Introduction
The contemporary world speaks the language of consent with a kind of exhausted fluency. Every entry into a platform, every employment portal, every welfare recertification, every medical intake, every border crossing and every chat window is framed by a request to agree. We are asked to click, to sign, to acknowledge that we have read, to accept that we understand what is being done to our bodies, our data, our time, and our relations. At the same time, those who design and govern these systems increasingly rely on forms of automation and experimental governance that move faster and further than any plausible understanding of informed agreement. Consent appears everywhere in language and almost nowhere in structure. This book begins from a simple and offensive thesis: in most of the sites where contemporary institutions speak of consent, what is in fact being staged is a liturgy of non consent, a ritual that launders asymmetry, saturation, and dispossession into the appearance of mutual recognition. The argument is offensive in the precise sense that it refuses to treat these gaps as marginal defects in otherwise legitimate orders and instead treats them as central features of how twenty first century institutions organize vulnerability and power.
This volume is the fourth movement in a larger investigation that has followed exhaustion, saturation, liminality, and sacramental intelligence through the body, the nervous system, and the architectures of attention. Those earlier works stayed close to experience: the anxious worker whose every keystroke is logged, the student whose learning is turned into behavioral data, the friend whose grief is pulled into endless availability. Their argument was that modern regimes of optimization do not simply consume time or labor; they eat through the interior life itself until presence becomes almost indistinguishable from performance. The present book turns toward the institutions that scaffold this condition. It asks what it would mean to design and inhabit institutions of sacramental consent under regimes that are saturated by data extraction, actuarial risk, and algorithmic sorting, regimes that already treat consent language as a flexible instrument for risk management rather than as an ethic of mutual answering.
The term “sacramental consent” is intentionally theological and institutional rather than psychological. It does not name a feeling of peace when one signs a form, nor an inward sense of being at ease with what a platform or state demands. It names a way of binding the act of asking and the act of answering to a thicker grammar of reverence, mutual visibility, and shared risk. In sacramental practice, a vow is not meaningful simply because it is uttered. It is meaningful because it is embedded in a form that makes it possible for that promise to be witnessed, remembered, contested, and renewed. The central wager of this book is that consent has been evacuated of this sacramental thickness. Instead of a practice that structures the conditions under which one person may ask something of another, it has become a kind of administrative incantation layered over systems that have already decided what will happen. To recover sacramental consent is not to baptize existing forms of opt in and opt out. It is to ask whether the liturgical and doctrinal resources of sacrament, attention, and responsibility can be used to design institutions that actually honor refusal, ambiguity, and liminality rather than treating them as errors.
The book is written from a position of structural limitation that must be named plainly at the outset. I do not possess ethnographic access to the hidden interiors of the corporations, agencies, and vendors that design the systems I analyze. I do not sit in their design meetings, and I do not read their code. I live under administrative regimes that are opaque by design. Their internal deliberations are shielded by trade secrecy, national security, and the soft secrecy of professional culture. Hannah Arendt teaches that political judgment under such conditions must begin from what appears, from the surface where actions leave traces that can be seen, narrated, and contested. In The Human Condition she insists that the space of appearance has its own dignity and danger, because action is visible there yet responsibility can be diffused and displaced across many hands. Simone Weil, in a different register, writes of the obligation to pay attention with whatever available light is offered rather than waiting for a clarity that will never come. To write under opaque and saturated regimes is to accept this constraint as part of the object of study, not as an external inconvenience. The book therefore takes as its primary materials not leaked internal memos but the available archive: public policy documents, contracts, court filings, regulatory guidance, investigative journalism, technical standards, and the traces that surface when people resist.
The method of the book follows three interwoven strands. First, it reads institutional traces as theologico political texts. A welfare eligibility rubric, a workplace analytics dashboard, a predictive policing contract or a migration risk score are not treated simply as technical artifacts. They are read as condensed doctrines about what a person is, what they may be asked to endure, and what counts as a meaningful “yes.” Saidiya Hartman’s reading of “scenes of subjection” as ordinary settings where domination is rehearsed and normalized provides one model for this approach: the archive of consent is approached as an archive of liturgies in which the enslaved, the poor, the racialized, and the disabled are invited to participate in their own dispossession. Second, the book constructs explicit sacramental consent institutions as thought experiments. These imagined workplaces, agencies, and clinics are not utopian blueprints. They are intentionally constrained by the harms and failures documented in the first strand and are interrogated using the severity of political theory, law, and formal reasoning. They function as transparent models whose structure can be questioned in detail. Third, the book descends into the micro practices of consent and refusal in friendship, community, and interior life, asking how attention, acknowledgment, complaint, and silence already enact sacramental consent or its refusal in the smallest theaters of agency. These practices are not decorations at the edge of institutional design. They are the sites where institutional forms either acquire moral reality or remain abstract.
I call these three strands archive, construction, and micropractice, and they structure the four movements and twelve chapters of the book. The first movement, “Scenes of Broken Consent,” contains three chapters that assemble an archive of emblematic episodes in which consent is claimed yet structurally void. The second movement, “Institutions at the Altar,” contains three chapters that build sacramental consent institutions as explicit thought experiments. The third movement, “The Smallest Theaters of Agency,” gathers three chapters that trace consent and refusal in friendships, communities, and interior life. The fourth movement, “Nonreformist Reforms of Consent,” returns to the archive with the tools of construction and micropractice in hand, testing whether sacramental consent can offer any non naive reframing of institutional design under saturated regimes. These twelve chapters are followed by a concluding coda that refuses completion and treats sacramental consent as an orientation rather than an achieved state.
The first movement begins with welfare automation and public benefits systems in the United States and Europe, sites where the language of consent is thick while meaningful choice is thin. Drawing on documentary work on automated eligibility systems and digital welfare, the opening chapter treats policy manuals, vendor contracts, algorithmic scoring rubrics, and complaint records as a single liturgy. It asks what is being worshipped when eligibility is determined by opaque scores, when claimants must agree to data collection they cannot see, and when any refusal effectively voids survival. Virginia Eubanks’s analysis of automated decision making in welfare and public assistance, Ruha Benjamin’s work on race and technology, and Dorothy Roberts’s analyses of family policing form part of the intellectual spine for this chapter, though the argument insists on close reading of primary documents rather than secondary commentary.
The second chapter in this movement turns to workplace analytics and the quantified worker. Here the book engages Ifeoma Ajunwa’s legal and sociohistorical account of worker quantification, which shows how workplace technologies convert employees into continuous sources of behavioral and biometric data and how the law often lags behind these changes. The chapter reads consent forms, employment agreements, and vendor promotional materials as doctrinal statements about what a worker is and what counts as voluntary agreement under conditions of unemployment risk, immigration precarity, and racial hierarchy. It pairs Ajunwa’s work with Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism, which names the systematic appropriation of human experience as raw material for predictive products, and Helen Nissenbaum’s articulation of “contextual integrity,” which insists that privacy and permission must be evaluated within concrete social contexts rather than through abstract formulas. In this reading, the routine “I agree” in workplace portals appears as a ritual of acquiescence to opaque monitoring that cannot plausibly be refused without severe cost.
The third chapter in the first movement examines policing and migration control, particularly predictive policing platforms and risk based border regimes. Drawing on work in sociolegal studies, anthropology, and critical race theory, this chapter asks how consent operates in settings where the primary subject is never asked anything at all, but is instead tracked, routed, flagged, and excluded. Here consent appears in contracts between states and vendors, in data sharing agreements, and in public facing discourses about safety and risk. The chapter reads these documents as a liturgy in which entire neighborhoods and populations are offered up for experimental governance without their knowledge. Across these three chapters, Aristotle asks what ends these systems serve and what virtues they implicitly reward. Arendt presses the question of responsibility in systems where no one appears as a fully answerable actor. Du Bois demands that the analysis trace the racial and colonial continuities that render these scenes legible as part of a much longer history rather than as sudden technical accidents. Michel Foucault appears not as a slogan but as a guide to disciplinary and biopolitical power, alongside Ann Stoler on archival governance and scholars of race and law who show how consent in these contexts so often masks structural coercion.
If the first movement insists on reading contemporary institutions as liturgies of non consent, the second movement refuses to leave the argument at denunciation. “Institutions at the Altar” takes the offensive step of constructing sacramental consent institutions under conditions of exhaustion. Each of its three chapters is an explicit thought experiment. The first constructs a workplace that attempts to be consent worthy within the constraints of contemporary markets. It specifies hiring procedures, surveillance policies, evaluation practices, and discipline mechanisms in detail and asks what must change if refusals are to be protected from retaliation in more than name. Here the book engages Carole Pateman on the sexual contract and the problem of consent under patriarchal social contracts, Charles Mills on the racial contract, and Onora O Neill on principled autonomy and deception. The model workplace is tested against these theorists and against empirical constraints such as labor law, shareholder expectations, and supply chain pressures. Turing’s insistence on explicit protocols appears in this chapter as a demand for clear, checkable procedures rather than vague aspirations. Newton represents a more austere demand: where does the model introduce friction, slow processes, risk failure, and accept tradeoffs that would be politically costly.
The second chapter in this movement constructs a public service agency structured by sacramental consent, perhaps a benefits office or municipal data hub. It draws on Lucy Suchman’s work on participatory design, Phil Agre’s early analyses of capture and surveillance, and Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework in order to specify how information may be gathered, stored, and shared without treating human beings as raw material. In this construction, theologians of sacrament such as Alexander Schmemann, James Cone, Willie Jennings, and Susan Ross are not ornamental. They shape decisions about how time is allocated, who may pause a process in the name of conscience, and how absences and silences are honored as meaningful refusals rather than bugs. The third chapter in this movement turns to a clinic or mental health service that takes liminality seriously and refuses to treat altered states as simple failures. It reads Frantz Fanon on colonial psychiatry, contemporary trauma theory, and ethnographic work on spiritual experience alongside Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. The institution that emerges tries to hold breakdowns and visions without forcing premature normalization, and it is assessed both as a theological proposal and as a legally precarious experiment.
The third movement, “The Smallest Theaters of Agency,” turns to micro architectures of consent and refusal in everyday life. One chapter offers a phenomenology of consent and refusal in friendship. It brings Iris Murdoch’s account of attention, Stanley Cavell on acknowledgment, bell hooks on love as an active practice, Sara Ahmed on complaint, and Emmanuel Levinas on responsibility for the other into conversation. Friendship becomes a laboratory for sacramental consent where the central acts are not signatures but speech acts: the invitation that genuinely allows decline, the apology that does not compel reconciliation, the shared silence that does not demand explanation. Another chapter examines small communities that structure time and resources in ways that protect fragility and liminality, from mutual aid circles to spiritual friendships, reading groups, and monastic or quasi monastic experiments. Benedict, Basil, Dorothee Soelle, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Indigenous writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer and Vine Deloria Jr appear here as guides to forms of common life in which shared work, shared land, and shared worship embed consent in daily practice while also generating failures that must be named. A third chapter proceeds as a self interrogation in the style of Simone Weil or Augustine’s Confessions. It asks how a knowledge worker inside a corporation and an academic ecosystem consents to and refuses demands on attention and energy. Byung Chul Han’s analyses of burnout and transparency, feminist critiques of care and self sacrifice from Joan Tronto, Silvia Federici, and Eva Kittay, and the literature on professional exhaustion form the theoretical surround. The chapter does not present the author’s practices as exemplary; it treats them as symptoms in need of diagnosis.
The fourth movement, “Nonreformist Reforms of Consent,” draws these threads together under a single question: how does one design and live under institutions of sacramental consent without claiming purity or completion. Here the book returns explicitly to the cases from the first movement. One chapter revisits a welfare system, another a policing platform, a third a workplace analytics tool. In each case, the sacramental consent institutions and micro practices developed in movements two and three are applied back onto these systems, not as straightforward solutions but as ways of reading what might have gone otherwise and why it did not. This movement engages James Scott on the limits of state legibility, Roberto Unger on institutional imagination, Wendy Brown on neoliberal rationality, and Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality. It also listens to Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the church under dictatorship, Delores Williams and Kelly Brown Douglas on womanist critiques of sacrificial logic, and Latin American liberation theologians on base communities and structural injustice. A sustained section addresses the formal limits of consent protocols, engaging work in formal verification, usable security, and value sensitive design, including Batya Friedman and Ryan Calo, in order to state clearly what a protocol can and cannot guarantee even when well designed.
The concluding coda refuses to present the book as completion. Nāgārjuna reminds us that institutions of sacramental consent, even when carefully imagined or partially realized, are empty in the philosophical sense: they exist only in their relations, depend on fragile habits and contested resources, and generate new exclusions even as they repair old ones. Darwin stands beside him as a reminder that institutional forms evolve through selection pressures that rarely align with justice. The coda returns to Hartman, Édouard Glissant, and Fred Moten on opacity and the right to non exposure; to Ruha Benjamin and Simone Browne on how reverent design can nonetheless be captured by racial capitalism; and to abolitionist thinkers such as Mariame Kaba and Dean Spade on nonreformist reforms that increase capacity for refusal while refusing to sanctify any particular institution as final. The tone is not resigned. It acknowledges that sacramental consent is not a state that any community or institution can permanently possess. It is an orientation, a practice of design and attention that must be renegotiated as forces shift, resources move, and new forms of harm emerge.
Because the argument is offensive, the introduction must also be defensive in the sense of answering foreseeable objections with care. One objection warns that sacramental language has been used to justify immense abuse, particularly within churches and religious communities that sanctified obedience and silence. The book therefore treats the sacramental tradition as contested terrain rather than as an unambiguous resource and keeps womanist, queer, Indigenous, and disability theologies at the table whenever sacrament appears. Another objection notes that consent has often functioned as an alibi in liberal law for ignoring structural inequality, especially in matters of sex, labor, and finance. The chapters on the sexual and racial contracts, on unpaid care, and on structural coercion are written in explicit conversation with this critique. A further objection is that under conditions of mass data extraction and algorithmic inference, consent itself may be obsolete as a primary moral concept. Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism and Nissenbaum’s critique of notice and choice already point in this direction. The book therefore does not seek to rescue consent as the master concept of ethics and law. It treats sacramental consent as a test case: if even this thick and relational version struggles to address structural harms, then the reader has good reason to ask what other grammars are needed.
The intended audience for this book includes designers and engineers of digital systems, public administrators and lawyers, organizers and activists, theologians and philosophers, and anyone whose daily life is structured by the forms of consent that saturate contemporary platforms, workplaces, and states. The chapters are written to be read by those inside institutions and those who live under them without access. They move between close reading of documents, conceptual analysis, and constructive proposals, and they keep primary sources in view at every step. Ajunwa on worker quantification, Arendt on the space of appearance, Hartman on scenes of subjection, Nissenbaum on contextual integrity, and Zuboff on surveillance capitalism are not invoked as decoration; they function as structural supports for the argument and are read alongside policy texts, technical specifications, and the narratives of those subjected to these systems.
What follows is not a manual for ethical compliance and not a romantic vision of pure institutions. It is an attempt to think and design under saturation with whatever light is available, to treat documentation as liturgy, to write consent as sacrament without forgetting its histories of harm, and to place the smallest acts of refusal in friendship beside the largest architectures of extraction. If the book succeeds, it will not persuade the reader that sacramental consent is a finished solution. Instead, it will have made visible how much of contemporary life already runs on the counterfeit of consent, and it will have opened a space in which the design of institutions, the practice of friendship, and the interior work of attention can be reimagined together rather than in isolation.
Chapter One: The Digital Poorhouse and the Liturgy of Welfare Consent
The chapter begins, quite deliberately, with a woman dying on the wrong side of a screen. In Virginia Eubanks’s investigation of automated welfare systems in the United States, a woman in Indiana has her benefits cut off while she is literally in the hospital, because a new eligibility system treats any procedural irregularity as a failure to cooperate, and a failure to cooperate as grounds for full sanctions rather than an occasion for conversation or care. The system records her non response as refusal. Her silence, shaped by illness and bureaucratic confusion, is translated into the language of choice. To restore benefits, she must enter a labyrinth of call centers and appeal mechanisms that presuppose time, health, legal literacy, and reliable access to networks. She never completes that circuit. The file records a case closed. In the public rhetoric of the welfare agency and its private vendors, this closure appears as administrative necessity governed by neutral rules. The chapter insists that we read it instead as a liturgy of non consent. The woman was invited, repeatedly, to agree to terms that she could not meaningfully understand or contest. When she failed to answer within the allotted time, her non answer was treated not as a symptom of vulnerability but as an informed declaration that authorized the state to withdraw support.
This scene is not an aberration in a basically legitimate order. It is one example of what Eubanks calls the digital poorhouse, a set of data driven infrastructures that subject poor and working class people to intensive surveillance, automated decision making, and predictive risk scoring in the name of efficiency and fairness. These systems do not simply sort applicants by need. They continuously profile and police their lives, compelling them to participate in routines of disclosure, verification, and self explanation that wealthier citizens rarely face. The rhetorical surface of this regime draws heavily on the language of consent and choice. Applicants are asked to authorize data sharing across agencies. They are asked to acknowledge privacy policies and to certify the truth of every statement they make. They are assured that participation in certain programs is voluntary. In practice, refusal here often means hunger, eviction, or the removal of children. Under such conditions, to call this structure consensual is not merely inaccurate, it is itself a doctrinal claim that demands scrutiny.
The aim of this chapter is to develop a grammar for reading automated welfare systems as theologico political texts in which consent is staged, revoked, and weaponized. It does so by aligning three bodies of thought that are rarely placed in sustained conversation. First, Saidiya Hartman’s analysis in Scenes of Subjection of those moments under slavery and its aftermath where domination is enacted through forms that resemble care, protection, and consent rather than overt violence. Second, Oscar Gandy’s account of rational discrimination and the panoptic sort, which names the use of statistical and computational techniques to differentiate populations according to their estimated value and risk. Third, the sacramental and liturgical traditions that treat acts of vow, confession, and blessing as socially real only when embedded in forms that make them answerable to a community of witnesses. The chapter argues that contemporary welfare automation fuses Hartman’s scenes of subjection with Gandy’s panoptic sort, while hollowing out any sacramental thickness from the moments where consent is purportedly sought. The result is a liturgy of non consent in which impoverished people must repeatedly appear as willing participants in their own surveillance and punishment.
To make this argument, the chapter adopts Hannah Arendt’s insistence that political judgment under opaque conditions must begin with what appears on the surface rather than with fantasies of full disclosure. In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes among labor, work, and action and reserves political meaning for those acts that take place in a shared space of appearance where actors can be seen and held to account by one another. Automated welfare systems seem, at first glance, to belong to the realm of administrative work rather than action. They are technical tools meant to process applications and enforce rules, not arenas where politics in Arendt’s sense unfolds. Yet the design of such systems is an act in her sense: it introduces new structures of visibility and invisibility, new ways in which people appear as data points or vanish into error codes. Moreover, the way these systems represent consent, cooperation, and refusal to their human operators and to courts profoundly shapes who can be seen as a responsible actor. Responsibility is distributed across caseworkers, software vendors, legislators, and data scientists in such a way that no one appears as the author of any specific harm. The impoverished applicant, by contrast, appears as the one decisive actor whose supposed choices determine whether benefits are granted or denied. The chapter therefore reads welfare portals, scoring algorithms, and procedural rules as elements in a stage on which certain agents can stand and others are pushed off into anonymity.
Ann Laura Stoler’s writing on archives as active instruments of governance rather than neutral stores of information deepens this approach. In Along the Archival Grain, Stoler shows how colonial archives participate in making some lives legible and others disposable, and how their classificatory habits materialize racial and political hierarchies. Reading along the grain, in her sense, involves attending to the mundane categories, forms, and annotations through which rule is enacted. Welfare case files and eligibility databases are contemporary archives in this sense. They do not only record whether consent was obtained; they produce the very fact of consent by structuring how questions are asked and how answers are interpreted. When a welfare portal requires an applicant to click a single “I agree” button that covers dozens of clauses authorizing data sharing, cross matching, and ongoing surveillance, the archive will later show that the applicant consented. It will not record the constraints that shaped that assent, the absence of viable refusal, or the applicant’s partial comprehension. To read these archives sacramentally is therefore to treat every recorded act of consent or refusal as a doctrinal statement that expresses a theology of the poor whether or not any explicit religion appears.
