Individual Christian novelists may make appeals to moral principles, but rarely do they band together to pledge anything in particular. Sometimes it is hard even to get them to condemn a clearly titillating passage in a novel as being pornographic. If we can discern no difference in substance and not just in degree between Fifty Shades of Grey and Dante’s sexually suggestive line of “That day we read no more,” then we have lost our ability to judge anything. (No, I’m not pointing fingers. And yes, I’m exaggerating for effect.)
If we cannot agree that freedom does not extend to passages meant to incite the reader to lust, then one suspects there is little point in discussing other areas of potential moral error (e.g., glorifying crime, describing how to commit crimes, exploiting cruelty and violence, mocking the sacred, blasphemy, racial ridicule, etc.). I am not arguing that all such areas are equally wrong to depict, nor wrong in every situation, but that is part of the problem. We lack the moral subtlety required to discern between these areas, and so we tend towards blanket allowance or blanket condemnation.
- Jonathan McDonald, Purifying the Source
