to cook Sunday dinners. Without dismissing the importance of that, it’s a beautiful legacy to leave for your family.

But when I heard this story, I thought, what a picture of the difference between utility and contribution. We are all made for contribution, but the substance and worth of our lives is not in utility. This woman’s utility may have changed as she aged, as she developed an illness, but her ability to contribute to the lives of her family and to others did not.

She is still, regardless of her condition, as Psalm eight says, made a little lower than the angels, and regardless of her ability, she still has the ability to contribute to the lives of others. How? Well, this gets down to the question of what is life for? What are we here for? And we are all here to contribute, but how we are able to do that in different seasons of life can change.

What we are ultimately all here for is to know, love, and serve God and others. Is there a way that she can do that, even though it changes in terms of her ability to fulfill the things that she used to love? Of course, she can find that. We can all find that in the season that God has placed us.

The sense of helplessness, the decline in our bodies. Ultimately, it is preparation for our souls because our bodies weren’t designed to go on forever in this life. They were designed to be resurrected and with the Lord, and I also think it’s a great opportunity for us to recognize, as we all have aging parents, that what an opportunity to honor those who cared for us when we had no utility, when we had no ability to add something or fill some type of responsibility, and yet our lives had value because of the relationship that we had to our family.

And so I’m just so happy to know that her family intervened and clearly helped persuade her to realize that the substance and meaning of her life was not in her utility; it was in her relationship that she had with others.

BROWN: Author, speaker, and co-host of Reality Check on WORLD Watch, Katie McCoy. Katie, thank you. We will talk again soon, but in the meantime, best wishes on season two of Reality Check.

MCCOY: Thank you. Always good to be with you.

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