Dorothy Roberts’s work on child welfare and racialized family separation provides a necessary frame for understanding why these digital archives are saturated by race and history long before any algorithm is deployed. In Shattered Bonds, Roberts argues that the disproportionate removal of Black children from their families is not an accidental excess in an otherwise well intentioned child protection system but the product of a political choice to address Black child poverty through punitive intervention rather than through redistribution. The child welfare system, she shows, presumes parental failure and criminalizes poverty, with a racial logic that makes Black families appear as always already suspect. When automated risk scoring tools for child protective services are introduced into this context, as Eubanks documents in Allegheny County, they do not enter a neutral field. They intensify preexisting racial and class biases under the guise of objective prediction. A family that fits a certain statistical profile, often based on proxies for race and poverty, becomes an object of continuous suspicion long before any act of harm occurs. The parents’ consent to monitoring is framed as a cooperative effort to ensure the child’s safety, yet refusal is treated as evidence of risk.
The first section of the chapter therefore reconstructs the historical and conceptual lineage that leads from the nineteenth century poorhouse to the twenty first century digital poorhouse. Eubanks explicitly draws on the history of poorhouses as institutions that served both to contain and to morally discipline the poor, offering minimal support at the price of surveillance, stigma, and loss of autonomy. The digital poorhouse, she argues, reproduces these functions through data infrastructures rather than brick walls. Welfare applicants are still compelled to surrender privacy, mobility, and dignity in exchange for survival, but now the enclosure is algorithmic. Gandy’s concept of the panoptic sort clarifies how this enclosure operates. In The Panoptic Sort, he describes a discriminatory process that sorts individuals into categories of presumed worth and risk based on personal information collected by both state and commercial actors. The goal is not simply to know individuals but to triage them, directing resources and surveillance toward those who matter for capital accumulation or security. Rational discrimination, in his later work, names the way this sorting can be justified without explicit animus, as a matter of efficient management that treats systemic disadvantage as a neutral variable.
Automated welfare systems exemplify this rational discrimination. The scoring models that determine who is “high risk” or “likely to commit fraud” are built on data that reflect decades of racialized policing, housing segregation, and employment discrimination. The models treat these patterns as facts rather than injustices. When a predictive tool flags a neighborhood as high risk for welfare fraud because many past investigations have occurred there, it incorporates the history of targeted enforcement into its design without any explicit mention of race. Applicants from such neighborhoods are then required to submit more documentation, endure more frequent reviews, and accept more invasive data collection in order to receive the same benefit others receive with minimal scrutiny. The system invites them to consent to this unequal treatment in the name of integrity and fairness.
In Hartman’s terms, these are scenes of subjection in which domination is enacted through an invitation to participate in one’s own regulation. She reads the plantation and the post emancipation order as spaces where coerced performances of joy, gratitude, and loyalty masked ongoing violence, and where the language of rights and humanity was deployed to stabilize racial hierarchy. The welfare office and its online extensions are not continuations of slavery in any simple sense. They are, however, sites where the promise of care and support is entangled with forms of scrutiny and discipline that fall disproportionately upon racialized poor people. When an applicant is required to sign a statement affirming that they understand and accept the agency’s right to monitor their employment, family composition, and even romantic relationships, they are being asked to endorse an arrangement whose structural coercion is obscured by the language of consent. Hartman’s insistence that we attend to the “encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent” becomes a methodological demand for our reading of welfare automation.
The second section of the chapter turns to concrete case studies in order to see how this liturgy of non consent is written into code, contracts, and forms. Eubanks’s triptych of cases in Indiana, Los Angeles, and Allegheny County serves as the backbone. The Indiana case centers on the replacement of in person casework with a call center and automated eligibility determination, in which any missing document or failure to respond within a narrow window is recorded as “failure to cooperate,” leading to termination of benefits. The nominal premise is that applicants have been informed of their obligations and have agreed to them. In practice, the design of the system ensures that people with limited literacy, unstable housing, or serious illness will “fail” repeatedly. What is officially recorded as failure to cooperate is, in reality, a failure of the institution to recognize vulnerability as anything other than non compliance.
From a sacramental standpoint, this system produces false vows. It asks applicants to affirm that they will maintain up to date documentation and respond promptly to all queries, yet it offers no structure that would make such promises realistic under conditions of poverty. In liturgical traditions, a vow made under duress or without understanding is considered invalid. Sacramental consent requires that the subject be both free and informed in a substantive sense. The Indiana system inverts this principle. It treats signatures and recorded acknowledgments as sufficient, regardless of context. This inversion is not a moral accident but a structural necessity in regimes that rely on consent language to legitimize automated harm.
The Los Angeles case, in which a predictive risk model is used to allocate scarce child protective resources, reveals a different aspect of the liturgy. The Allegheny Family Screening Tool and similar systems combine data from multiple state databases to assign risk scores to families when calls are made to child welfare hotlines. Families are not asked whether they consent to have their histories of benefit receipt, criminal justice involvement, or mental health treatment used to calculate their risk score. The consent in these cases is displaced onto earlier encounters where individuals authorized specific agencies to collect and share data, often under threat of losing services. The risk model appears as a neutral tool that simply uses available information. In fact, it reconfigures earlier acts of constrained consent into raw material for new forms of surveillance.
Dorothy Roberts reminds us that child welfare already functions as a system of racial governance in which Black families are subjected to disproportionate intervention on the basis of poverty and cultural judgment. When predictive tools enter this system, they amplify these inequalities by embedding them in code. Ruha Benjamin’s account of discriminatory design in Race After Technology helps to name this dynamic. She argues that emerging technologies do not simply mirror social hierarchies; they can encode them in ways that make them more difficult to contest, producing what she calls the New Jim Code. In automated welfare systems, this code is written into the categories that distinguish between “compliant” and “non compliant” clients, between “cooperative” and “high risk” parents, and between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. Each of these categories appears to be grounded in consent or its refusal. Each is, in fact, grounded in structural conditions that make genuine consent rare.
The third section of the chapter draws Michel Foucault into the analysis in a precise way. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces a shift from spectacular punishment, where power is displayed on the body in public, to disciplinary power, where control is exercised through surveillance, normalization, and the internalization of rules. The welfare office belongs to this latter regime. Its goal is not only to decide who receives aid but to shape conduct. Recipients are expected to adhere to work requirements, family norms, and health behaviors that align with state definitions of responsibility. Automated systems intensify this discipline by making deviations more visible and by lowering the cost of detection. When an applicant agrees to data sharing and ongoing monitoring, they are effectively agreeing to become a subject of continuous discipline with little prospect of exit.
Yet Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon as a model of self regulating power is incomplete without Gandy’s insistence on the political economy of personal information. The panoptic sort is not a neutral mechanism for observing all equally. It is a differential machine that directs attention and sanction toward those deemed risky or unprofitable. Eubanks’s digital poorhouse concept takes this insight into the domain of poverty governance, showing how automated systems intensify discrimination against the poor by making their lives hyper visible to institutions that can punish but not adequately support them. Poor people are not suffering from an excess of privacy that automation might help overcome; they suffer from an excess of surveillance combined with a deficit of meaningful protection.
The chapter then turns explicitly to the language of sacrament and liturgy in order to clarify what is at stake in calling these infrastructures liturgies of non consent. In sacramental traditions, liturgy is the ordered sequence of words, gestures, and material acts through which a community encounters what it names as sacred. Consent in marriage, confession of sin, the sharing of bread and wine, and the taking of baptismal vows are not private expressions of feeling. They are public and structured acts that create and transform relations. They require witnesses, institutional memory, and avenues of redress when harm occurs. A marriage vow exchanged in a secret ceremony with no recognition by a community or legal system does not have the same standing as one enacted within an order that can hold parties accountable. The sacramental claim is that form matters as much as content.
Automated welfare systems borrow the structure of liturgy without its commitments. They choreograph repeated encounters between vulnerable people and institutional power, framed by scripts of agreement and acknowledgment, but they do so without providing the communal structures that could make those scripts answerable. When an applicant electronically signs a statement accepting the terms of data sharing, there is no community of witnesses that might later say: this promise was obtained under duress, this promise was not understood, this promise was not honored by the agency. There is only the archive, which records a binary fact of consent or non consent. In sacramental theology, absolution without contrition is cheap grace; vows without freedom are invalid. In the welfare digital poorhouse, consent without freedom is the norm.
From this viewpoint, the category of fraud acquires a disturbing double meaning. Officially, fraud names the deception of the state by claimants who misrepresent their circumstances. Yet the structure of welfare automation suggests that the more pervasive fraud lies in the institutional claim that consent has been obtained when in fact only compliance under existential threat has occurred. The system pretends that the repeated clicking of “I agree” in order to avoid starvation is equivalent to the affirmative consent of a citizen entering a contract with meaningful alternatives. This is not simply a moralized observation. It has concrete legal and political consequences. Courts and legislators treat recorded consent as evidence that rights have been respected. Policy debates frame welfare automation as a matter of implementing already legitimate rules more efficiently. The sacramental lens presses us to ask whether the very form of these systems is incompatible with consent as mutual answering.
The final section of the chapter considers potential objections. One might argue that welfare agencies operate under legal mandates and resource constraints that make some form of automation inevitable. Human caseworkers are overburdened; budgets are limited; the demand for services is high. Automated systems, on this view, can reduce arbitrary decision making, standardize procedures, and make eligibility more predictable. Some advocates also point out that poorly implemented analog systems have long subjected applicants to humiliation and caprice. In response, the chapter does not claim that automation is intrinsically incompatible with justice. Rather, it insists that any claim that automated welfare regimes respect consent must be tested against sacramental criteria. Does the system allow for genuine refusal without catastrophic harm. Does it present terms in a form that applicants can realistically understand and negotiate. Are there witnesses and processes that can contest recorded consent when it is later shown to have been constrained or misinformed.
Another objection suggests that sacramental language romanticizes older, in person welfare practices that were themselves deeply coercive and racist. Roberts’s historical work shows that face to face interactions in child welfare and public assistance have often been sites of surveillance, moral policing, and family destruction, especially for Black women. The chapter acknowledges this reality and does not appeal to an imagined golden age of mutual understanding in the welfare office. Instead, it argues that sacramental consent provides a standard by which both analog and digital regimes can be judged. When a caseworker threatens to remove children unless a mother agrees to intrusive conditions, that too is a liturgy of non consent. Automation does not create coercion; it reorganizes it. The question is how the shift from face to face to digital, from discretionary decisions to algorithmic ones, alters the possibilities for recognition, contestation, and repair.
A further objection holds that in large scale systems some abstraction and standardization are necessary. The state cannot tailor every interaction to each person’s subjective experience. Rules must be written in general terms; eligibility must be determined by criteria that can be applied uniformly. This objection is important because it points to a genuine tension between administrative rationality and ethical responsiveness. Here the sacramental lens again helps. Sacraments are not infinitely flexible experiences tailored to individual preference. They are highly structured and repeatable forms. Their claim, however, is that the structure exists to protect vulnerability and to make certain abuses less likely. A confession heard in private is governed by a seal that forbids its use for worldly advantage. A marriage vow is embedded in a web of obligations that constrain both parties and the witnessing community. The question for welfare automation is therefore not whether it uses rules and categories, but whether those structures are designed to protect or to exploit vulnerability.
By the end of this chapter, the reader should be persuaded of three claims that will guide the rest of the movement. First, that automated welfare systems are not simply technical tools but liturgical spaces in which consent is staged under conditions of structural coercion. Second, that the language of consent in these systems cannot be taken at face value, because it is embedded in archives and algorithms shaped by racialized histories of control, as Roberts, Hartman, Eubanks, Benjamin, and Gandy all in different ways demonstrate. Third, that sacramental consent offers a demanding and deeply practical standard for evaluating these systems, not because it is religious in a narrow sense, but because it locates the ethics of consent in the design of institutions and the presence of witnesses rather than in isolated acts of agreement.
The next chapters in this movement will extend this analysis to workplace analytics and predictive policing, showing how similar liturgies of non consent operate wherever automated systems invite the vulnerable to authorize their own monitoring. Together, these chapters will construct an archive of broken consent against which the constructive and micropractice movements of the book must measure their proposals. If sacramental consent is to mean anything beyond a pious phrase, it must survive this archive’s scrutiny.
Chapter Two: The Quantified Worker and the False Sacraments of Workplace Consent
The second scene begins before sunrise, not in a welfare office but beside a bed. In the opening pages of The Quantified Worker, Ifeoma Ajunwa imagines a worker whose day is inaugurated by the gentle vibration of a device on her wrist. The device records how long she slept, how often she stirred, how quickly she rose. Once she steps out of bed, her steps are counted, her gym visits logged, her food entered into an application that also tracks her menstrual cycle, prescription medications, and mood. All of this data flows to a workplace wellness program tied to her health insurance premium. In return for participation she receives lower monthly costs and the promise of better health. To remain in good standing, she must hit daily movement targets, keep her biometric markers within range, and respond promptly to nudges that encourage lifestyle change. This worker is not a science fiction character. She is a composite drawn from contemporary programs that reward employees for wearing fitness trackers, completing health assessments, and sharing biometric results with employer sponsored wellness vendors.
Ajunwa names this figure the quantified worker and argues that the information revolution has ushered in a reorganization of the workplace around data driven surveillance, risk shifting, and continuous evaluation. Fitness trackers, automated hiring platforms, productivity dashboards, keystroke loggers, safety exoskeletons, and algorithmic scheduling systems do not simply measure output; they extend employer power into the worker’s body, time, and social relationships, while presenting their demands as voluntary participation in programs for wellness, engagement, and efficiency. The worker signs consent forms, taps accept on screens, and clicks to acknowledge privacy policies that authorize a web of data collection and sharing among employers, insurers, vendors, and platforms. Formally, the worker has a choice. She can refuse to enroll in wellness programs, decline constant monitoring, or opt out of social media screening. Practically, refusal may mean higher premiums, loss of bonuses, exclusion from promotion pools, or even termination in environments where data is framed as necessary for safety and performance.
This chapter treats such arrangements not as marginal experiments but as central sacraments of contemporary employment. An employment contract has always carried an implicit vow: the worker sells time and skill in exchange for wages and access to institutions of social reproduction. Under conditions of quantification that vow is rewritten to encompass the body, the nervous system, and the intimate life of the worker. Consent is not a threshold event at hiring but a continuous demand. The chapter’s thesis is blunt. Contemporary regimes of workplace analytics and quantification stage consent as a daily ritual that masks asymmetries of power so profound that the forms of agreement they solicit are structurally void, and yet those forms are then used to legitimate intensified surveillance and control. The argument is not that every instance of monitoring is unjustifiable. It is that the prevailing architecture of quantification collapses the distinction between consent and compulsion in ways that sacramental ethics can register with unusual clarity.
To develop this claim, the chapter braids three strands of analysis. First, it uses Ajunwa’s theory of worker quantification to trace how technologies of hiring, wellness, and productivity measurement cumulatively quantify not only output but the whole person, rendering the worker legible as a bundle of risks and potentials that can be optimized or discarded. Second, it draws on Shoshana Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism and Frank Pasquale’s analysis of black box power to show how this quantification is organized around opaque data markets and algorithmic reputations that workers cannot effectively contest. Third, it insists with Simone Browne and Phoebe Moore that the quantified worker is never an abstract subject; race, gender, class, and precarity shape whose bodies become sites of intensive monitoring and whose resistance is conceivable, and their work exposes how the technologies in question inherit long histories of racialized surveillance and labor control.
The first section returns to Ajunwa’s narrative but refuses to let it remain a neutral description of new devices. The waking vibration is the first call to prayer in a secular liturgy that orders the worker’s day. The worker has already submitted to genetic testing that yields a profile of disease propensity and optimal diet; she must log food intake to keep her scores in range. She applied for the job by passing through automated hiring systems that analyzed her facial expressions and vocal tone, tagged her personality traits, and calculated a fit score based on prior successful employees. Her future advancement depends on performance metrics derived from badges that track location and speech patterns, wearable sensors that monitor posture and movement, and software that records keyboard activity, application usage, and time spent away from the screen.
Ajunwa shows that these forms of worker quantification rarely remain isolated. They are layered. The same worker’s health data may be shared with wellness vendors, insurers, and human resources departments; her productivity metrics may feed into retention risk models and promotion algorithms; her online presence may be scraped to update psychometric inferences. Each layer presents itself as an opportunity. Participate in the wellness program to save money and live longer. Agree to automated monitoring to prove you are a high performer. Opt in to facial analysis to demonstrate your enthusiasm. Yet the worker’s capacity to refuse is constrained by structural features of labor markets: high unemployment or underemployment, at will employment in many jurisdictions, weak unions, and the concentration of algorithmic tools among large employers. Ajunwa therefore argues that the law has lagged behind these developments, leaving workers with few remedies when quantification practices intrude on dignity, discriminate against protected classes, or repurpose data in ways that extend far beyond any plausible understanding of informed consent.
From a sacramental perspective, the problem is not simply that the worker is asked to agree many times. It is that agreement is detached from any stable form that could protect her. In religious tradition, a sacrament such as marriage or ordination binds the institution as well as the individual. The vows taken are reinforced by communal obligations, canons, and procedures for redress; the community has a professed interest in preventing abuse of the vulnerable party. Workplace quantification reverses this polarity. The institution demands assent from the weaker party but structures its own obligations in vague terms about wellness, engagement, or innovation. There is no liturgical body of co workers empowered to review and contest the scripts; there are contracts, privacy policies, and employee handbooks drafted unilaterally by employers and their vendors.
Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism clarifies how these arrangements function as a business model rather than an incidental misuse of technology. Surveillance capitalism names a logic of accumulation in which human experience is translated into behavioral data, much of it extracted without awareness or genuine consent, and then used to predict and shape behavior for profit. The workplace is an ideal environment for this logic. Employers control the tools of production, the physical or virtual spaces where work occurs, and the contractual conditions under which workers can be present at all. As Zuboff notes, the asymmetries of knowledge and power are such that workers often cannot know what data is collected, how long it is retained, or how it is processed into predictions that affect their livelihood. When employers or vendors insist that participation is voluntary because workers click accept, they rely on a thin formalism of consent that ignores this structural dependency.
Pasquale’s analysis of black box society intensifies this diagnosis. He observes that core institutions of the information economy use secrecy, complexity, and legal protections for trade secrets to shield their algorithms from scrutiny. In the employment context, hiring algorithms, productivity scores, and wellness risk ratings often fall into this category. Workers are told that these tools help identify talent, match people to roles, or keep them safe, but they are rarely given meaningful explanations of how scores are calculated or how to challenge them. When adverse decisions occur, responsibility is diffused between employers, vendors, and software. The worker’s earlier consents, recorded in terms of service documents or wellness program agreements, are then used to deny recourse.
In sacramental language, this is a regime of secret rites performed upon unwilling participants. The worker’s data is offered up in rituals that she does not control and does not fully understand. The blessing promised is job security, health benefits, and perhaps advancement; the curse threatened is termination, higher costs, or reputational damage. The actual workings of the rite are hidden inside proprietary code and internal policies. Pasquale’s demand for intelligibility and accountability suggests an affinity with sacramental ethics, which insist that rituals that materially affect lives must be transparent to those who undergo them and open to communal judgment. Here, the demand is more modest yet no less stringent: no claim of consent should be credited when the consenting party can neither see nor contest the operations that follow from that consent.
Browne warns us, however, that any analysis that treats workers as a generic class of quantified subjects effaces the racial and colonial histories that shape whose bodies are marked as proper objects of surveillance. In Dark Matters she traces how contemporary monitoring practices echo earlier regimes such as slave patrols, pass systems, and lantern laws that required Black people to carry lights at night so that their movements could be tracked. In biometric systems, airport security, and public space monitoring she finds a recurring pattern: Blackness is constructed as a category that justifies heightened scrutiny and coercive visibility. Workplace quantification inherits these patterns. Algorithmic hiring tools trained on data from historically exclusionary employers reproduce biased notions of professionalism and cultural fit; productivity metrics that penalize time away from keyboards or customer facing smiles ignore the racialized emotional labor that some workers must perform to retain their positions. Wellness programs that frame weight, diet, and stress as individual responsibilities ignore how racism structures access to healthy environments and care.
Moore’s work on the quantified self in precarity adds another layer. She argues that digitalization in the workplace, whether in gig platforms or office environments, is not an inevitable march of progress but a contested arrangement that often increases stress, turnover, and subjective insecurity. Quantification, she shows, tends to reframe structural problems as individual performance deficits. If the platform cuts pay or shifts risk onto workers, the metric dashboard still presents outcomes as functions of hustle, self optimization, and agile responsiveness. Moore names this as a new form of Taylorism extended into mental and affective life. Here, consent appears as the decision to accept platform terms or to log into dashboards, yet the material alternatives are often unemployment or migration to similar systems.
