Does The Biblical God Care About Consent?

Occasionally, I have encountered the bizarre claim that the Bible (and the Old Testament more specifically) views women as inferior to men and does not care about their consent in sexual acts, even supporting male sexual dominance of women.  The critics voicing this attack argue that the Bible represents outdated views on gender relations and sex for this and many other reasons.  As a knowledgable Christian, this idiotic assertion strikes me as both laughable for its nonsense and terrifying for its ignorant disregard of key passages.  There are three main Biblical categories I can appeal to for the refutation of this erroneous claim.  No, I am not imposing my own moral preference about consent or the 21st century cultural view of it onto any of these passages.  Instead, the Bible has taught that consent is crucial all along.


Rape

God clearly despises forced sex so much that he designated it a capital crime in Deuteronomy 22:25-27.  As I have shown in another article:

"Contrary to the view that some people hold about rape, it was something that received at least condemnation equal to that of murder.  God did not say that the victim should be told not to dress a certain way so that she wouldn't "ask for it", or that rape is terrible but the suffering it inflicts is not as evil as acts of murder, or that rape was excusable in any way." [1]

More than one story documenting cases of rape exists in the Bible [2], but one does not need to scrutinize the contexts and narratives hard to discover that God never approved of any of the rapes, and Mosaic Law directly testifies to his strict abhorrence of such an act.  This fact alone demonstrates irrefutably that God cared about sexual consent quite a bit more than secular people imagine, but it is not even all that can be extracted from the Bible on this issue.


Bestiality

Bestiality is condemned multiple times in the Old Testament and is also categorized as a capital crime [3], but what few people immediately consciously realize is that at least a large percentage of the time bestiality is basically nonconsensual sex with, or rape of, an animal.  Even if not some act of particularly violent or brutal rape, it is similar to having sex with a child, who is unable to give informed consent.  And most children can at least speak and form actual words even if they cannot understand enough to say no or to know that they are being exploited, while animals cannot even do that.  They possess no developed speech with which to object.  God decided to make it quite clear on multiple occasions that sexually assaulting or sexually using even an animal so violates his moral nature that the civil government must execute the man or woman who commits bestiality.


Marriage

Lest opponents of Scripture say that though the Bible condemns rape of animals or someone else's spouse it does not condemn marital rape, I can fully prove otherwise.  1 Corinthians 7:3-5 directly pertains to this issue.

1 Corinthians 7:3-5--"The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.  The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband.  In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.  Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer."

Obviously, mutual consent between both spouses is deeply important to a healthy sexual and emotional relationship.  In fact, both spouses, the man and the woman, are given the responsibility of agreeing on what sexual acts to engage in and when to stop, and in a wonderful egalitarian manner Paul explicitly declares both to have loving possession of each other's bodies.  Far from allowing men to forcefully dominate a woman's body, Paul explained that both husband and wife share equal authority in their consent.

So even in marriage, and one might add especially in marriage, God ensured that we know he will not ignore marital rape just because it occurs in a context of marriage.  All sexual activities in marriage must not degrade, threaten, or harm either spouse.  Consent IS morally mandatory.  Surprisingly, spousal rape was not legally recognizable as a legitimate offense until far too recently in American history [4], but God's moral nature has always prohibited it.


Conclusion

So the three most relevant Scriptural passages on sexual consent cover extremely important areas.  No one is to sexually force themselves on a neighbor, an animal, or a spouse.  For those that do, God has called for the proportionate punishment of the death penalty.  Indeed, the Bible teaches the exact opposite of the position on consent that many new atheists and secular critics pretend is conveyed.  While deeper reflections on this point could be made, a simple and brief evaluation of the passages inspected above is the only thing necessary to quickly correct this misunderstanding.

The myth that the Bible does not address sexual consent at all and the even more destructive lie that the Old Testament God doesn't care about it must not simply be exposed but also obliterated through confrontation with the blatant facts.  Those who accuse the Bible of neglecting consent or deeming it unnecessary are guilty of a fallacious straw man argument that collapses entirely when examined properly.



[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/06/slavery.html

[2].  See Genesis 34, 2 Samuel 13, and Judges 19.  In Judges, the particular case of heartbreaking gang rape and sexual abuse recorded in the text incited an army to seek to destroy an entire tribe for not handing over the rapists to be executed as according to Deuteronomy 22:25-27.

[3].  See Exodus 22:19 and Leviticus 20:15-16 for passages fastening the death penalty to bestiality.  In addition to these verses that provide the punishment, two other verses condemn bestiality without mentioning the penalty.

[4].  "Rape—any nonconsensual sexual intercourse— between non-spouses has always been illegal. However, until 1975, every state had a 'marital exemption' that allowed a husband to rape his wife without fear of legal consequences."--http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/marital-rape-laws.html