By Mallory Mattingly
In a new episode of The Kirk Cameron Show, Cameron and his son, James, discussed consent and morality.
Cameron began by asking the question, “If two people consent to doing something, does that make it automatically good or moral?”
“I think this is a really important conversation because we look at consensual permission as all we need to do anything, especially if you’re two adults,” Cameron continued. “You know, you can’t really talk about the consent of children because they’re not of age to really make the kind of wise, responsible decisions and understand how it impacts their lives. But essentially, two adults can engage in all kinds of activity, even creepy, weird stuff that is self-destructive, but in some countries, it’s perfectly legal to do it as long as you have consent.”
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James began thinking about this topic after listening to a sermon by John MacArthur.
In the sermon, MacArthur had discussed “that sin isn’t just doing something that is wrong, but it’s taking something that doesn’t belong to you, that you have no right to. It is not yours to take.”
“And by that, you are overreaching God and getting rid of his plan and his path to try to impose your will on something that you want in the moment right now,” James said.
That thinking from MacArthur challenged James to “think of relationships, and then it led into the idea of consent in a relationship.”
“I think so many times we think of consent as being almost horizontal. It’s between me and the person I’m in the relationship with,” James explained. “If we both agree that this thing is acceptable and we both have a desire to do this thing, it almost, in today’s culture, makes it seem as though it is good or it is okay. It’s permissible because of the idea of consent.
“But through reading the Bible, understanding the depravity of man’s heart, along with experiencing the depravity within my heart and seeing the depravity within other people’s hearts, also comes the recognition that people make bad decisions,” he continued. “People are broken. People do things that they shouldn’t do, and they give consent where they shouldn’t be giving consent.”
“So the idea of horizontal consent, me between you, if we both say it’s right or wrong, has a lot of room for error because we are full of error. We are full of depravity and bad decision-making,” he added.
Kirk and his son James challenged viewers to think of their sin as taking something that doesn’t belong to them. They then discussed this in the realm of relationships and consent.
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