Karen Levy’s ethnography of long haul truckers offers an unusually concrete example of how these dynamics unfold. In Data Driven she shows how digital monitoring devices, introduced ostensibly to track hours and prevent fatigue related accidents, become tools through which trucking firms and regulators continuously surveil drivers’ locations, speeds, and compliance with schedules. The mandated installation of electronic logging devices creates a data stream that can be used far beyond its original safety rationale, enabling firms to press drivers to push up against legal limits while blaming them when something goes wrong. Formal consent to monitoring is built into the employment relationship, but drivers have little bargaining power and often find that refusal means exclusion from the industry. Levy shows that the devices not only change how firms manage labor; they reshape truckers’ sense of autonomy, dignity, and craft.
Placed alongside Ajunwa, Browne, Moore, and Levy, the figure of the quantified worker appears as a liturgical subject whose body and life are continuously offered up to a sacrament of productivity under the sign of choice. To say yes is to remain employed and insured. To say no is to risk expulsion. The language of consent does enormous ideological work here. Employers emphasize opt in participation, wellness rewards, and flexible performance targets. Vendors advertise personalization and empowerment. Legal frameworks treat signed forms and electronic acknowledgments as strong evidence that workers understood and accepted terms. Sacramental consent refuses this flattening. It requires that we ask, for every ritualized yes, whether there was space for a meaningful no, whether the form of the ritual protects the weaker party, and whether the community surrounding the act is committed to honoring the dignity of the one who consents. Under these criteria, much of what passes for workplace consent is revealed as a series of coerced affirmations that stabilize asymmetrical control.
The chapter does not deny that some monitoring can genuinely serve worker interests. Safety sensors that detect hazardous conditions, accommodations that track fatigue in order to adjust workloads, and scheduling tools that genuinely respect worker preferences all exist. There are cases where quantification can help document harassment or discrimination, revealing patterns that might otherwise remain invisible. However, sacramental consent demands that any such practices be evaluated with ruthless attention to structure rather than rhetoric. Who owns the data. Who can access it and under what conditions. How long is it stored. What are the consequences of refusal. Is there a worker controlled body that can audit and challenge the systems. Without robust answers to these questions, appeals to consent function primarily to insulate employers from responsibility rather than to protect workers.
Supporters of workplace analytics often argue that transparency and informed consent can fix the problem. Provide clear privacy notices, they say, and let workers decide whether to participate. Helen Nissenbaum’s doctrine of contextual integrity illustrates why this is inadequate. She argues that privacy is not about secrecy but about respecting the norms that govern information flow in specific contexts. A worker may reasonably expect that her employer will know her title, wage, and performance evaluations; she does not expect genetic data gathered for wellness programs to be repurposed for promotion decisions or shared with third party data brokers. Consent forms that purport to authorize unrestricted sharing across contexts do not restore integrity; they erase it. Under conditions of dependency, workers cannot negotiate separate streams of information for distinct purposes.
Zuboff warns that surveillance capitalism thrives precisely on such erosion of contextual integrity. Behavioral surplus generated in one domain is repurposed in others without genuine consent, and the resulting predictive products are sold in markets that subjects cannot see. When the subject is a worker rather than a consumer, the stakes include not only targeted advertisements but livelihood itself. Pasquale therefore proposes that some domains of algorithmic decision making should be subject to heightened obligations of transparency, due process, and public oversight. Employment decisions based on opaque scoring systems, backed by spurious claims of consent, are prime candidates.
From the standpoint of sacramental consent, these proposals appear as partial moves toward re embedding workplace rituals of agreement in structures of mutual answerability. A sacramental order of employment would treat every request for data, every new device, every analytics program, as a public act to be scrutinized by worker representatives, regulators, and affected communities. Consent would be recognized only when workers have real alternatives, including the ability to refuse particular forms of monitoring without losing access to livelihood. There would be confession, in the sense that employers would be required to acknowledge harms when quantification practices backfire or discriminate, and penance, in the sense of structural repair rather than public relations.
Predictably, defenders of existing practices respond that such standards are utopian and incompatible with competitive labor markets. Firms, they argue, must optimize productivity, reduce liability, and satisfy investors. Workers who do not wish to be monitored can seek employment elsewhere. This argument rests on two claims that cannot withstand scrutiny. First, it assumes that labor markets offer diverse alternatives, when in reality major employers in many sectors have converged on similar suites of monitoring technologies, leaving workers with little choice but to accept being quantified. Second, it assumes that the costs of quantification fall primarily on individual preferences rather than on shared goods such as trust, health, and democratic participation. Ajunwa, Moore, and Levy all document increased stress, burnout, and alienation among workers subjected to continuous surveillance, along with chilling effects on organizing and speech. The sacramental lens registers these not as collateral discomforts but as signs that the ritual form itself is disordered.
By the end of this chapter, the reader should recognize that the quantified worker stands in the same archive of broken consent as the welfare subject in the opening movement. In both domains, institutions organize rituals of agreement under conditions of profound asymmetry, record assent as evidence of legitimacy, and then use that record to shield themselves from claims of harm. The difference is locus. Welfare automation disciplines those who seek support from the state, often under racialized conditions of poverty; workplace quantification disciplines those who seek survival through wage labor, often under precarious conditions that make exit implausible. In both cases, appeals to consent turn vulnerability into a resource.
Subsequent chapters in this movement will explore parallel logics in predictive policing and migration control, where subjects may never even be asked for consent but are nevertheless governed as if they have tacitly accepted continuous tracking and risk scoring. Together, these cases will solidify the claim that contemporary institutions have transformed consent from a practice of mutual recognition into a technology of domination. Only by recovering a sacramental ethic of consent, anchored in form, community, and the protection of refusal, can we begin to imagine institutions in which saying yes regains its moral meaning.
Chapter Three: Predictive Policing, Border Regimes, and the Liturgy of Preemptive Consent
The third scene begins on a street corner that has been designated high risk before anyone arrives. In Sarah Brayne’s ethnography of the Los Angeles Police Department, patrol cars are guided not only by radio calls and sergeants but by software that paints the city in gradients of risk. Certain blocks appear in red, marked as places where crime is predicted to occur. Officers are instructed to make their presence felt there, to conduct pedestrian and vehicle stops, to gather names and identifiers for inclusion in databases. The residents of those blocks were never asked whether they consented to becoming objects of intensified surveillance. They did not sign agreements authorizing their movements, friendships, and minor infractions to be fed into predictive systems. Yet once they live inside those colored shapes, every step they take can be read as if they had tacitly accepted a new regime of visibility.
The scene shifts, without relief, to a night sea in the Mediterranean or a desert crossing near the border between Mexico and the United States. A small boat or a group on foot moves through a space that is saturated with sensors, drones, patrols, and risk models that estimate flows and fatalities. Vicki Squire shows that European Union border governance in the past decade has not been a response to an unexpected wave of movement but the continuation of long term practices designed to channel, slow, and sometimes deter migration through controlled exposure to danger. Border deaths are treated as unfortunate but foreseeable outcomes of policies that close safer routes and push people into more perilous ones. The migrants have not agreed to become test cases in this deterrent strategy. They are compelled by war, poverty, or climate damage to move, and the only way to reach safety is to pass through zones where their survival is contingent on decisions made far away and long before.
This chapter argues that predictive policing and contemporary border regimes operate as liturgies of preemptive consent. They enact a world in which certain populations are treated as if they had already agreed to be governed through risk scores, predictive maps, and lethal border designs, even when no actual consent has been sought or could be meaningfully given. The language of consent appears not at the point of contact with those policed or intercepted but in the rhetoric of democratic mandate, the claims of public security, and the procedures that govern data collection and sharing. Citizens, it is said, have consented to intensive policing in high crime areas by demanding safety. Voters, it is claimed, have consented to restrictive migration policies by electing governments that promise border control. Once this diffuse political consent is invoked, the individuals most affected by predictive patrols and violent borders are treated as though they had personally authorized their own exposure.
Following Bernard Harcourt’s critique in Against Prediction, the chapter insists that these actuarial regimes do not simply add a neutral layer of efficiency to existing systems of law and migration control. They reorganize the distribution of suspicion, violence, and death in ways that deepen racial and colonial asymmetries, while cloaking those asymmetries in the language of rational risk management. Achille Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics, the power to decide who may live and who must die, clarifies what is at stake at the border and in intensively policed neighborhoods. He shows that contemporary democracies increasingly exercise sovereign power by exposing some populations to chronic precarity and sudden death, not as exceptional measures but as normalized techniques of rule. When predictive policing and fortified borders are justified as expressions of collective consent to security, they become sacraments of necropolitical governance: rituals through which certain lives are quietly offered up so that others may experience the feeling of safety.
The first section of the chapter reads predictive policing as a sacramental script in which whole neighborhoods are cast as perpetual penitents. Brayne’s fieldwork reveals how data driven systems extend police presence into everyday life. Her concept of system avoidance shows that people who have had contact with the criminal legal system often respond by withdrawing from institutions such as hospitals, banks, and schools that might share data with law enforcement, thereby deepening marginalization. In this environment, algorithms trained on past records identify some places and people as likely sources of future crime. Officers are then encouraged to proactively stop individuals who happen to be present in those spaces, to ask for identification, run warrants, and document gang affiliations. Residents may be told that they are free to refuse searches or to walk away, yet they know that refusal can itself be read as suspicious and may lead to escalation. Formally, every stop contains a moment where consent might be sought for a bag search or a pat down. Substantively, consent is embedded in a context of asymmetrical power, fear, and the threat of arrest.
Harcourt warns that actuarial practices in policing, such as profile based stops and predictive patrols, may increase overall harm rather than reduce it. By concentrating enforcement on already marginalized groups, they produce feedback loops in which those groups appear ever more criminal simply because they are observed more closely and punished more often. The purported consent of the general public to aggressive policing in the name of safety thus translates into a non consensual saturation of surveillance for particular communities, typically poor and racialized. Michelle Alexander’s account of mass incarceration as a new racial caste order complements this argument by showing that colorblind policies framed as neutral law enforcement, particularly in drug policing, have systematically targeted Black communities and relegated millions to permanent second class status.
Ian Haney Lopez’s analysis of dog whistle politics demonstrates how appeals to crime and order have been used to mobilize white voters through coded racial messages that present punitive policies as rational responses to disorder rather than as instruments of racial control. When officials claim that communities have consented to predictive policing through such electoral processes, they ignore both the exclusion of many targeted individuals from the electorate and the manipulation of racial fears that shape public debate. The consent at issue is therefore doubly constrained. Those most exposed to predictive patrols often cannot vote or do not see their interests represented, and those who can vote are invited to endorse policies through narratives that misrepresent the nature and distribution of harm.
Didier Fassin’s ethnography of urban policing in the Paris region makes these abstractions concrete. In Enforcing Order he documents how everyday patrols focus on young men of immigrant origin in disadvantaged neighborhoods, where police practice a form of presence that oscillates between boredom, humiliation, and sudden violence. Stops are often justified as identity checks, framed as routine, and occasionally accompanied by requests for cooperation. Yet the young men understand that refusal can provoke escalation and that no amount of compliance guarantees safety. Fassin shows that these interactions do not simply reflect neutrality; they enact a moral economy in which certain bodies are coded as threats whose existence justifies the very practices that target them. The surrounding society is told that such policing is necessary to keep order and that its continuation expresses public will. The subjects of that policing are asked to behave as if they had accepted their role in this liturgy, while knowing that they were never invited to write its script.
The chapter then turns to risk assessment instruments that shape parole, bail, and sentencing decisions. Kelly Hannah Moffat has argued that contemporary risk tools, presented as objective measures of the likelihood that an individual will re offend, often encode gendered and racialized assumptions about normal behavior. These tools use variables such as employment history, neighborhood, family structure, and prior arrests to generate scores that influence judicial decisions. People subject to these assessments may be asked to answer questionnaires, sign forms, and acknowledge conditions, all of which present themselves as consensual participation in an evidence based process. Yet the fundamental structure is one of compulsion. The individual cannot refuse the assessment without jeopardizing release. The community never had an opportunity to consent to the use of these instruments, which can entrench inequalities by systematically rating those from marginalized backgrounds as higher risk.
From a sacramental perspective, the promise of redemption that parole and probation once held is being translated into actuarial terms that treat people less as repentant agents and more as carriers of risk profiles. The rituals of interview and signature that accompany risk assessment function as false confessions and false vows. The subject is invited to testify about their past and present in a form designed to extract predictive features rather than to hear a narrative. They are then bound to conditions that they have formally accepted but did not co design, in a framework that offers limited real avenues for forgiveness or transformation. Sacramental consent would require that such rituals take place within a community committed to the person’s flourishing and equipped to contest unjust conditions. Actuarial consent, by contrast, concerns itself only with whether the required acknowledgments can be recorded.
The second major section of the chapter shifts from policing to borders, treating border zones as altars where the sovereign power over life and death is exercised under the sign of collective consent. Squire’s work on border deaths in Europe shows that Mediterranean crossings are lethal not because of unavoidable natural dangers but because policy decisions have closed safer routes, criminalized rescue, and externalized control to third countries, thereby making danger a technique of migration management. Humanitarian language is often deployed to justify these measures. Officials claim that tough controls and deterrence are necessary to prevent smugglers from exploiting vulnerable people and that strengthened borders ultimately save lives. Migrants appear in this narrative as passive victims who must be protected even against their will.
Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics illuminates how such humanitarian border politics can coexist with systematic exposure to death. He argues that modern power increasingly operates by creating zones where rights are suspended, where some populations are confined in camps, held in detention, or left in conditions of slow death, while others move freely and securely. The border is one of these zones. People in transit are neither fully inside the protection of the law nor fully outside; they are managed through a mix of security measures and symbolic gestures that make their suffering both visible and politically useful. When governments claim that electorates have consented to such arrangements by supporting strong border policies, they treat this diffuse support as a sacramental act, a collective vow to maintain a particular order even at the cost of distant, often unseen deaths.
Squire’s earlier work on post humanitarian border politics at the Mexico United States border underscores the ambivalence of humanitarian interventions. She analyzes how activists and organizations that provide water, food, and medical aid in the desert both contest and navigate state practices that render migrants killable through neglect. Their actions expose the violence of border policy while sometimes being incorporated into management strategies that rely on non governmental actors to mitigate the worst effects of deterrence. In this context, migrants are asked repeatedly to sign forms, attend credible fear interviews, and perform narratives of victimhood that fit asylum categories. At each step, they are said to participate voluntarily in procedures that will determine their status. In reality, refusal is rarely a genuine option. To decline to answer is to risk immediate removal or prolonged detention.
The sacramental lens reveals that border procedures combine rituals of petition, confession, and judgment without offering the elements that would make consent meaningful. In religious liturgy, confession presupposes the possibility of absolution and the presence of a community that pledges to accompany the penitent. At the border, confession of suffering and fear is required for access to asylum, yet absolution is scarce and arbitrary, and the community that hears these confessions is an impersonal apparatus whose primary obligation is to enforce exclusionary law. The signatures that migrants provide on forms consenting to detention, medical examination, or deportation under pressure of exhaustion and language barriers cannot be treated as sacramental acts. They are closer to coerced oaths obtained under duress, which classical moral theology holds to be invalid.
If predictive policing and border governance are liturgies of preemptive consent, the question arises whether any consent is present at all. Aristotle’s reflections on voluntary and involuntary action in the Nicomachean Ethics remain instructive. He distinguishes between acts that are compelled by external forces and those that are chosen, arguing that genuine responsibility requires that agents have alternatives and knowledge of what they are doing. When sailors throw cargo overboard in a storm, their act is in a sense voluntary because it serves a greater end, yet it is also made under constraint. For Aristotle, moral evaluation must account for this mixed character. In contemporary actuarial regimes, by contrast, the moral nuance disappears. Residents who remain in policed neighborhoods and migrants who attempt dangerous crossings are often described as having chosen their situation, as if they had access to a menu of safe alternatives. Their subsequent compliance with procedures is then treated as full consent.
From Hannah Arendt’s perspective, the difficulty is compounded by the way predictive systems and fortified borders hollow out the space of appearance where actors can be seen and held to account. In a city governed by predictive maps, no single officer or official appears as the author of increased stops and arrests; responsibility is dispersed among software vendors, analysts, supervisors, and distant legislatures. At the border, similarly, deaths are the cumulative result of policies, patrol practices, agreements with other states, and the decisions of carriers, none of which alone presents itself as a clear act. Arendt insists that politics requires identifiable actors who can answer for their deeds. Actuarial governance dissolves those actors into procedures. In such a landscape, appeals to consent serve as a substitute for accountability. If the public supposedly consented to these systems, then no further questioning is deemed necessary when harm occurs.
W E B Du Bois offers the final strand for this chapter’s argument. His analysis of the color line as the central problem of modernity and his description of double consciousness as the condition of those forced to see themselves through the eyes of a society that devalues them resonate strongly with the experiences of communities targeted by predictive policing and exclusionary borders. For those communities, the message of actuarial governance is clear. Their lives and movements are treated as risks to be managed rather than as expressions of human freedom to be supported. They are asked to perform consent in rituals they did not convene and to accept responsibility for harms that flow from structures designed without their participation.
The chapter anticipates two objections. The first is that predictive policing and risk based border control are necessary to prevent crime and save lives. Supporters point to cases where predictive maps have coincided with reductions in reported crime, or where information sharing across agencies has disrupted trafficking and smuggling networks. They note that borders and policing institutions must allocate finite resources and that risk models can guide those allocations more rationally than intuition. The response here is not to deny that some targeting can be more effective than random patrols or that some borders must be managed. It is to insist, with Harcourt, that these benefits must be weighed against the structural harms of concentrating surveillance on already marginalized populations, reinforcing racialized suspicion, and legitimating exposure to death as a cost of governance. The sacramental lens adds that no increase in efficiency can justify rituals of consent that are structurally void, because they compromise the moral standing of institutions themselves. An institution that lives by extracting sham agreements from the vulnerable corrodes its own legitimacy even if it sometimes achieves pragmatic goals.
The second objection is that sacramental language is out of place in contexts that are already fiercely secular and legalistic. Predictive policing and border management, critics may argue, are matters of regulation and policy, not of sacraments and liturgy. This objection misunderstands how theological concepts are being used. The chapter does not claim that police and border agents secretly believe they are performing religious rites. It claims that sacramental consent, understood as a structured practice of mutual recognition and vow under conditions designed to protect the vulnerable, offers one of the most exacting available standards by which to judge whether ostensibly secular practices of agreement and exposure are ethically defensible. When we discover that predictive and border regimes treat certain populations as if they had already agreed to bear disproportionate risk without ever having the capacity to refuse, we are justified in calling those regimes sacrilegious in the precise sense that they profane the idea of consent.
By the end of this chapter, the archive of broken consent assembled in the first movement now spans welfare offices, workplaces, streets, and borders. In each site, institutions organize rituals in which vulnerable people must appear as if they have consented to their own monitoring, discipline, or exposure, while communities that benefit from these arrangements are reassured that their desire for security, efficiency, or order has been honored. The next movement of the book will not attempt to repair this archive through denial or easy optimism. It will instead treat these scenes as the necessary ground for any attempt to construct sacramental consent institutions. Only if institutional designs can withstand the pressure of welfare digital poorhouses, quantified workplaces, predictive patrols, and necropolitical borders will they deserve to be called sacraments of consent rather than new liturgies of domination.
Chapter Four
At the Altar of Work: Designing a Consent Worthy Institution under Exhaustion
It is one thing to expose the liturgies of broken consent in welfare offices, case management dashboards, and risk scoring engines; it is another to specify an institution in which consent is not an afterthought but the central sacramental question. The first movement of this book has argued that contemporary regimes of eligibility, productivity, and security treat workers and recipients as figures inside a prewritten story, asked to sign their names at the margin of a script that can in no meaningful sense be said to be theirs. The next task is no longer simply accusatory. It must show what a workplace would look like if we took seriously the claim that consent under structural inequality is neither a moment of clicking “I agree” nor a wage contract negotiated under exhaustion, but a continuing liturgy of attention, refusal, and shared risk. This chapter therefore inhabits a thought experiment that is not innocent. It begins inside a corporation whose basic architecture has been shaped by the sexual contract and the racial contract, and then attempts to break that architecture and rebuild it enough that the word consent could be spoken there without blasphemy.
Carole Pateman’s argument that the modern social contract presupposes a deeper sexual contract, in which women’s subordination is secured through apparently voluntary agreements, has already forced us to admit that contract language can stabilize domination rather than limit it. Charles Mills’s description of a racial contract that quietly circumscribes who counts as a person in need of protection displays a parallel structure in which formal equality masks a background agreement that some bodies will be surveilled, displaced, or sacrificed for others. The site of employment is where these contracts most reliably converge. Non disclosure agreements, arbitration clauses, attendance policies, and productivity dashboards are written as if every worker stood before the employer as a free and equal contractor, yet the surrounding landscape is marked by debt, immigration status, caregiving responsibility, racialized policing, and the global reserve army of labor. If sacramental consent is to mean anything here, it must begin by naming that asymmetry instead of hiding it in legal boilerplate. In that sense this chapter is intentionally offensive, because it does not concede that existing employment contracts are neutral ground on which one might add a few dignity clauses and declare the institution redeemed. It treats much of what passes for ordinary labor law as a liturgy of submission that must be rewritten from its first line.
At the same time the chapter is defensive, not in the sense of retreating, but in the sense of defending the argument against the predictable charge that such designs are utopian, economically naive, or blind to unintended consequences. The models sketched here are constrained by three disciplines. First, they are answerable to feminist and anticolonial critiques of contract that insist any talk of consent must begin with structural inequality rather than abstract autonomy. Second, they are answerable to the empirical record of institutions that have experimented with worker voice and democracy, such as German works councils, co determination regimes, and worker cooperatives, which show both the possibilities and the limits of institutionalized participation. Third, they are answerable to what Onora O Neill calls principled autonomy and the ethical function of consent as a safeguard against coercion and deception, rather than as a magical ritual that can sanctify any inequality provided a signature is on file.
The thought experiment proceeds in layers. We imagine a workplace of several hundred employees in a sector that is recognizably contemporary, such as a technology services firm or logistics provider, rather than an idealized artisanal commune. The firm is situated within an economy that still contains shareholder owned corporations, precarious subcontractors, and state regulators whose enforcement capacity is uneven at best. It must therefore negotiate with existing labor law, capital markets, and supply chains. Within that constraint we ask what it would mean to treat the workplace as an altar, in Alexander Schmemann’s sense of the world as sacrament, where ordinary material practices become sites of offering and reception rather than extraction. From Willie James Jennings we borrow the insistence that institutional design cannot ignore the racialized histories and spatial separations through which Christian and secular organizations learned to imagine some bodies as naturally mobile and others as naturally disposable. From Susan Ross we take the warning that sacramental language itself can encode exclusion if it leaves intact who is allowed to preside, interpret, or speak. James Cone’s pairing of the cross and the lynching tree stands behind any talk of sacrifice in the workplace, reminding us that an institution which asks the least powerful to absorb the costs for the sake of the whole has already decided whose suffering counts as holy and whose does not. The chapter’s institution is therefore designed not as a neutral space for productivity, but as a liturgical arrangement of power, risk, and attention that can be judged theologically and politically.
The first architectural decision concerns ownership and governance. If sacramental consent is to be more than an inner attitude, it requires that those who bear the consequences of decisions participate in their formation. Worker cooperatives and co determination regimes are not romantic solutions here; they are empirical laboratories that show both how democratic governance can stabilize shared purpose and how it can fail through capture by informal elites, burnout of representatives, and slow erosion under competitive pressure. The institution we are designing therefore begins with a mixed structure. Workers collectively hold a majority of voting shares and elect a substantial portion of the supervisory board, as in strong forms of German co determination, yet there remains external capital investment that can demand profitability and regulatory compliance. This arrangement is not chosen because it guarantees justice. It is chosen because it forces every question about consent at work to be asked in front of a body in which workers, management, and outside capital must speak to one another rather than treating one group as an absence represented only by a quarterly report. Jane Mansbridge’s distinction between adversary and unitary democracy is helpful here. She shows that assemblies sometimes operate under conditions of common interest and sometimes under structured conflict, and that institutional design must make those conditions visible rather than pretending they do not exist. A consent worthy workplace will therefore have governance spaces explicitly named as adversarial, where bargaining and contestation are expected, and other spaces named as unitary, where the shared good is primary, and it will treat mislabeling those spaces as a violation of consent.
Ownership is not enough, however, because consent is voided daily not only in boardrooms but in the small scripts of hiring, scheduling, evaluation, and discipline. Onora O Neill argues that the ethical importance of informed consent lies in its role as a safeguard against coercion and deception, and that the proliferation of formal consent procedures can erode, rather than build, trust when those procedures are detached from substantive protections. Applied to the workplace, this means that a sacramental regime cannot rely on stacks of policy acknowledgments and training modules to claim that workers have agreed to whatever is done to them. Instead, it must codify veto points where workers can refuse certain demands without retaliation, and it must bind management to forms of transparency that make deception costly. Here value sensitive design offers concrete guidance. Batya Friedman and colleagues describe value sensitive design as an approach that weaves ethical values into the full lifecycle of technology, from conceptual framing to implementation and evaluation, with attention to both direct and indirect stakeholders. If we treat consent as a value to be built into the workflows and interfaces of the institution, we must ask at every point where information is gathered, decisions are made, and metrics are displayed who is represented, who can contest the representation, and what happens when they do.
Consider hiring. In a conventional firm, the candidate signs a contract whose terms include at will termination, mandatory arbitration, and consent to future changes in surveillance or performance management tools, often expressed in a single paragraph of dense text. From Pateman’s perspective this is a paradigmatic sexual contract in form if not always in content, because it establishes a long term relation of subordination masked as a free exchange. From Mills’s perspective it very often functions as a racial contract as well, because it is layered on top of segregated labor markets, discriminatory policing, and immigration enforcement that narrow who is effectively able to refuse such terms. In the sacramental workplace, the hiring process is instead treated as the first public liturgy of consent. Offer letters are written in plain language and specify three separate domains: tasks, surveillance, and discipline. For each domain there are enumerated rights of refusal and renegotiation, and there is a standing joint committee, elected by workers and management, empowered to treat any material change in these domains as a change that must be consented to again. Consent here does not mean a fresh signature on a form; it means that workers have had access to the arguments for change, have had time and paid space to deliberate, and have institutional channels through which minority objections can be made visible even when they do not prevail. Mansbridge’s work on representation reminds us that not every worker can be present in every deliberation, so the design must combine elements of direct participation with representative structures whose accountability is not limited to periodic elections but includes ongoing channels of communication and contestation.
Surveillance and data use require especially explicit sacramental structuring, because they are where the quantified worker reenters the scene. Ajunwa has shown how workplace analytics can collapse the distinction between work life and private life, normalize continuous monitoring, and shift risk onto the worker under the language of efficiency and safety. Zuboff has argued that such practices participate in a wider logic of surveillance capitalism, in which behavioral data is appropriated and turned into predictive products in ways that outstrip existing consent regimes. Ryan Calo’s work on notice skepticism shows that simply offering more or clearer privacy notices cannot resolve this problem, because experiential design and power imbalances shape how people actually encounter and respond to requests for consent. A consent worthy workplace therefore begins not from a presumption that management may collect whatever data it can and need only disclose the fact, but from a presumption of informational fasting. That is, it collects only the data that workers and management together can justify as necessary for shared safety, legal compliance, and genuinely collaborative improvement. In theological terms, it treats data as a form of consecrated matter rather than as unowned exhaust. Schmemann’s conviction that the world in its materiality is sacramental becomes a constraint here: if bodily movement, click streams, and voice recordings are treated as trivial, the institution has already denied the workers’ bodies the dignity of sacramental presence.
Practically this means that any proposal to introduce a new monitoring practice passes through a three stage scrutiny process, borrowing from value sensitive design’s conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations. Conceptually, the proposing party must identify the values at stake and how the data collection aligns or conflicts with those values, with particular attention to the risks of reinforcing racial, gendered, or disability based inequities identified by Mills, Cone, Jennings, and Ross. Empirically, the institution must consult those who will be monitored, including those whose positions carry less formal authority, and gather qualitative accounts of how the practice might be experienced as coercive or protective. Technically, alternative designs must be explored that achieve similar aims with less intensive data collection or with stronger worker control. Only when all three stages have been completed and reported to the whole community can the practice proceed, and even then it carries an expiry date after which it must be reconsidered. Consent to surveillance is thus not a one time act but a recurring rite in which the community asks whether the current arrangement still reflects its stated reverence for one another.
Discipline and performance evaluation form another axis where sacramental consent must interrupt standard practice. Conventional performance management tools translate complex human activity into scores, rankings, or sentiment metrics that can be used to allocate promotions, bonuses, and terminations. As the previous chapters have shown, these tools carry forward the logics of predictive policing and automated welfare adjudication: opaque models encode historical bias and then present their outputs as objective measures, while appeal processes are narrow, slow, or dangerous to use. The sacramental workplace adopts a different premise. It assumes that any evaluation system that cannot be interrogated and revised by those evaluated is an instrument of domination. Here Ostrom’s work on governing the commons becomes a surprising ally. She shows that communities managing shared resources successfully tend to have rules that can be modified by those affected and monitoring that is itself accountable to the group. Applied to the workplace, this means that performance metrics are co designed and that any worker can request a community review of a metric that appears to misrepresent their work or to penalize care, solidarity, or resistance. Mansbridge’s treatment of democratic legitimacy as a continuum rather than a binary helps here as well; she suggests that legitimacy increases when affected parties can recognize their concerns as at least having been heard and weighed, even when their preferred policies do not prevail.
Consent worthy discipline thus looks very different from the disciplinary regimes described by Foucault and later scholars of managerial control. Instead of assuming that management alone defines infractions and remedies, the institution establishes a worker majority disciplinary council that reviews serious cases and publishes anonymized decisions. Harassment, discrimination, and abuse of authority are treated as violations of sacrament rather than as mere legal exposures, and patterns of harm must be addressed not only at the level of individual perpetrators but also at the level of structural arrangements that made such harm plausible. In parallel, refusal is structurally protected. Workers can decline overtime, refuse assignments that conflict with articulated ethical commitments, and raise public objections to decisions without fear of quiet retaliation in the form of downgraded performance reviews or informal exclusion. O Neill’s insistence that consent without the real possibility of refusal is empty forces the institution to design not only explicit whistleblower channels but a daily culture in which “no” is thinkable and survivable.
At this point the critic will object that such an institution cannot compete in a saturated market that rewards speed, docility, and the ability to externalize costs onto workers and communities. This objection should not be dismissed as cynicism; it is exactly the sort of structural constraint that Du Bois and Jennings teach us to keep in view. A sacramental workplace that preserves consent may have to accept slower growth, lower profit margins, and chronic tension with supply chains that are not similarly ordered. From an economic standpoint, this is a tradeoff; from a theological standpoint, it is a partial refusal of what Cone names the sacrificial logic of white supremacy, in which the flourishing of some is built on the routinized suffering of others. The chapter therefore does not claim that such institutions are easily scalable or universally replicable. It claims instead that they render visible a set of choices that current firms hide behind the language of necessity. When a company says it must monitor keystrokes to remain competitive, it is liturgically asserting that competition outranks the workers’ right to opacity and rest. When a firm insists on at will termination, it is liturgically asserting that managerial discretion outranks the worker’s need for stability and the community’s need for trust. Sacramental consent reorders these rankings. It does not abolish risk or scarcity, but it refuses to treat them as unchallengeable gods.
Because this is a theological as well as institutional experiment, the workplace imagined here includes explicit communal rites that mark consent and refusal. At regular intervals the community gathers to review its covenants: the founding charter, the surveillance agreements, the disciplinary procedures, and the wage scales. These gatherings are not shareholder meetings in which a leadership team presents decisions already made, nor are they open microphone sessions with no binding effect. They are liturgies in Schmemann’s sense, in which the world of work is brought before God and one another as an offering for discernment. The act of reading aloud a clause that authorizes biometric monitoring becomes a moment in which the community must decide whether it can, in Ross’s language, recognize in this clause an expression of God’s extravagant affections or whether it embodies a refusal of bodily dignity that cannot be blessed. If the latter, the institution commits itself to either changing the clause or acknowledging that it has stepped outside its own sacramental commitments. There is no room for silent hypocrisy here; the sacramental frame demands that contradictions be spoken.
What, then, makes this workplace genuinely different from existing experiments in worker ownership, open management, or mission based corporate culture. The difference is not in the novelty of any single element. Works councils already provide formal rights of participation in German law. Worker cooperatives already distribute ownership and governance. Value sensitive design already attempts to embed ethical commitments in technical systems. What sacramental consent adds is a continuous, explicitly theological and ethical interrogation of how these elements fit together, and a refusal to treat any institutional arrangement as morally self evident. It requires the institution to confess, aloud, when it has chosen efficiency over reverence, predictability over opacity, or growth over the right to refuse. It also demands that those confessions have structural consequences, such as reassigning power, redistributing time, or relinquishing certain markets.
The chapter ends where it began, with exhaustion. A consent worthy workplace in a tired world cannot assume that its workers arrive as lucid choosers who can weigh tradeoffs and express preferences in an unpressured way. It must reckon with burnout, trauma, caregiving burdens, and the subtle coercion of gratitude that pervades any context where income and health care are at stake. Jennings’s account of a distorted Christian imagination that fails to recognize the other as neighbor, and Cone’s insistence that theology must speak from the underside of racial terror, both press this institution to ask whose fatigue is being exploited and whose is being relieved. In practical terms this means that sacramental consent will often express itself not in heroic moments of principled refusal, but in the quiet decision to slow down production, to grant extended leave without penalty, or to accept lower output rather than demand that the most precarious absorb yet another shock. Consent under exhaustion may sometimes mean that the institution chooses to consent to its own limit, to decline contracts that would require a pace of work or a form of surveillance incompatible with its commitments.
In the next chapter the focus will shift from the workplace to a public service agency, where the formal language of rights and eligibility is even more prominent and where sacramental consent must confront the state’s monopoly on legitimate coercion. The design logic, however, remains continuous. Consent is not a signature at the bottom of a document. It is a sacramental practice in which communities repeatedly ask whether the arrangements they inhabit still honor the other as an end, or whether they have slipped back into the old contracts that treat some bodies as raw material for others’ peace.
Chapter Five: The Office of Life: Sacramental Consent in a Public Service Agency
Imagine a benefits office that begins with an apology. Not a theatrical display, not a statement drafted by a communications team, but a standing confession inscribed into the architecture of the institution itself. On the wall where the queue begins, between the dispenser that issues numbers and the poster that lists required documents, the agency has printed its own history: how earlier systems denied food, housing, and health care through opaque scores, how data was reused across contexts to punish minor errors, how people were treated as cases rather than neighbors. The text is not nostalgic and it is not self exculpating. It names public service as a site where consent has been systematically voided, where signatures were demanded under threat of hunger, where data collected under the promise of care fed other institutions of punishment. Only after this confession does the room introduce the present. It describes what will happen to a person’s information, what they can refuse, who can stop a process, and how decisions can be contested without retaliation. The line still moves slowly. People still wait. Scarcity has not disappeared. Yet something fundamental has shifted. The agency has decided that it will no longer pretend that consent in a welfare state is a matter of neutral forms and individualized choice. It will treat every encounter, every request for data, and every eligibility decision as a sacramental act that must be accountable to the vulnerable.
This chapter constructs such an agency as a deliberate affront to the dominant grammar of digital government. It is offensive because it declares that many current practices in welfare offices, municipal data hubs, and public service portals are not simply flawed implementations but liturgies of domination that profane the idea of consent. It is defensive in the sense that it anticipates and answers the charge that any alternative is impossible, or that sacramental language has no place in administrative law. The thought experiment is anchored in concrete traditions. Lucy Suchman’s work on situated action and design teaches that human activity in offices does not follow abstract plans but arises within tangled local negotiations, so any institution that claims to respect consent must be designed for those situations rather than for idealized workflows. Phil Agre’s distinction between surveillance and capture shows that contemporary state data practices are not only about watching but about restructuring activity into machine legible formats, which means that consent must address the very grammar of interaction and not just the visibility of records. Helen Nissenbaum’s doctrine of contextual integrity insists that privacy and consent in public services are about preserving appropriate information flows within specific social contexts, not about generic control over data. From theology, Alexander Schmemann’s vision of the world as sacrament, James Cone’s union of the cross and the lynching tree, Willie Jennings’s account of the Christian imagination under race, and Susan Ross’s feminist sacramental theology together insist that institutional rites must answer to histories of violence and exclusion rather than operate as abstract rituals of legitimacy.
The agency is imagined as a municipal benefits and data office in a mid sized city that administers housing vouchers, food assistance, disability benefits, and local service programs that interface with national systems. Its staff are street level bureaucrats, case workers, data analysts, managers, and guards. It receives funding that depends on metrics, audits, and compliance with national standards. It operates in a landscape still marked by the digital poorhouses and risk regimes analyzed in the first movement of the book. It cannot choose its clients, who arrive under duress and with few alternatives. If sacramental consent can be articulated anywhere in public life, it must be able to survive here.
The first design decision concerns how the agency understands and represents its own work. Suchman’s critique of plan based models of action is foundational. She argues that traditional human computer interaction and artificial intelligence research imagined coherent plans that guide action and then treat situated deviations as noise, whereas in practice human actors continually adapt, negotiate, and reinterpret plans in response to local contingencies. In a conventional welfare office, the plan is the formal workflow encoded in software: pre screening, application intake, documentation, automated eligibility determination, appeals. The situated action is what actually happens when a mother arrives late with incomplete documents, or when a case worker notices that a risk score does not match the reality of a household. Systems built on plan centric assumptions penalize deviations and treat local improvisation as error. A sacramental agency, by contrast, treats situated action as the primary reality to which systems must answer. This does not mean abandoning rules. It means designing processes that acknowledge that every case is an encounter between specific lives and general categories, an encounter in which consent can be honored or violated.
Practically, this means that the agency designs its core systems in dialog with front line staff and service users rather than imposing them from above. Suchman’s later work on human machine reconfigurations shows that agency emerges through interaction across humans and technologies, not from one side alone. Case workers, clients, and technologists are therefore gathered into standing design councils that have power not only to comment but to decide how digital forms, eligibility rules, and interaction scripts will be structured. The goal is not a fantasy of consensus. It is the explicit recognition that any consent regime in public service must be answerable to those who live inside it daily.
Agre’s capture model deepens this recognition. He distinguishes between a surveillance model, which imagines watching from outside, and a capture model, which restructures activity into standardized representations that can be processed by systems. In welfare and benefits offices, capture appears when clients are asked to narrate their lives in terms of categories such as household composition, employment status, disability codes, and allowable expenses, and when those categories are further constrained by fields in an interface that accept only certain entries. Each choice about how to encode a life is a choice about what parts of that life will be legible to the state and in what form. Consent in such a context cannot be reduced to whether the client signs the application. It must address whether the available categories, input devices, and data flows allow the client to appear as a full person rather than as a collection of risk factors.
The sacramental agency therefore treats every field in its systems as a liturgical text. Before a new category is introduced, the design council asks: What does this field assume about the person. What forms of life does it misrecognize or erase. Does it inherit racialized, gendered, or colonial assumptions. Does it invite confession in Cone’s sense, an honest naming of suffering and hope that can be met with solidarity, or does it mimic confession while in fact collecting ammunition for future punishment. Questions like these do not belong only in ethical guidelines that nobody reads; they are written into the technical design review and into procurement contracts. Vendors must document not only security and performance but the moral assumptions embedded in their data models, and clients are invited to participate in pilot testing where they can flag fields and flows that feel like traps.
Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity provides the formal vocabulary for structuring information flows once data enters the system. She argues that privacy violations occur when information moves across contexts in ways that violate the norms governing those contexts, and that effective regulation should specify roles, types of information, and transmission principles appropriate to each sphere of activity. In a conventional agency, information given to prove eligibility for housing assistance might be shared with law enforcement, other agencies, or data brokers under broad consent clauses and interagency agreements, often without meaningful notification. Contextual integrity is shattered when information collected in a context of seeking help is repurposed for punishment or exclusion.
A sacramental consent agency therefore enforces sharp contextual boundaries. Information provided for the purpose of securing subsistence is treated as consecrated to that end. It may be shared within the benefits agency as needed to administer programs, but it may not be used to support debt collection unrelated to benefits, policing, immigration enforcement, or commercial profiling. Any exception must pass through a public process that names the contemplated flow, its justification, and its risks, and service users must be part of the deliberation. Formal consent from clients is not treated as sufficient for context crossing transfers, because the surrounding structural pressures, including fear of benefit loss and lack of alternatives, render such consent suspect. Instead, the default is that contexts remain intact, and the burden of justification rests with those who wish to break them.
This is where Schmemann’s sacramental vision sharpens Nissenbaum’s framework. Schmemann writes that the Church’s liturgy reveals the world as sacrament, that is, as material participation in divine life, and that secularism arises when the world is treated as neutral stuff to be used. In the agency, data about hunger, illness, and displacement is not neutral stuff. It is the residue of lives under pressure, and it bears the weight of the cross that Cone describes, the intersection of divine solidarity and human cruelty. To treat such data as free resource for analytics or interagency sharing is to repeat in digital form the old sacrilege in which Black bodies were displayed as property and evidence, their suffering turned into spectacle and instrument of control. The sacramental agency refuses this. It treats information about suffering as something that may be offered, with consent, for the specific end of relief and justice, and that otherwise must be shielded from view.
Jennings’s history of the Christian imagination under race reminds the agency that contexts are never abstract. Western institutions learned to sort bodies and lands into contexts that justified dispossession and enforced mobility. Public services today inherit this architecture when they designate some neighborhoods as problem areas, some families as paths of dependency, some migrants as illegals, and then build data systems that make these classifications sticky. The sacramental agency must therefore design its contextual boundaries with racial histories in view. For example, it may choose to collect race and ethnicity only for purposes of monitoring discrimination and resource allocation, and it must establish enforcement mechanisms that prevent those categories from being used to increase surveillance or to feed predictive models that deny services. Consent to categorize is tied to a demonstrable practice of repair, not to administrative convenience.
Ross’s feminist sacramental theology raises another dimension. She argues that sacraments have often been defined and controlled by male clerical authorities who exclude women’s bodies and experiences, and she calls for a sacramental practice that recognizes God’s extravagant affections in ordinary, embodied relationships. Within the agency this means recognizing that consent is gendered, that women, transgender, and nonbinary persons seeking benefits may have experienced intimate violence, reproductive control, and bureaucratic suspicion. Intake procedures must therefore be designed to minimize retraumatization. Questions about partners, pregnancies, or household composition are asked only when necessary, with options to decline and with clear explanations of relevance. Private spaces are provided for sensitive conversations. The agency refuses to require, as some systems have done, that survivors of domestic violence repeatedly narrate their trauma to different officials in order to maintain eligibility. Sacramental consent here means that the institution takes responsibility for the conditions under which narrative is requested, not that it assumes that any story told in a government office has been offered freely.
At this point the critic may object that this description slides toward an idealized community and that real public agencies must deal with fraud, finite budgets, and oversight regimes that demand strict documentation. The chapter therefore turns to process design with these constraints explicit. Suchman’s situated action suggests that many compliance failures arise when rigid systems force staff to choose between following rules and responding to human need. The sacramental agency responds by building formal spaces for discretionary judgment and by making that judgment accountable rather than clandestine. For example, case workers may be authorized to override an automated income threshold to maintain food assistance for a household with irregular earnings, but every override is logged with a narrative explanation and periodically reviewed by a joint committee that includes peers and service users. Instead of pretending that discretion does not exist, the agency normalizes it as part of its sacramental life, where mercy and justice must be held together.
Agre’s capture model warns that even well intentioned discretion can be undermined if the underlying representations remain narrow. If the system encodes only monthly income and household size, it cannot register the difference between a person caring for a disabled parent and a person with the same income without caregiving duties. The sacramental agency therefore insists on representational adequacy as a consent issue. If people must contort their lives to fit into data fields, their apparent consent to the resulting decisions is suspect. Participatory design sessions therefore include exercises in which clients rewrite forms to reflect their realities. The agency then tests new schemas not only for database performance but for whether they allow people to tell the truth about their circumstances without fear that honesty will be punished.
Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity also reframes the omnipresent language of fraud. In many systems, cross matching and data sharing are justified as tools to detect and deter fraud, and clients are told that participation in these checks is the price of public trust. The sacramental agency assumes instead that trust is built when information flows are appropriate to context and when the institution demonstrates that it will protect clients from other arms of the state that may wish to repurpose their data. Fraud detection becomes one function among others, subject to the same contextual constraints as any other. For instance, if payroll data is used to verify income, it may be imported into the benefits context but may not trigger automatic notifications to immigration enforcement or police when discrepancies arise. Investigations are initiated only when there is evidence that someone who has genuine alternatives is intentionally misrepresenting information, and even then the response is proportional and attentive to structural conditions.
From a sacramental point of view, this shift is not sentimental; it is doctrinal. Cone’s pairing of the cross and lynching tree exposes how easily dominant groups frame violence as necessary discipline. A welfare agency that organizes itself around suspicion of fraud risks reenacting that pattern, treating the poor and racialized as presumptive cheaters whose suffering can be intensified in the name of protecting the public. The sacramental agency refuses to build its identity around punishing the few who exploit programs. It builds its identity around accompanying the many who are trapped between inadequate wages, unstable housing, and structural discrimination. Consent in such a place means that clients can approach the agency without having to agree beforehand that they are suspects.
The chapter anticipates another objection, namely that explicit sacramental language will alienate secular staff and clients or violate norms of state neutrality. Here Jennings and Ross help clarify what is being claimed. The agency described does not impose liturgical rites or theological tests on anyone. It uses sacramental concepts as an internal discipline, a way for designers, managers, and communities to interrogate whether their practices honor or desecrate the dignity of those who seek help. The explicit language of sacrament may appear in internal documents and in partnerships with faith communities; it may appear in the agency’s own confessional wall text; but the services themselves remain available to all, regardless of religious affiliation. In that sense sacramental consent functions as a moral theory of institutions rather than as a state religion, a theory that can be translated into secular terms when necessary but that refuses to forget its theological roots in practices of confession, vow, and shared table.
Taken together, these design choices amount to a public service agency that treats consent as a structural property rather than as a ritual at the margin. Clients can refuse certain questions without losing all benefits. They can see and correct the data that represents them. They can challenge the categories that misname them. They can participate in governance bodies that review algorithms, data sharing agreements, and disciplinary policies. Staff can refuse to enforce policies that directly violate articulated commitments to context, dignity, and repair, and there are procedures for adjudicating such refusals without automatic retaliation. The agency binds itself to public confession when it fails and to penance understood as structural change rather than as public relations.
There is no guarantee that such an agency would be pure. Schmemann reminds us that sacramental life unfolds in a world that remains marked by sin and death, and Cone insists that any theology worth its name must stay near the sites of terror. The sacramental agency will make mistakes. It will sometimes capitulate to budget cuts, politics, or bureaucratic inertia. Its staff will grow tired. Its protections will be circumvented. The point is not to conjure a flawless institution. It is to specify, with as much concreteness as possible, what it would mean for a public service agency to take sacramental consent as its organizing question, and to do so in full knowledge of the histories of harm in which it stands.
In the next chapter the focus will narrow further to a place where liminality and breakdown are the norm rather than the exception: a clinic or mental health service that attempts to practice sacramental consent in the presence of altered states, trauma, and the temptation to normalize at any cost. The agency of this chapter remains in the background as a reminder that clinics never stand alone; they live downstream from welfare offices and border posts, and the consent they seek to honor will always already be conditioned by those prior liturgies.
Chapter Seven: Friendship without Capture: A Phenomenology of Sacramental Consent
Imagine something so apparently small that most ethical theories never notice it. You come home tired and a friend messages, “Call me, I need to process what happened at work.” You have already spent the day absorbing other people’s needs in meetings, in chat threads, in the half lit corridors of an office that expects you to be infinitely available. You hesitate. If you say yes, you know you will give more than you have. If you say no, you fear becoming what the culture has already trained you to despise, someone who is not there, someone who withholds. You answer, “Of course, what happened.” You have consented, but not from freedom. You have agreed inside a script in which good friendship is defined as unbounded emotional hospitality in a world that refuses to arrange structural care.
This chapter argues that scenes like this are not marginal to the ethics of consent. They are its primary theater. Institutions of sacramental consent, whether in workplaces, agencies, or clinics, are populated by people who have been trained in their friendships to treat their own exhaustion as irrelevant and their own opacity as a failure. The argument is offensive in its target because it names ordinary expectations of intimacy and availability as violations of consent, not only in spectacular cases of abuse but in the everyday insistence that we disclose more than we can survive, forgive more than can be metabolized, and remain cheerful while doing so. It is defensive in its method because it refuses to reduce friendship to pathology or to deny the reality that many lives have been saved, quite literally, by friends who stayed on the phone all night.
The chapter therefore unfolds as a phenomenology of consent and refusal in friendship and small community, constructed with a council of thinkers who have already treated love, attention, emotion, and acknowledgement as serious philosophical work. Iris Murdoch offers a conception of moral life in which loving attention to the reality of another person is the central task, not a sentimental extra. Emmanuel Levinas gives us a grammar in which the face of the other calls us to an infinite responsibility that precedes choice, a responsibility that can sanctify or crush depending on how it is received. bell hooks writes of love as a practised ethic that requires honesty, justice, and care, and she does so precisely because she knows how thoroughly our cultures have failed to teach love at all. Sara Ahmed tracks how emotions move between bodies and institutions, how complaint is blocked and rerouted, and how those who make demands for redress are cast as the problem rather than the harm that provoked them. Stanley Cavell, finally, insists that moral life does not consist only in knowing the facts but in acknowledgement, the act of responding to another’s claim as real and binding, and he shows how easily we defend ourselves against this by insisting on epistemic privacy.
Together these thinkers allow us to name a set of micro practices that either sustain sacramental consent in friendship or hollow it out. The chapter moves slowly through those practices: attention that does not capture, love that does not demand transparency, complaint that can be heard without the complainer becoming the problem, acknowledgement that does not slide into surveillance, and refusal that can be spoken without loss of belonging.
Murdoch is the first guide because she refuses to let us treat love as an interior state that happens beneath ethics. In The Sovereignty of Good she argues that moral life is mostly a matter of patient attention to reality, and that love is the only force that can free our perception from the fantasies imposed by ego, fear, and self deception. For Murdoch, to love another person well is to work on one’s own vision so that the other can appear as they are, rather than as an object arranged around the self’s needs. This is already an account of consent at a deeper level. If my perception of you is thick with projection, then every apparent invitation I offer you is structured toward my own drama. Even if I formally ask for your consent to lean on you, disclose to you, or analyse you, the situation is already bent. You are being asked to enter into a scene whose script has been written in advance by my fantasies.
Murdoch’s emphasis on vision helps us name one of the most common voidings of consent in friendship, which is the insistence that the friend agree to play a particular role. The wounded genius who always needs rescuing, the fixer who always brings solutions, the fun one who must keep the mood light, the spiritual one who must interpret every event as meaningful: these roles may be tacitly consented to for a time, but over years they become cages. To withdraw from the role is experienced by the other as betrayal, because they have taken the role for reality. Murdoch’s insistence that virtue involves a long training of attention away from fantasy means that sacramental consent in friendship must include the willingness to admit that we have misseen the other, that we have treated their availability or cheerfulness as natural rather than as gifts that could have been withheld. Consent here is not only about what we ask in words; it is about whether we allow the other to change in our sight.
Levinas intensifies the demand. In Totality and Infinity he argues that the encounter with the face of the other person inaugurates an ethical relation that precedes knowledge and calculation. The other’s vulnerability and exposure call me to responsibility before I choose it; I find myself already bound. On one reading, this seems to annihilate consent, because if I am infinitely responsible, then I can never say that I have done enough, never claim the right to rest. Yet Levinas is not describing a legal contract. He is trying to articulate the way in which the other’s presence interrupts my tendency to reduce the world to my projects. For sacramental consent in friendship, this means that the first movement is always toward the other: I am summoned out of my self absorption. But Levinas also insists that the ethical relation is asymmetrical. The other has priority. This asymmetry can be weaponized in cultures that have already assigned some people to the role of caregiver and others to the role of one cared for, usually along lines of gender, race, class, and disability. Feminist critics have rightly worried that Levinasian responsibility, unmodified, can become a charter for the endless self giving of those already exploited.
To honour Levinas without reproducing this exploitation, sacramental consent must treat infinite responsibility as a description of the stakes of encounter rather than as an instruction for interpersonal policy. The fact that your vulnerability calls me does not mean that you are entitled to my every resource. It means that, at some level, my humanity is at risk in how I respond. Consent then becomes a double structure. On the one hand, I cannot pretend that your need does not concern me. On the other, I must discern how to respond without treating myself as an inexhaustible resource. Refusal here is not a denial of responsibility but a confession of finitude. In a sacramental frame, God, not the friend, is the one who bears infinite responsibility. Human friends participate, sometimes intensely, sometimes barely at all, in that responsibility.
bell hooks brings the analysis down to ground level. In All About Love: New Visions she argues that contemporary societies have almost entirely failed to provide a shared, rigorous definition of love, and that as a result people call many things love that are in fact domination, neglect, or projection. hooks proposes an explicit definition: love is a combination of care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. It is not merely feeling but a set of practised actions that aim at the growth of self and other. This definition is already sacramental in structure, because it treats love as a visible, repeated practice through which something invisible, the dignity and freedom of the person, is guarded and nourished.
If we treat friendship as one of the primary sites where this practice is learned, hooks’s account makes visible how often consent is voided by calling something love that is not. When a friend demands constant emotional labour without reciprocity and calls this “you are the only one I can talk to,” what is being asked is consent to an arrangement that arrests the other’s growth. When a friend insists on total access to thoughts, histories, and feelings in the name of authenticity, what is being demanded is consent to the erasure of opacity. hooks is explicit that love requires boundaries and that abuse, however emotionally intense, is incompatible with love, because it systematically undermines the other’s capacity to flourish. Sacramental consent in friendship therefore requires the courage to say that some bargains are unloveable, that there are conversations we will not have, accusations we will not accept, scripts we will not repeat, even when we care deeply.
Sara Ahmed’s work on emotion and complaint explains why such refusals are so difficult to sustain. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion she argues that emotions are not simply inner states but circulations that bind bodies and signs, forming boundaries of belonging and exclusion. Love, fear, shame, and anger do things: they stick to some bodies more than others, they attach some people to the nation and cast others as threats. In Complaint! Ahmed shows how institutions respond to complaints about harassment, discrimination, and abuse by redirecting attention from the harm to the complainant, framing them as troublemakers who disturb a supposedly harmonious environment. The person who names harm becomes the one who must leave.
Friendships and small communities often reproduce this dynamic at a micro scale. When someone says, “I did not consent to that joke, that touch, that assumption,” the response is often, “You are making everything difficult,” “You are too sensitive,” or “You are breaking the group.” To consent to be in the friendship then begins to mean consenting not to complain. Ahmed names complaint as feminist pedagogy because to complain is to learn and teach how power actually works, who is protected and who is exposed. In a sacramental register, complaint is confession redirected: not the confession of personal sins within a closed ritual, but the confession that a relationship or structure is violating its own stated commitments. If sacramental consent is to be more than a slogan, friendships must become places where complaint can be voiced without the complainer being expelled from love. This does not mean treating every feeling as final, but it does mean treating every complaint as a serious claim about how power and vulnerability are being distributed.
Stanley Cavell’s distinction between knowing and acknowledging helps us see what goes wrong when complaint is silenced. In The Claim of Reason he argues that skepticism about other minds arises not because we lack evidence but because we refuse to acknowledge that others have claims on us at all. To acknowledge is not simply to register a fact; it is to respond in a way that allows the other to appear as a speaking subject rather than as an object of interpretation. In friendship, the temptation is often to treat the other as a case to be assessed, diagnosed, or fixed. “You are just projecting,” “You are overreacting,” “You are traumatised, so you cannot see clearly.” Sometimes these assessments contain truth. Yet when they are offered as a way of avoiding the work of acknowledgement, they deny the very possibility of consent. For consent to be real, my “no” must be heard as a claim you must answer, not as a symptom you must interpret away.
This yields a set of sacramental micro practices that are both simple and severe. The first is the explicit recognition that no friend has a right to total access. There must be a right to opacity within love. A friend may invite disclosure, may express longing to know more, may suffer from not understanding, but sacramental consent demands that the other be allowed to say, “I am not ready to speak about that,” or, “I will never tell you that story,” without this refusal being treated as betrayal. Love here is measured not by how much is shared but by how carefully the boundaries of the other are kept. Murdoch’s account of attention as respect for the real means that love should direct us away from the fantasy that knowing everything is necessary for care.
The second practice is the covenant of revisability. In many friendships, expectations crystallize early and then become invisible law. We always talk every day. We never go to bed angry. We always tell each other everything. These informal vows are meaningful, but when left implicit they enslave. Sacramental consent in friendship requires that expectations be brought to speech and that they be treated as revisable in light of changing capacities and circumstances. This is not contract in the narrow sense; it is more like liturgical reform. Just as churches sometimes revise their rites in response to new insight or repentance, friendships must sometimes say aloud, “The way we have been doing this is hurting us, we need to change it.” Ahmed’s work on complaint suggests that one way to make this possible is to treat such revisions not as signs of failure but as part of the friendship’s pedagogy, as lessons in how power and vulnerability move between us.
The third practice concerns presence and absence. The culture of burnout that Han describes has invaded friendships with the ideology of total availability. Messaging platforms make it technically possible to be in contact at all times, and this technical possibility becomes a moral expectation. If sacramental consent is to survive in friendship, there must be liturgies of absence, agreed rhythms of non response that are framed not as abandonment but as necessary silence. Friends might explicitly covenant that there are times when phones will be off, that some days there will be no conversation, not as punishment but as recognition that attention is finite. In this sense, Sabbath becomes a model: the refusal to work, to answer, to be productive is not a failure of care but a commanded rest in which both friends consent to be held by something larger than their mutual need.
The critic will say that this language threatens to bureaucratize intimacy, to turn every friendship into a negotiation of boundaries and expectations that strips away spontaneity. The chapter acknowledges the risk. There are forms of self conscious relationality that suffocate, that turn every interaction into a seminar. Yet the current alternative is not innocent. When expectations remain unspoken, the person who is more willing to sacrifice tends to carry the load, and the person whose needs are more loudly expressed tends to set the terms. hooks’s insistence that love requires justice implies that the absence of explicit structures does not mean the absence of law; it means that the law is written by power without acknowledgement. Sacramental consent in friendship is an attempt to bring these laws into the open and to subject them to shared discernment.
One of the most delicate questions here is how to handle asymmetry of crisis. There are seasons when one friend is more in need than the other, because of illness, bereavement, structural oppression, or spiritual desolation. Levinas reminds us that the command of the other is not conditional on reciprocity, and sacramental consent cannot be equated with equal exchange. Often the friend who is less pressed must carry more. The problem arises when this pattern solidifies, when the same person is always the container of others’ distress and is never allowed to bring their own. Ahmed’s analysis of complaint suggests that one sign of a healthy friendship is whether the roles can reverse, whether the person who has been held can also hear complaint about how their weight has been carried. In sacramental language, this would be the moment when both recognize that God, not either of them, is the ultimate bearer of burdens, and that to treat a friend as an endless resource is to commit a quiet form of idolatry.
This phenomenology has institutional consequences. When we ask workers to participate in sacramental consent structures at work, in agencies, and in clinics, we are asking them to practise arts of listening, refusal, and complaint that are first learned at tables and on couches and in long walks at night. If people have been taught in their friendships that saying no means losing belonging, they will sign workplace forms they do not understand, accept welfare conditions they cannot live under, and submit to clinical regimes they do not trust, because their threshold for acceptable coercion has been lowered in the most intimate places. If, on the other hand, friendships become sites where complaint is honoured, opacity is respected, and finite attention is treated as morally significant, then institutions that ask for consent will encounter people whose expectations have already been raised.
The chapter therefore closes with a picture not of heroic friends but of ordinary ones who practise small sacramental acts. Two people agree that once a week they will talk about what feels coercive in their lives, not to solve it, but to acknowledge it together. Another pair decides that they will each reserve one part of their interior life as explicitly unshared, not as a secret against the other but as a sign that no human relation exhausts the person. A small group adopts Ahmed’s question, “What does complaint do,” as a regular reflection, asking how their reactions to one another’s discomfort either reproduce or interrupt institutional patterns. These are not grand designs, yet they are the nervous system of any larger sacramental consent architecture.
In such friendships, consent is not a formality or a therapeutic buzzword. It is the ongoing negotiation of how two or more finite beings will bear and limit their responsibility for one another under conditions of structural exhaustion. There will be failures, silences, and betrayals. There will be complaints that are never heard and refusals that are punished. Sacramental consent does not promise to eliminate these; it promises to keep them visible and to refuse the temptation to call submission love.
The next chapter turns from these dyadic and small scale relations to communities that attempt to architect time, land, and resources in ways that protect fragility and liminality: spiritual friendships, reading circles, mutual aid networks, monastic and quasi monastic experiments. There the question of consent widens again, as belonging begins to involve shared practices and vows. The phenomenology of friendship developed here remains the basic unit, the cell from which any larger body of sacramental consent must grow.
Chapter Eight: The Commons as Altar: Small Communities and the Architecture of Sacramental Consent
Begin with a room that is neither office nor sanctuary. Folding tables bear bags of rice and beans, diapers, and envelopes of transit cards; a hand drawn sign on the wall says that everything is free and that no documentation is required. At one corner a whiteboard lists tasks for the day: meet with tenants about repairs, call the auntie who was evicted last week, restock the fridge, clean. There is a child asleep on a pile of coats, someone stirring a pot of soup on a donated stove, two people quietly adjusting a spreadsheet that tracks who has access to which keys. A jar on the table reads, in handwriting that is both serious and playful, “Give what you can. Take what you need. No one keeps score.” At the doorway someone who has never been here before hesitates. They have been taught that any offer of help hides conditions. They ask, “What do you want from me if I take this?” The person at the door answers, “Nothing you do not wish to give. We are trying to live as if we belong to one another already.”
This chapter claims that such rooms, along with monasteries, base communities, reading circles, and small experiments in common life, are among the most important sites where sacramental consent is either protected or betrayed. The argument is offensive in its target because it names many forms of community that present themselves as refuges as places where consent is quietly voided through spiritualization, paternalism, or pressure for conformity. It is defensive in its method because it treats the long traditions of monasticism, liberation communities, Indigenous covenants with land, and mutual aid not as pure alternatives to compromised institutions but as fragile laboratories where the ethics of consent becomes visible in shared time, shared resources, and shared vulnerability.
The council that guides this chapter is unusually crowded. From early Christian monasticism come Benedict of Nursia and Basil of Caesarea, whose rules and urban monastic complexes organized time, labor, and property into forms of common life vowed through stability and obedience. The Rule of Benedict, composed in Latin in the early sixth century, calls for monks to profess stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience under an abbot, and presents the cloister as a workshop in which humility, listening, and common prayer are learned through ordered rhythms of day and night. Basil, preaching in a time of famine and founding what later writers call the Basiliad, organized houses of hospitality near Caesarea for the poor and sick, an ensemble described by later commentators as a small city that combined liturgy, medical care, and manual labor.
From the twentieth century we receive Dorothee Soelle and Gustavo Gutiérrez as theologians of communities that hold mysticism and resistance together. Soelle’s The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance presents mysticism as a practice of becoming empty of domination in order to join the suffering and transformative action of the poor, insisting that genuine spiritual experience is inseparable from resistance to oppression. Gutiérrez, in A Theology of Liberation and in We Drink from Our Own Wells, grounds theology and spirituality in the praxis of base communities, small groups of the poor who read scripture together, share life, and interpret their struggles as sites of God’s liberating action.
From Indigenous and ecological thought we learn that community is never only human. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and related essays describe a covenant of reciprocity in which humans receive gifts from plants, animals, and waters, return gifts in gratitude, and shape economies where the land could be thankful for the people, rather than the other way around. Vine Deloria Jr, particularly in God Is Red, frames Indigenous religions as ways of thinking in place and in time, rooted in particular lands and communal histories rather than in universal propositions about deity, and criticizes Christian traditions for their tendency to abstract faith from land and to disregard the sacredness of specific territories.
From contemporary movements, Dean Spade’s work on mutual aid names the practices through which communities share resources and support survival during crises, while warning of dangers such as deservingness hierarchies, saviorism, and cooptation when mutual aid reproduces charity models or implants state logics inside solidarity work. Dorothee Soelle remains present, not only as a Christian political theologian but as a mystic who insists that any community that claims spiritual authority while ignoring structural injustice has become an idol factory.
The question that binds these voices is simple and exacting. Under what conditions can a person consent to belong to a community that shares time, land, and resources without that consent collapsing into coerced loyalty or spiritualized exploitation.
Monastic traditions offer an early and ambivalent answer. The Rule of Benedict begins by inviting the listener to “incline the ear of the heart,” and then proceeds to describe a life structured by common prayer, manual labor, lectio, and practices of obedience under an abbot whose authority is extensive yet bound by the obligation to seek the good of the community and to consult the brothers, including the youngest, in important matters. Monks vow stability, which means remaining in one community rather than wandering in search of a better monastery, and this stability is described in later Benedictine commentary as the first discipline of an ordered life, a refusal to flee when life together becomes tedious or painful.
From the standpoint of sacramental consent, this vow of stability has both luminous and dangerous forms. On the luminous side, stability answers the saturation and mobility of late modern life by insisting that genuine community requires time. It resists the consumer pattern in which churches, neighborhoods, and organizations are abandoned whenever they cease to satisfy. Benedictine stability asks a person to consent in advance to remain with a specific group of others while working through the conflicts, disappointments, and small betrayals that accompany any honest life together. It embodies the belief that God and neighbor are found in this place and these faces, not in an imagined perfect community somewhere else.
On the dangerous side, stability can become a tool for trapping people in relations of abuse or silencing, especially when the abbot or leadership are treated as near infallible. The novice who vows stability after a year may be doing so under conditions of romantic idealization or social pressure, and centuries of monastic history include stories of communities where consent to remain was undermined by gendered subordination, class distinctions, or spiritual manipulation. Basil’s construction of the Basiliad as a city of care for the poor extended monastic virtues into service, yet it also raised questions about how the poor consented to enter such spaces and whether the charity they received required forms of gratitude that veiled structural injustice.
A sacramental reading of Benedict and Basil would therefore treat their rules and institutions not simply as models to copy but as texts that reveal how shared time and space can be structured either to honour or to void consent. The vows of stability, obedience, and listening can be reimagined as vows of mutual consent: to remain where accountability is possible, to obey only where the community as a whole has deliberated and consented to its own rule, to listen with the ears of the heart not as passive submission but as active reception of the other’s reality. Benedictine commentary on stability already hints at this when it describes listening as a central practice through which the community hears both scripture and one another.
Liberation theology reframes the question of community from the side of the poor. Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation describes poverty in Latin America as structural, produced by economic and political systems rather than by individual failure, and insists that theology must be done from within communities that struggle for justice. In We Drink from Our Own Wells he presents spirituality as the way in which a people lives out its faith in everyday life, drawing on the counsel of Bernard of Clairvaux to root spirituality in one’s own experience, here specified as the experience of the poor and their struggle for life. Base communities form as small groups that gather to read scripture, reflect on their situations, and plan action.
These communities are often presented as pure spaces of consent, where marginalized people freely gather to re interpret their lives and to resist oppression. Yet Gutiérrez himself, and many who follow, warn that they are not immune to power dynamics within the poor themselves. Leaders emerge; some voices carry more weight than others; women carry disproportionate burdens of care; and outside ecclesial or political forces may attempt to steer the communities toward particular agendas. From a sacramental consent perspective, the base community is a school where people learn to say yes and no together: yes to shared reading and mutual support; no to fatalism and to theologies that sanctify domination. The community consents to a method as much as to a set of doctrines, a method in which reality is read through the lens of the gospel and the gospel is read through the lens of reality. The risk is that the poor may be asked to consent not only to their own struggle but to heroic narratives projected upon them by theologians who require them as symbols.
Dorothee Soelle radicalizes this tension by insisting that mysticism separated from political resistance becomes reactionary, while resistance void of mystical depth becomes brittle. In The Silent Cry she explores mysticism as a universal human capacity for encounter with the divine that must be bound to the suffering of the oppressed rather than to private ecstasies, and she describes a “crazy mysticism of becoming empty” that reduces the misery of the poor and diminishes one’s own slavery to possession and violence. Soelle’s communities are gatherings where people share contemplative practice and political action, where liturgy and protest are not separate spheres. For sacramental consent, her work suggests that communities must ask whether their spirituality creates the capacity to say no to injustice, including injustice within the group. If communal contemplative practice dulls anger or teaches people to accept their exploitation as a path to holiness, then consent has been undermined. If mysticism, as Soelle understands it, becomes a resource for courage and resistance, then consent is deepened, because people are more able to name and refuse what violates their dignity.
Indigenous and ecological accounts of community reveal a further layer, one that challenges the anthropocentrism of many church and activist communities. Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass presents stories in which human communities are situated within larger networks of relation with plants, animals, and waters, and she repeatedly describes a covenant of reciprocity in which gratitude for the gifts of strawberries, maples, and sweetgrass leads to practices of restraint, ceremony, and gift giving in return. In essays such as “Returning the Gift” and more recent conversations on practical reverence, she speaks of a gift economy in which relationships, abundance, and reciprocity replace extraction and private accumulation, and she invites readers to consider whether the land itself might be thankful for the presence of people who live by these covenants.
Vine Deloria Jr’s God Is Red presses this further by arguing that Indigenous religions are fundamentally about relationships in particular places, in contrast to what he sees as Christian preoccupation with history and abstract doctrines. He emphasizes the importance of sacred sites, tribal lands, and communal histories, and he challenges non Indigenous readers to recognize how land theft and ecological destruction are not secondary issues but assaults on the religious life of Indigenous nations.
These perspectives shift the question of consent from interpersonal and institutional arrangements alone to the relationships between communities and land. A small community that shares housing and meals but participates in extractive economies that despoil local ecosystems has consent structures that end at the property line. Sacramental consent, in an Indigenous and ecological register, would require communities to seek the consent of more than human neighbors: to ask whether their patterns of consumption, building, and worship honour the gifts of land and water. Kimmerer’s language of covenant and reciprocity implies that consent with land is enacted not through formal declarations but through practices such as taking only what is needed, returning gifts, caring for damaged places, and teaching gratitude as a daily discipline.
In light of Deloria’s critique, communities shaped by Christian sacramental traditions must also acknowledge that their own liturgies have often been performed on stolen land without recognition of Indigenous presence or consent. A sacramental consent community in North America or other settler contexts would therefore need to incorporate practices of land acknowledgement that go beyond polite prefaces, including relationships with Indigenous nations, concrete forms of land return or shared governance, and liturgies that confess complicity in dispossession. Only then can claims about sacramental community avoid reproducing what Deloria identifies as the Christian habit of treating land as a backdrop rather than as a partner in covenant.
Contemporary mutual aid projects sit at the intersection of these traditions. Dean Spade defines mutual aid as survival work done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, in which communities share resources and support one another directly as governments fail to respond to or actively engineer crises. Food distribution networks, tenant defense groups, bail funds, disaster response collectives, and medical support teams all fall within this field. Spade insists that mutual aid is not charity; it aims to build solidarity and collective power, not to reproduce hierarchies of giver and receiver. At the same time, he warns of recurring dangers: deservingness hierarchies that determine who is worthy of help, saviorism in which helpers seek moral self justification through those they assist, and cooptation when states and large nonprofits attempt to channel mutual aid into service delivery that props up unjust systems.
From the perspective of sacramental consent, mutual aid projects are profound experiments in how communities structure consent to give and to receive under conditions of crisis. On the giving side, participation often involves time, emotional labor, and exposure to danger, such as the risk of arrest at protests or contamination during pandemics. Consent to take part must therefore be free from coercive moralism. When mutual aid rhetoric frames participation as the only proof of political virtue, it pressures people to say yes beyond their capacity. The sacramental frame would insist that the community honour refusals and pauses, treating them as part of the covenant rather than as failures of solidarity. On the receiving side, mutual aid groups attempt to eliminate the humiliating conditions attached to many forms of charity: means testing, invasive questions, surveillance. Receiving help is framed not as gratitude to a superior benefactor but as participation in a cycle of giving in which everyone is sometimes in need and sometimes in plenty. Consent here is protected when people can take what they need without surrendering their dignity or their privacy.
For such projects to be sacramental, their practices must be intentionally bound to an ethic of reverence. Kimmerer’s language of practical reverence, in which small daily acts embody gratitude and care for the Earth, offers a template. A mutual aid kitchen that sources food from local producers committed to soil health, that composts waste, and that treats the space as a site of ceremony as well as distribution is already binding its consent structures to land. Gutiérrez’s insistence that spirituality is the way a people lives out its faith in history suggests that mutual aid, when rooted in shared reflection and prayer or other forms of communal meaning making, becomes more than logistics; it becomes a sacramental practice in which the body of the community is broken and shared.
Soelle’s warning remains in force. Communities that celebrate their mutual aid work without confronting the structural causes of crisis risk turning solidarity into a substitute sacrament that numbs political will. Her vision of mysticism as resistance would require mutual aid groups to cultivate contemplation not as escape but as deepening of rage and tenderness, helping members endure the slow work of structural change without surrendering to despair.
Across these diverse communities several features emerge as necessary for sacramental consent. First, there must be a shared and revisable rule. Benedict’s monastic rule, Gutiérrez’s descriptions of base communities, Kimmerer’s covenant of reciprocity, and Spade’s practical guidelines for mutual aid all function as rules in this sense: articulated commitments about time, money, decision making, and conflict. Consent is possible only when people know what they are saying yes to and when the rule itself can be questioned and changed. Second, there must be structurally protected spaces for complaint and dissent. Ahmed’s analysis of complaint in institutions applies equally here: if those who name harm are treated as threats to community harmony, then any formal consent is hollow. Third, there must be real exit options. Stability is not servitude. A community that practices sacramental consent will make it materially and relationally possible for members to leave without punishment, even as it cultivates practices that help them stay when departure is driven purely by boredom or fantasy. Benedictine reflections that contrast stability with restless wandering can be reinterpreted here as warnings against consumer mobility, not as commands to endure abuse.
Finally, there must be an orientation toward those beyond the circle. Basil’s Basiliad, liberation base communities, Kimmerer’s ecological covenants, Deloria’s land based sustenance of tribal life, and mutual aid networks all testify that genuine community is not a gated refuge. Sacramental consent is deformed when belonging in the group requires indifference to those outside or active participation in their exclusion. Communities that share goods, time, and land in ways that lessen the misery of others, while also protecting the right of members to rest and refuse, come closest to what this book has been naming as sacramental.
In such communities, consent is not a single moment of joining but a repeated act of shared discernment. Members consent to show up to a meeting, to cook a meal, to listen to a story, to sign a lease in common, to risk arrest together, to plant and harvest in a garden, to pray or sit in silence at dawn. They also consent at times to step back, to decline a role, to relocate, to grieve. The community consents, in response, to absorb these movements without collapsing into resentment or collapse. The altar of this chapter’s title is not a piece of furniture but the shared table, stove, field, and floor where these acts are enacted under an awareness of the sacred.
The next movement of the book will return to large scale institutions, to welfare systems, workplaces, and policing regimes, and ask whether the sacramental consent architectures glimpsed here can be scaled without being destroyed. The small communities examined in this chapter are not alternatives that we can simply multiply; they are signs and workshops in which practices of consent under exhaustion are learned. Their failures are as instructive as their beauty. If sacramental consent is to become more than a fragile possibility under saturated regimes, it will be because the patterns traced in monasteries, base communities, ecological covenants, and mutual aid rooms are allowed to disturb contracts, protocols, and policies far beyond their walls.
Chapter Nine: Against Legibility Alone: Nonreformist Reform and the Limits of Sacramental Consent
Begin in a conference room that has been staged to look transparent. There is glass on three sides, a wall of screens on the fourth, and a long table scattered with printed decks. Representatives from a welfare agency, a predictive policing task force, and a multinational employer have been summoned to hear from the vendors who built the systems examined in the first movement of this book. The vendors speak with the calm of those who believe in their own rationality. They show charts of reduced fraud, improved response time, increased productivity. They talk about adding new consent prompts, redesigning interfaces, including community advisory boards, and conducting fairness audits. At the end of the presentations, one civil servant asks a question that cuts through the rehearsed optimism: “If we adopted every safeguard you propose, would the people subjected to these systems have a meaningful way to refuse them without losing food, safety, or work.” The room falls quiet. Someone finally answers, “They could always opt out,” and then admits that opting out would mean hunger, arrest, or unemployment. The systems remain formally optional and materially compulsory.
This chapter stands in the final movement of the book, where abstract principles of sacramental consent must confront the design of large scale institutions that cannot be escaped without great cost. It is intentionally offensive toward the comforting belief that better notice, more inclusive interfaces, and improved explanatory language can redeem systems whose basic purpose is to render populations legible for extraction, discipline, or optimization. It is intentionally defensive in its method, because it refuses nihilism. It does not claim that sacramental consent demands the abolition of all states, platforms, or contracts. Instead it uses the tools of political theory, law, and formal design to distinguish between reforms that reinscribe domination and what abolitionists call nonreformist reforms, changes that reduce harm, expand spaces of refusal, and build capacities for future refusal without sanctifying the institution itself.
Three thinkers frame the problem. James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, describes how modern states pursue legibility, the simplification of complex social practices into forms that can be counted, taxed, regulated, and disciplined. Cadastral maps, population registers, standardized measures, and planning schemes all aim to make life visible from a central vantage point, and Scott shows how this ambition, combined with high modern confidence and weakened civil society, has produced disasters from forced collectivization to authoritarian urban planning. Wendy Brown, in Undoing the Demos, argues that neoliberal reason colonizes democratic institutions by recoding citizens as human capital, public goods as investments, and political decision making as market competition, so that democratic practices and imaginaries are hollowed out even when formal procedures remain. Elinor Ostrom, in Governing the Commons, offers a different picture, one in which communities craft rules for shared resources that fit local conditions and rely on participation, monitoring, and graduated sanctions, thereby disproving the assumption that only states or markets can manage common goods.
Sacramental consent is caught within these tensions. It requires enough legibility that those subject to institutions can understand how their data, time, and bodies are being used, yet it cannot accept legibility as a final good, because many communities need opacity to survive. It depends on democratic practices of shared rule and complaint, yet neoliberal rationality has already recoded many domains as arenas of entrepreneurial self management. It seeks forms of shared governance that resemble Ostrom’s commons, yet it must work with institutions that are not voluntarily joined and that involve coercive powers of taxation, policing, and discipline.
To test what sacramental consent can and cannot do in such conditions, the chapter returns to three objects already examined: an automated welfare scoring system, a predictive policing platform, and a workplace analytics suite. For each, it asks four questions. First, what would sacramental consent require in the design of contracts, defaults, and escalation paths. Second, which reforms would improve dignity and agency yet remain compatible with the system’s basic logic. Third, where does intersectional analysis, in the sense articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw, reveal that consent is structured by overlapping regimes of race, gender, class, and immigration status. Fourth, where does the attempt to embed sacramental consent run up against limits so firm that only nonreformist reform, or abolition, remains intellectually honest.
Consider first the welfare system modeled on the cases analyzed by Virginia Eubanks, Dorothy Roberts, Sarah Brayne, and Ruha Benjamin, systems in which eligibility for benefits is governed by opaque risk scores that combine employment history, family data, housing records, and sometimes predictive models of child maltreatment. In the version imagined here, sacramental consent has been retrofitted into the contract between the state and its vendor. The contract now requires the publication of model documentation, including training data sources, performance metrics, and known error patterns. It mandates that claimants have a right to an explanation of any adverse decision in plain language, a right to appeal with human review, and a right to access and correct information used in scoring. It forbids repurposing welfare data for law enforcement except under narrow, publicly debated conditions.
These changes matter. They answer some of the demands that Batya Friedman and David Hendry gather under the heading of value sensitive design, which calls designers to integrate moral values such as autonomy, privacy, and justice into every stage of technological development, from conceptual modeling to implementation and evaluation. They also respond to concerns raised in privacy law about the emptiness of traditional notice and consent models. Ryan Calo, for example, argues that standard privacy policies fail because they rely on abstract text that no ordinary person can read or relationally interpret, and he explores what he calls visceral notice, design features that alert users to data collection through experiential cues. Applying such insights, the welfare system might include clear, unavoidable prompts that tell applicants when additional data are being pulled, what inferences are being drawn, and what consequences follow from refusal.
Yet as soon as we layer Crenshaw’s intersectional lens over this system, the limits become visible. In her foundational essay on the intersection of race and sex, Crenshaw shows how antidiscrimination law fails Black women because it treats race and gender as separate categories and cannot account for harms that arise at their intersection, such as employment policies that exclude Black women while appearing neutral when race and gender are analyzed separately. Applied to welfare scoring, intersectionality reveals that many claimants are subject to layered vulnerabilities: they may be Black mothers whose work histories are shaped by racial discrimination and care responsibilities, migrants with precarious status, disabled people whose conditions are misrecognized by standardized forms. Even the best explanation of a risk score cannot compensate for the fact that the underlying data embody histories of exclusion and that refusal to share data may mean losing access to food or shelter.
In such a context, sacramental consent can demand that the system treat claimants as persons rather than as risk vectors, can insist on the right to appeal, on the presence of advocates, on the cessation of punitive data repurposing, and on the building of alternative pathways such as no questions asked cash supports. It can require that welfare governance be redesigned along Ostromian lines, with beneficiaries participating in rule making, monitoring, and sanction design, and with local knowledge shaping thresholds and categories. It cannot, however, make consent fully free so long as hunger remains the price of refusal.
The same pattern appears in predictive policing. The platform in question analyzes historical crime data, calls for service, social media signals, and sometimes commercial data to generate heat maps of predicted offenses. Sacramental consent would first require a public covenant about ends. Is the system aimed at reducing violence, protecting property, maximizing arrest numbers, asserting territorial control, or some combination. Scott’s analysis of legibility warns that when states simplify complex social realities into counts of incidents and arrests, they often confuse what is measurable with what matters, sacrificing local forms of order and trust. Brown’s account of neoliberal rationality adds that security policy is frequently recoded in market terms, with police performance evaluated through metrics that resemble key performance indicators in corporate settings.
Sacramental consent would prohibit secret implementation of such a system. It would require public hearings in which affected communities can examine training data, question modeling assumptions, and demand constraints on use. It would require that individuals have access to information about whether they live in zones of intensified surveillance and that communities can collectively refuse deployment. Here Ostrom’s design principles for commons governance are again relevant. Successful commons, she found, have clearly defined boundaries, rules adapted to local conditions, participatory decision making, and mechanisms for resolving conflict and revising rules. A sacramental consent policing platform would treat neighborhoods as co governors of safety, not as data sources to be mined.
Intersectionality reveals deeper fractures. Crenshaw’s argument that Black women fall through the cracks of legal frameworks that see only race or gender applies analogously to policing systems that treat crime data as neutral. Arrest records, stop data, and calls for service are already shaped by racial profiling, gendered assumptions about threat and vulnerability, and class based visibility. Feeding these data into a model reproduces and amplifies existing bias. No consent screen can make someone meaningfully agree to live under intensified patrol that arises from patterns they did not choose and cannot exit. Even if individuals could opt out of data inclusion, neighbors and family members remain within the net.
Here sacramental consent may still recommend specific reforms. It can insist on disaggregated reporting that reveals racial and gendered disparities, on strict limits to the use of predictive outputs in decisions about probation, parole, and use of force, on community veto power over deployment, on reparations when predictive policing has contributed to wrongful incarceration or harassment. It can join abolitionist organizers who argue for nonreformist reforms, such as redirecting funds from predictive technologies to housing, mental health care, and community controlled conflict resolution, thereby reducing the situations in which police are invoked at all. Yet sacramental consent must also admit that as long as policing retains a mandate to wield force in defense of a racial capitalist order, consent will remain shadowed by compulsion.
The workplace analytics suite presents a more ambiguous field. In the scenarios detailed earlier, sensors and software track keystrokes, location, productivity metrics, customer sentiment, and even affective display. As Ajunwa and Zuboff show, employers and platform companies collect vast quantities of data about workers under the rubric of efficiency, security, and improvement, reshaping workers into quantified subjects. Sacramental consent would require that workers co define what data may be collected, for what purposes, and with what retention and sharing policies. It would require that workers and their unions hold legally enforceable rights to refuse certain forms of monitoring without retaliation, and that work design be explicitly negotiated rather than unilaterally imposed.
This is one domain where Ostrom and Unger can be brought into direct conversation. Ostrom’s commons principles suggest that work groups could treat aspects of their labor process as shared resources governed by rules they help devise, including schedules, surveillance parameters, and information flows. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, in Plasticity into Power, argues that societies thrive when their institutions are plastic, capable of continuous revision through democratic struggle, and when organizational forms nurture rather than suppress collective capacity for innovation. A sacramental consent workplace would treat job design as plastic, open to reconfiguration by those who do the work, rather than as a fixed technology imposed from above.
Value sensitive design again supplies method. Friedman and Hendry propose that technological design consider direct and indirect stakeholders, identify value tensions, and iterate through conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations to align systems with articulated values. For workplace analytics this would mean mapping how values such as dignity, privacy, fairness, and collective power are implicated by different monitoring choices, and designing systems that, for example, favor team level metrics over individual surveillance, random sampling over continuous tracking, and human oversight over automated discipline. Calo’s critique of abstract notice would prohibit burying these arrangements in unreadable policies, pressing instead for interface level signals and routine conversations in which workers can understand and contest the tools that watch them.
Even here, however, sacramental consent confronts structural limits. In labor markets marked by precarity, union busting, and global supply chains, workers often accept roles under conditions where refusal of surveillance means having no job. Brown’s analysis of neoliberalism as a political rationality that recodes workers as self investing human capital helps explain why appeals to individual consent ring hollow; the risk of unemployment has been privatized and moralized so that saying no appears as personal failure rather than as protest against unjust design. Sacramental consent must therefore ally itself with efforts to change the background conditions: strengthening collective bargaining rights, regulating workplace surveillance through law that sets non waivable minima, and experimenting with cooperative and municipal ownership structures in which workers exercise direct governance over technologies that measure them.
In all three cases the pattern is the same. Sacramental consent can demand that institutions speak honestly, minimize hidden repurposing, slow their own operations to make space for listening and appeal, and share governance with those they affect. It can identify particular clauses, defaults, escalation paths, and redress mechanisms that move a system from outright violation toward partial dignity. Yet it cannot transform materially coercive conditions into spaces of free consent by design alone. This is where the language of nonreformist reform, developed among abolitionist organizers, becomes indispensable. Reforms are nonreformist when they reduce the power of harmful institutions, improve the lives of those most affected, and build capacities for further refusal, rather than stabilizing or beautifying the existing order.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and thought provide a theological analogue to this stance. As a German Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazi regime, participated in conspiracies against Hitler, and was executed for his role, Bonhoeffer understood that institutional sin cannot be managed through minor adjustments. In works such as The Cost of Discipleship and his prison letters, he wrestled with the question of what it means for the church to exist within a state that has become murderous, and he rejected both quietist piety and self righteous purity. He described the church as called to take responsibility for the world, even at the price of guilt, and he spoke of costly grace that refuses cheap consolations. In our context, Bonhoeffer’s witness suggests that those who design and govern institutions must sometimes participate in structures they know to be compromised while working to undermine their worst effects and to prepare for other forms of life. Sacramental consent does not allow them to call this participation innocent, but it does allow a vocabulary for naming repentance, risk, and solidarity.
James Scott’s late work on resistance, along with the reception of his corpus in recent reviews, reminds us that much of the important work of refusal takes place below the threshold of institutional recognition, in what he calls infrapolitics: everyday acts of non compliance, evasion, and re interpretation that cumulatively limit the reach of formal power. Ostrom’s empirical studies of commons show that communities can sustain shared governance when they are allowed to craft their own rules and when higher authorities recognize their autonomy. Brown warns that neoliberalism hollows out the very capacities for such self rule by transforming citizens into competitors and by saturating institutions with market metrics. Unger presses for institutional plasticity, the building of structures that can be re made through collective struggle rather than protected as natural or inevitable. Together they imply that sacramental consent will always be a moving target rather than a stable achievement, something that must be renegotiated as institutions and subjects change.
From this vantage, the reforms proposed in the first three movements of the book can be re sorted. Some are clarifications that make domination more transparent but do not reduce it. Others are mitigations that lessen harm yet leave core power asymmetries intact. A smaller subset are nonreformist reforms: welfare practices that decouple survival from punitive surveillance, policing arrangements that reduce the footprint of armed response, work structures that redistribute control over time, data, and tools toward workers and communities. Sacramental consent aligns itself with the last category, not because they are pure, but because they are oriented toward a future in which consent is less hostage to hunger, fear, and exhaustion.
The chapter closes without triumph. It has shown that sacramental consent cannot be fully realized in any system that governs access to necessities under conditions of scarcity and racialized hierarchy. It has also shown that the language of consent, sacramentally deepened, can guide discernment about which reforms to pursue, which compromises to accept, and which invitations to refuse. The next chapter and the concluding coda will gather these threads into a more explicit theology of contingency and decay, drawing on traditions such as that of Nagarjuna and Darwin to insist that institutions of sacramental consent are themselves provisional, fragile, and subject to judgment. For now it is enough to say that sacramental consent, when brought to bear on states and platforms, functions less as a certification mark than as a question that refuses to let legibility, optimization, or even reform have the last word.
Chapter Ten: Emptiness and Evolution: Sacramental Consent after the Institution
Imagine an institution that once announced itself as the answer. A church that rebranded around restorative justice and trauma informed care. A public benefits agency that rolled out a redesigned portal with accessible language and visible ombuds offices. A platform that declared its metrics “human centered” and its moderation “care based.” For a few years, people spoke of these sites as if they were the future. Then the funding cycle ended, leadership turned over, software aged, and the careful practices that had seemed so promising were thinned into slogans. The portal still exists, but staff override protections under pressure of quotas. The church keeps its liturgy of apology but has quietly re centralized authority. The platform still uses language of respect, but its business model depends on compulsive engagement and extractive targeting. No scandal explains the decay. The place simply returns to the gravitational field of its environment.
This chapter is written in that aftermath. It does not offer a new design that cannot rot. Instead it asks what sacramental consent means once we acknowledge that every institution, including those that most honestly attempt reverent design, is contingent, fragile, and oriented toward decay. It draws on a pairing that might seem unlikely at first glance: Nāgārjuna, whose account of emptiness and dependent origination refuses to grant any phenomenon a fixed essence, and Darwin, whose account of natural selection insists that forms of life arise and disappear through contingent processes of variation and selection rather than through timeless plans. Their convergence allows us to say something hard and necessary. Institutions of sacramental consent are empty in a precise philosophical sense: they exist as patterns of relation, they persist only while supported by practices and resources, and they will generate new exclusions even as they repair old ones.
Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is best known for its sustained meditation on emptiness, śūnyatā, which he identifies not with nihilistic absence but with dependent origination. “It is dependent origination that we call emptiness,” one famous verse reads; “it is a dependent designation and is itself the Middle Path.” On this view, nothing possesses self nature. Every phenomenon arises in dependence on causes and conditions, names and uses. To say that something is empty is to say that it does not contain within itself the reason for its own existence or stability. Applied to institutions, this implies that no church rule, welfare protocol, or workplace covenant can anchor itself in a timeless essence. The rule exists as long as people recite and inhabit it. The protocol governs as long as staff and claimants treat it as binding. The covenant shapes life as long as the community continues to speak and revise it. Emptiness here is not an insult; it is a restraint on idolatry. It prevents us from treating any institutional form as a sacrament in itself rather than as one possible vessel for grace and justice.
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species provides an allied yet distinct discipline. In that work he proposes that species do not appear fully formed according to a fixed design, but rather emerge over long spans of time through variation and natural selection, with traits that confer reproductive advantage in particular environments becoming more common. Populations change, branch, and sometimes vanish as conditions shift. There is no guarantee that any given form will persist or that traits which were once adaptive will remain so. For institutional design, Darwin’s lesson is unsparing. Even the most careful arrangements for sacramental consent will be subject to selective pressures: budget constraints, political backlashes, legal challenges, shifts in technology, the slow exhaustion of volunteers, the reassertion of racial and economic hierarchies. Some features that initially protect consent may become vulnerabilities under new conditions and may be trimmed away. Others may be coopted and turned against the people they were meant to serve.
Placed together, Nāgārjuna and Darwin disallow a comforting fantasy. There will never be a final institutional form that guarantees sacramental consent once and for all. Emptiness means that institutions have no inner core that can preserve their intention without ongoing practice. Evolution means that institutions will change as environments change, sometimes in directions that undermine their founding commitments. This does not license despair or passivity. Instead it clarifies the task. Sacramental consent must be designed as an orientation and a set of disciplines that expect decay, plan for revision, and hold open the possibility of dismantling even beloved structures when they begin to devour those they were built to shelter.
To see why this insistence matters, we must return to the histories of consent that Saidiya Hartman documents. In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America, Hartman describes how regimes of slavery and its afterlives used consent and enjoyment as instruments of domination, staging spectacles of coerced festivity, coerced confession, and coerced performance of loyalty that produced the appearance of agreement where terror and dependency reigned. She shows how notions of protection, rights, and humanity themselves became vehicles for encroachment, as enslaved and freed Black subjects were invited to demonstrate loyalty and gratitude in forms that reaffirmed white control. In that landscape, consent is not a neutral tool; it is already saturated with racialised histories of subjection.
Any contemporary project that claims to build sacramental consent in law, welfare, or platforms therefore stands under Hartman’s judgment. It must account for the ways in which invitations to agree, to sign, to authenticate, to disclose, to “opt in,” may reenact patterns in which the vulnerable are asked to perform consent to structures they cannot escape. The emptiness of institutions does not erase these histories. It means that institutions are constituted by such histories and can be reconstituted only through practices that actively refuse them. Hartman’s emphasis on opacity and on the right not to be made legible to hostile power suggests that sacramental consent will often involve forms of non disclosure, refusal of performance, and insistence on what cannot be converted into data or contract at all.
Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation gives this insistence a conceptual name: the right to opacity. For Glissant, relation describes a world in which identities and cultures emerge not as closed essences but as entangled movements, and he argues that true relation does not require transparency. To demand that the other become fully knowable is, in his account, an extension of colonial control. Opacity is not obscurantism; it is a condition for mutual respect in a world where histories are asymmetrical and wounds are unevenly distributed. Applied to institutions, the right to opacity means that sacramental consent cannot be reduced to making everyone legible to everyone else, even under the sign of care. Communities, neighborhoods, and persons must be allowed to retain unshared textures.
Fred Moten, in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, approaches a related terrain through sound and performance. He reads Black performance as an improvisatory practice that both emerges from and resists regimes of capture, treating the broken voice, the scream, and the surplus of sound as sites where the subject refuses to be unified and fully known. In this light, sacramental consent must protect not only explicit refusals but also fugitive forms of presence that do not resolve into stable identities or data points. There will be noises, silences, and disruptions that cannot be translated into the grammar of consent screens or procedural fairness. To demand that every relation be formalized as a consent transaction risks repeating the violences Hartman and Moten name.
Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code brings these insights into the terrain of contemporary automation. She shows how emerging technologies, from predictive policing software to risk scoring systems and digital platforms, embed racial hierarchies in their code, reinforcing what she calls the New Jim Code, a set of practices that reproduce segregation and discrimination under the guise of neutrality and innovation. Benjamin documents how consent is invoked in these systems through terms of service, checkboxes, user agreements, and opt out mechanisms that place responsibility on individuals while obscuring structural constraints. A person may formally consent to location tracking or data collection because not consenting would mean losing access to basic services, and this coerced yes is later treated as proof of fairness.
In response, Benjamin calls for abolitionist tools, a repertoire of design practices, policies, and collective actions that do not merely diversify the face of tech but disrupt its role in maintaining racial domination. Sacramental consent, if it is to avoid becoming another language of legitimate capture, must align with this abolitionist horizon. It cannot be satisfied with better disclosure or kinder wording when the underlying systems remain structured by the New Jim Code. Instead it must ask, with Benjamin and Hartman, where consent is being used as camouflage for coercion, and it must be ready to say that in some contexts the only honest sacramental act is refusal, sabotage, or exodus.
This is where abolitionist thinkers such as Mariame Kaba and Dean Spade enter with particular force. In We Do This Till We Free Us, Kaba describes abolition not as a distant future event but as a practice of building and experimenting with forms of care, accountability, and safety that do not rely on prisons, police, or punishment. She emphasizes nonreformist reforms, changes that reduce the power of oppressive institutions and increase collective capacities for refusal rather than making domination more tolerable. Consent appears in her work not as a legal checkbox but as a collective process through which communities decide what they will no longer accept and what they are willing to risk in order to build alternatives.
Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity during This Crisis and the Next similarly treats consent as embedded in practices of solidarity, where people share resources and support one another in ways that resist charity logics and state cooptation. Mutual aid, in his account, asks people to consent to mutual dependence, to refuse the shame attached to need, and to accept the disciplines required for collective survival. It also demands that groups confront how power and oppression show up in their own spaces, allowing for complaint and change rather than treating solidarity as a shield against critique.
When these abolitionist frameworks are placed alongside Nāgārjuna and Darwin, a picture emerges. Institutions of sacramental consent must be designed as temporary, accountable experiments that can be revised, constrained, or dismantled by those they affect. Their emptiness means that they can never claim divine warrant or natural necessity; they must always be ready to answer to the people and communities who inhabit them, especially those who arrive with the histories Hartman narrates and the demands Benjamin articulates. Their evolutionary vulnerability means that they should include within their own structure mechanisms for decay and replacement: sunset clauses, mandatory periods of moratorium and review, legal pathways for collective exit, material support for those who refuse.
This does not mean that sacramental consent reduces to permanent flux. Sacraments, in the theological traditions that underlie this book, are not abstractions but repeated practices that bind communities to realities beyond themselves. The Eucharist, for example, is not redesigned every generation; it is a ritual that persists through centuries while being interpreted and enacted in different ways. Yet even sacraments have changed: languages have shifted, access has widened or narrowed, abuses have been confronted and, at times, re entrenched. To call consent sacramental is to suggest that there are some patterns of attention, reverence, and refusal that should recur across institutions and eras, while acknowledging that the forms in which they are embodied will have to be re made.
From Nāgārjuna’s perspective, emptiness and compassion belong together. Because beings lack fixed essence and arise in dependence on conditions, their suffering is not inevitable, and compassionate action becomes possible. From Darwin’s perspective, the fact that forms arise through natural selection does not mean that human choices are irrelevant; our designs, laws, and solidarities become part of the environment that shapes which practices and institutions survive. From Hartman, Glissant, and Moten we learn that many existing forms have been shaped by racial terror and colonial capture, and that any attempt to redesign institutions must center the right to opacity, the dignity of refusal, and the presence of fugitive life that will never be fully authorized. From Benjamin, Kaba, and Spade we learn that abolition and mutual aid are not decorative additions to institutional ethics but conditions for any honest talk of consent under regimes where hunger, policing, and debt shape choice.
The argument of the book ends, therefore, not with a design template but with a posture. Sacramental consent is an orientation in which designers, policymakers, pastors, organizers, and ordinary participants continually ask four linked questions. What are we asking people to give, and what happens to those who say no. How do our forms honour or betray the opacity and vulnerability of those most harmed by existing systems. Which of our reforms expand the space of refusal and collective self rule, and which simply make domination smoother. Are we ready, when necessary, to let cherished institutions go, trusting that the emptiness and contingency of all forms is not an enemy of the sacred but one of its conditions.
There is no guarantee that those who ask these questions will succeed. Darwin teaches that failure, extinction, and dead ends are pervasive. Nāgārjuna teaches that clinging to any form as ultimate produces suffering. Hartman teaches that the histories of subjection haunt every contemporary scene. Glissant and Moten teach that there will always be elements of life and relation that resist our categories. Benjamin, Kaba, and Spade teach that the work of abolition and mutual aid is exhausting and never finished. The wager of sacramental consent is that, in spite of this, there is value in building and rebuilding institutions that try to hold attention, reverence, and refusal together, even knowing they will crack.
In that sense, this chapter does not close the project. It returns us to the starting point: a world saturated with forms that demand consent without deserving it, and a set of fragile human capacities for saying yes, saying no, and saying not yet. The book has argued that these capacities are not only psychological but theological, not only private but institutional, not only individual but collective. To treat consent as sacramental is to admit that every contract and every protocol is, at best, a partial and temporary attempt to honour the dignity and opacity of persons and communities under conditions that rarely permit free choice. The task now belongs to readers and their companions. They will decide which institutions to join, which to redesign, which to abandon, and which to oppose. They will improvise new practices that this text could not anticipate. They will fail and try again.
What this book offers them is not assurance but companionship: a set of concepts, stories, and exemplars that might help them tell the truth about where consent is voided and where it is tentatively being repaired. If Nāgārjuna is right, there is no form that cannot be otherwise. If Darwin is right, there is no guarantee that better forms will prevail. If the abolitionists and mystics are right, there is nevertheless something worth building in the meantime, something that glimmers in rooms where people share food without paperwork, sign contracts that they understand and can contest, and gather around tables and screens to ask together what they will no longer agree to. That glimmer is not an institution. It is an orientation of attention and love that, for now, we have named sacramental consent.
Chapter Eleven: Pedagogies of Consent: Formation, Method, and the Labor of Everyday Practice
Imagine a seminar that is not quite academic and not quite pastoral, held in a borrowed room above a neighborhood clinic at the end of a long day. Around the table sit a welfare caseworker who has spent the afternoon navigating an eligibility system that she knows is unjust, a junior engineer who writes code for a large platform, a community organizer from a tenants union, a nurse from the clinic downstairs, a graduate student in theology, and a person who has come because their friendships keep collapsing under the weight of unspoken obligations. They have read fragments in common: a chapter from Martha Nussbaum on capabilities, an essay by Iris Marion Young on political responsibility for structural injustice, short passages from Rowan Williams and Karl Rahner on doctrine and everyday mysticism, and a few pages from Thich Nhat Hanh on washing dishes as meditation.
They are not here to invent a new theory. They are here because they sense that their institutions ask for consent they do not deserve, and because they are tired of alternation between compliance and burnout. The seminar convenes as a small school in sacramental consent. It tries to form people who can work, design, legislate, and befriend in ways that align with the arguments of this book, without deceiving them into believing that such formation will absolve them from complicity or guarantee their safety. The question that governs this chapter is how such formation could proceed, and what kinds of pedagogies might prepare people to practice sacramental consent inside, against, and sometimes beyond existing institutions.
The chapter is unapologetically constructive, yet it remains answerable to the constraints described in the introduction. We do not have transparent access to the interior life of agencies, corporations, or states. We know them through public documents, partial accounts, and our own embodied involvement. Our pedagogies must therefore work with what Simone Weil called the available light, trusting that the way people read contracts, welfare regulations, platform policies, and friendship scripts can change how they act in relation to them. The council for this chapter is drawn from thinkers who have already treated theology, political theory, and spiritual practice as forms of pedagogy: Nussbaum on education for capabilities, Young on responsibility under structural injustice, Williams on doctrine as spiritual discipline, Rahner on everyday mysticism, and Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness as political practice.
Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, articulated in works such as Frontiers of Justice, begins from a deceptively simple question: what are people actually able to do and to be. Justice, on this account, is not measured primarily by the distribution of resources or by adherence to formal procedures, but by whether each person attains a threshold level of central capabilities, such as life, bodily health, bodily integrity, practical reason, affiliation, and control over one’s environment. The approach is deliberately partial. It does not pretend to provide an entire moral doctrine, but it claims to offer a framework for evaluating institutions and policies. For sacramental consent, the capabilities lens acts as a disciplined way to distinguish between nominal consent and real capacity. A welfare claimant who signs a form under the threat of destitution, a worker who accepts surveillance because unemployment is the alternative, a citizen who clicks “agree” in order to access essential services, all these people have had their formal consent extracted while their capabilities remain constrained.
If we take Nussbaum’s question seriously, pedagogy around sacramental consent must train people to ask it in concrete settings. What can this claimant actually do after signing. Can they contest decisions. Can they live with dignity given the conditions attached. What can this worker actually be under the regime of metrics and sensors. Are they treated as a replaceable input or as an agent whose judgment matters. What can this neighbor or friend actually do inside this relationship. Are they able to say no, to change their mind, to leave without spiritual or social annihilation. Pedagogy here is not only about teaching content. It is about establishing habits of interrogation that refuse to confuse formal procedures with lived entitlements.
Iris Marion Young’s account of political responsibility adds a second axis. In her Lindley Lecture on “Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice” she argues that in a world of complex structural processes, responsibility cannot be reduced to blame for discrete wrongful acts. People become responsible for structural injustice by virtue of their positions within social structures and their participation in ongoing processes that advantage some and disadvantage others. This responsibility is forward looking. It calls those who are implicated to join with others in transforming structures, not merely to feel guilty or to seek personal purity. Young’s analysis is especially striking because she refuses to treat structural injustice as an external force. People are both shaped by and contribute to it.
From the standpoint of sacramental consent, Young teaches that any pedagogy worth the name must address positionality. The engineer in the seminar, the pastor, the caseworker, the organizer, the friend all occupy locations that distribute power unevenly. They consent to and refuse different things in part because of where they stand in structures of race, class, gender, disability, and nationality. A pedagogy of sacramental consent must therefore include exercises in mapping one’s position: how one’s salary depends on extractive business models, how one’s institutional security depends on policing, how one’s friendships are shaped by norms of productivity and cheerfulness. Without that mapping, consent talk risks collapsing into self congratulation for people who already have exit options.
Rowan Williams offers another dimension. In essays collected in On Christian Theology he describes theology as an “open system,” a way of speaking about God that is rooted in scripture and tradition yet remains exposed to the contingencies of history and the demands of present voices. Authentic doctrine, on this account, is not a set of propositions that hover above time. It is a practice of continuous listening and re articulation, a refusal of closure that is not indecision but faithfulness to a God who is encountered in history rather than mastered by concepts. Theologians, in Williams’s description, must cultivate habits of attention, patience, and self interrogation, letting the voices of the marginalized and the events of the world press upon their inherited language.
Williams’s vision models for this project a pedagogy in which sacramental consent is not a fixed doctrine but an ongoing discipline. Designers, lawyers, pastors, and organizers must learn to hold their own concepts under interrogation by the lives they touch. This is not relativism. It is a recognition that any claim about reverent consent must remain open to correction from those whose consent has been most damaged. A training program in sacramental consent that does not regularly bring practitioners into contact with welfare recipients, precarious workers, racialized communities under surveillance, and those whose friendships or religious communities have failed them will rapidly become self referential.
Karl Rahner deepens this sense of discipline in the register of spirituality. In The Practice of Faith: A Handbook of Contemporary Spirituality and related essays, he describes what commentators have called the mysticism of everyday life. Rahner insists that in late modern conditions, most Christians will not experience extraordinary visions or dramatic conversions. Their life with God will unfold through perseverance in ordinary tasks, through small acts of trust, through attention to the quiet movements of conscience and grace in the midst of work, family, and public life. Everyday mysticism, for Rahner, is not a consolation prize. It is the real form of sanctity available for most.
Transposed into the vocabulary of this book, Rahner teaches that any authentic pedagogy of sacramental consent must attend to habits of attention and endurance in daily institutional life. The caseworker who chooses to explain an opaque rule to a claimant, the engineer who raises a question about a metric in a planning meeting, the pastor who believes the testimony of someone who complains about spiritual coercion, the friend who resists the urge to demand disclosure from someone who is not ready, all these actions are small and easily dismissed. Yet they are the texture in which sacramental consent exists or fails. Training cannot focus only on dramatic institutional redesigns. It must form people to perform these quiet acts consistently, without romanticism and without the expectation of immediate visible reward.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness offers concrete practices for such attention. Written while he was in exile from Vietnam, the book takes the form of a letter to a colleague in the School of Youth for Social Service. It offers simple exercises, such as breathing with awareness, washing dishes fully present to the warm water and the sound of plates, and bringing attention to the body while walking or sitting. These practices are not escapist. Thich Nhat Hanh developed them in the context of war, displacement, and political struggle, as a way to keep his students grounded and compassionate while they engaged in relief work and activism. Mindfulness, for him, is a way of inhabiting time that prevents mechanical reaction and opens space for wise response.
If sacramental consent depends, as earlier chapters argued, on attention that does not rush past the vulnerability of the other, then pedagogies of mindfulness become essential. In the seminar above the clinic, participants might practice a short period of silent breathing before reading a case file or a policy document, noticing their own impulses to judge, defend, or withdraw. They might adopt a discipline of pausing before sending an email that asks for agreement, or before coding a feature that will request a new category of data. They might learn to recognize in their own bodies the difference between a yes that emerges from considered alignment and a yes that arises from fear, shame, or exhaustion.
When Nussbaum, Young, Williams, Rahner, and Thich Nhat Hanh are read together, a threefold pedagogy emerges. First, there is a cognitive discipline: learning to analyze structures, trace capabilities, and map positional responsibility. Second, there is a spiritual discipline: cultivating habits of attention, openness, and endurance that allow people to remain present to injustice without either dissociating or surrendering to rage. Third, there is a communal discipline: establishing small groups, communities of practice, and shared rules that make it possible to sustain these efforts over time. The rest of this chapter explores how such a pedagogy might take shape in three settings: professional education, organizational life, and intimate community.
In professional education, sacramental consent demands curricular changes that go beyond adding a unit on ethics. Law schools, for example, could integrate Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and Young’s structural responsibility into their first year courses, teaching students to read cases and statutes not only for doctrinal rules but for their effects on what different groups of people are able to do and to be. Clinics that handle welfare appeals, housing disputes, or immigration cases could incorporate reflective practices drawn from Rahner and Thich Nhat Hanh, inviting students to examine how their own fear of failure, career ambitions, or cultural assumptions shape their interactions with clients. Courses on administrative law and technology could introduce Benjamin and other abolitionist voices alongside traditional material, helping students see how formal consent can function as cover for structural domination.
Engineering education can follow a similar path. Programs in computer science and human computer interaction already include courses in ethics and responsible innovation, but these often remain at the level of compliance or reputational risk. A pedagogy of sacramental consent would require students to read case studies of welfare automation, predictive policing, and workplace analytics in depth, to meet with affected communities, and to write design documents that specify not only functionality but also consent pathways, refusal options, and capabilities impacts. Value sensitive design, as articulated by Batya Friedman and David Hendry, can serve as a scaffold: students identify stakeholders, articulate values, and iterate designs in dialogue with users. The distinct contribution of sacramental consent is to underline reverence and refusal as explicit values, and to insist that spiritual and emotional formation accompany technical skill.
Theology and ministry training can also be reoriented. Seminaries that prepare clergy and chaplains often teach sacramental theology, pastoral care, and social ethics as separate subjects. A curriculum ordered by sacramental consent would bring them together around questions of power, attention, and institutional life. Students would study ecclesial history with an eye to how consent has been sought or abused in liturgy, governance, and pastoral relationships. They would read Williams on doctrine as open system and Rahner on everyday mysticism, not only to deepen their own spiritual lives, but to understand how theology can distort consent when it sanctifies hierarchy, demands forced transparency, or romanticizes sacrifice. They would learn concrete practices for protecting consent in spiritual direction, confession, and community life, including clear boundaries, shared rules, and robust complaint procedures.
Inside organizations, sacramental consent becomes a matter of institutional pedagogy. A human centered policy that sits unread on an intranet does almost nothing. What shapes conduct are the routines through which people are inducted into expectations, the examples set by leaders, and the informal norms that determine who can say no. Here the insights of Young and Nussbaum meet the everyday mysticism of Rahner and the mindfulness of Thich Nhat Hanh. Leaders can be trained to name structural injustices explicitly, to acknowledge how their own positions benefit from existing arrangements, and to invite others into honest conversation about what forms of consent are missing.
At the level of policy, organizations can adopt practices such as participatory design sessions with employees or clients, regular consent audits that examine where agreement is assumed rather than asked, and transparent processes for revising rules. At the level of culture, they can establish small groups or circles that meet regularly to reflect on concrete situations where consent feels strained: for example, mandatory data collection, pressure to attend after hours events, or expectations of emotional disclosure in team building. These circles would borrow from Rahner the sense that faithfulness is measured by perseverance in small acts, and from Thich Nhat Hanh the conviction that breathing and silence can create space for genuine listening.
In intimate communities, the pedagogy becomes even more vulnerable. Friendships, partnerships, and small groups are where many people first learn patterns that will later structure their institutional consent. If early relationships teach that love requires constant availability, that saying no brings abandonment, or that spiritual authority is beyond question, then later claims about consent in church or workplace will be heard through that filter. A sacramental pedagogy for everyday life would therefore include practices such as explicit conversations about expectations, periodic check ins about capacity, and blessings for departure when people need to leave groups or change the shape of relationships.
Here Williams’s theology of communication and Glissant’s right to opacity can work together. Williams stresses that speech about God and neighbor is always a response to what has been shown, never a mastery of the other. Glissant insists that genuine relation does not require total transparency; respecting the other includes respecting their secrets and their unexplained silences. A pedagogy shaped by these insights will teach people to ask before entering someone’s inner life, to accept “not now” as a complete answer, and to avoid spiritualizing the demand for disclosure. It will model apologies when boundaries are crossed and will treat the restoration of trust as a slow shared work rather than as a quick resolution.
None of these pedagogies will succeed without institutional support. The welfare caseworker will burn out if she is the only one in her office who practices sacramental consent. The engineer will be sidelined if management treats her questions as obstacles to shipping products. The pastor who protects consent in pastoral care but serves within a church that silences whistleblowers will face tragic limits. Young’s account of political responsibility emphasizes that change requires collective action. Sacramental consent, understood pedagogically, therefore includes training people to build coalitions, join unions, form caucuses, and participate in movements that aim at structural transformation. It discourages isolated heroism in favor of shared projects, even as it honors the individual conscience.
A final element of pedagogy concerns expectation. In the seminar above the clinic, the facilitator must resist the temptation to promise that if participants practice these disciplines, their institutions will become just. Darwin’s lesson that forms arise and perish under selective pressures, and Hartman’s reminders of how consent has historically been weaponized against Black life, remain in force. Pedagogy must teach that sacramental consent is a way of inhabiting struggle, not an escape from it. It is a commitment to keep asking whether agreements are worthy, to keep building and rebuilding spaces where real choice is possible, and to keep telling the truth about where consent is impossible under present conditions.
In this sense, the chapter does not offer a training manual in the usual sense. It sketches a set of intertwined practices: analytic, spiritual, and communal. It suggests readings and exercises, but it knows that each context will have to adapt them. A welfare office in a small town, a multinational technology firm, a prison ministry, a mutual aid network, a group of friends in a city apartment, each will need to hear the voices of Nussbaum, Young, Williams, Rahner, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the abolitionist and mystical company gathered in earlier chapters in their own languages, with their own urgencies. They will need to add authors and elders from their communities, including Indigenous, disabled, queer, and youth voices, whose experiences of broken consent can revise the very language of sacrament for the next generation.
What unites these efforts is not a shared curriculum but a shared intention. Pedagogy for sacramental consent aims to form people who can recognize when consent is voided, who can design and defend spaces where consent is more than a signature, who can endure the grief of partial success and the anger of ongoing harm, and who can accompany others in the labor of saying yes and no under constraint. The final coda of this book will gather this intention into a brief orientation for those who carry the work forward, but the real teaching will happen in rooms like the one above the clinic, where people bring their tired bodies, their conflicted loyalties, and their stubborn hope, and learn to read their own lives as part of the sacramental drama they have been studying.
Chapter Twelve: Anamnesis and Vow: Living with Sacramental Consent in a Tired World
Imagine that the book has been closed on a kitchen table rather than a library desk. There is a mug with cold tea near the spine, an unopened envelope from a government agency, a phone face down with unread messages, and a laptop that still contains the tabs of a working day. The reader has reached the end not in a retreat center or a graduate seminar, but in the ordinary debris of a weekday night. Outside, rent is still due. The platform still demands clicks and data. The welfare office will still expect forms in the morning. A friend still waits for a reply to a message that says simply, “Do you have space.” If this project has any integrity, it must speak from this table and return here.
This final chapter refuses to present itself as a conclusion in the triumphant sense. It is closer to a last turning of the object in the light, a final attempt to name what the book has been doing and what it cannot do. Its work is anamnetic rather than programmatic. In the Christian liturgical traditions that inform the language of sacrament here, anamnesis is the act of remembering that is also a making present, as in the Eucharistic prayer that recalls a life, death, and resurrection not simply as past but as realities that press into the present community. This chapter undertakes an anamnesis of consent. It remembers scenes of consent voided and repaired, not to tidy them into a lesson but to hold them in a single field of attention and to ask what kind of vow a reader might make at the end of such a book.
The argument unfolds slowly in three movements. First, it gathers the threads of the preceding chapters into a living grammar, returning briefly to the archive, the constructed institutions, the micro practices, the commons, the nonreformist reforms, the emptiness and evolution, and the pedagogies, not as sections to be summarized but as stances to be carried. Second, it turns to the language of vow and promise, drawing on theological and philosophical accounts of covenant to ask what it would mean to make an explicit vow of sacramental consent in one’s own life and work without falling into moral grandiosity or self deception. Third, it turns the camera away from the self and toward the future, asking how sacramental consent might outlive any single reader through institutions, communities, and practices that remember differently.
The first task is a kind of recollection without resolution. The archive of broken consent presented in the early chapters brought into view welfare systems that discipline the poor through opaque scoring, workplaces that quantify workers into metrics and dashboards, policing regimes that treat neighborhoods as risk surfaces, and migration controls that rout bodies through databases and borders without ever asking for a genuine yes. Behind these systems stood histories of racial capitalism, colonial rule, and patriarchy that had already hollowed out the language of consent long before digital forms appeared. Scholars such as Dorothy Roberts, Ruha Benjamin, Simone Browne, and Bernard Harcourt refused the comfort of treating these harms as technical accidents, insisting instead that data driven governance carries forward older forms of domination under the sign of innovation.
The book did not stay at denunciation. It proposed thought experiments in sacramental institutions: a workplace where surveillance is constrained by covenant and shared rule, a welfare agency that treats time, opacity, and appeal as sacred, a clinic where altered states are not immediately pathologized, commons where land and labor are shared in ways guided by Benedictine stability, Basilian care, liberation theology’s base communities, Indigenous reciprocity, and mutual aid. It dwelt in micro practices of friendship and small community, guided by Murdoch on attention, Levinas on responsibility, hooks on love as practice, Ahmed on complaint, and Cavell on acknowledgement, to show how consent is rehearsed or betrayed in the smallest theaters of ordinary life.
Subsequent chapters turned outward again, asking how commons, movements, and communities structure consent when they share land, food, and housing, and then subjected the entire enterprise to the harsh light of nonreformist reform, abolition, emptiness, and evolution. James Scott, Wendy Brown, and Elinor Ostrom taught that states and markets seek legibility and optimization, often with disastrous effects, but also that communities can craft durable alternatives when they are allowed to govern shared resources under rules they make. Hartman, Glissant, Moten, Benjamin, Kaba, and Spade insisted that consent cannot be purified within institutions that still depend on racial terror, carceral control, and managed abandonment, and that any honest attempt to speak of sacramental consent must align itself with abolition and mutual aid rather than calling for kinder management of captivity. Nāgārjuna and Darwin refused the fantasy that any institutional design could escape emptiness or contingency, insisting that forms have no inner essence and that they arise and vanish through intertwined conditions.
The previous chapter then asked how, given all this, anyone might learn to live and work in sacramental consent. It turned to Nussbaum, Young, Williams, Rahner, and Thich Nhat Hanh to sketch pedagogies that bind analytic clarity, spiritual discipline, and communal practice.
To call this recollection anamnesis is to say that it is not a neutral summary. The point is not to re list arguments but to let them stand as a kind of liturgy of memory. Each scene, each thinker, each case brought into the book is a presence that asks for response. They do not form a system, and they resist being streamlined into a single doctrine. Instead they make up what Rowan Williams would call an open grammar of discernment. At the kitchen table where this chapter began, the reader is therefore not being asked to master a theory. They are being asked to remember enough of these presences that they will begin to see their own institutional and relational life differently.
The second movement turns from memory to vow. Vow language in modern conditions is suspect for good reasons. It has been used to sanctify marriage arrangements that trapped women in abusive relationships, to bind religious to communities that suppressed their dissent, to consecrate loyalty oaths to nations, companies, and causes that later betrayed those who pledged themselves. Feminist and decolonial critics have shown how vows are embedded in power relations, how promises can be extracted under duress or ignorance and then enforced as if they were free.
Yet the languages of covenant, vow, and promise remain central within the theological and philosophical traditions that underwrite sacramental language. In Jewish and Christian scriptures, covenants mark relationships between God and peoples, between peoples and land, and between communities, relationships that involve obligations, blessings, and curses. In modern philosophy, figures such as Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor have argued that promising is one of the few ways humans create islands of relative predictability in a contingent world, enabling political life and personal identity. The question is whether there is a form of vow that can honour these insights without re inscribing domination.
Arendt, in The Human Condition, writes that action, once done, cannot be undone and that human beings would be overwhelmed by the irreversibility and unpredictability of their own deeds were it not for the faculties of forgiving and promising. Promising, she suggests, is the way we bind ourselves to future courses of action in the presence of others, thereby creating durable spaces in which political life can unfold. Forgiveness, in turn, is the way we release one another from some of those bindings when they prove destructive. Vows, in this frame, are not romantic absolutes. They are political techniques for stabilizing action while admitting fallibility.
If we take Arendt seriously, a vow of sacramental consent would not be an oath of personal purity or a pledge to fix institutions single handed. It would be a public promise, made in the company of others, to adopt and sustain certain practices of asking, listening, refusing, and designing, along with a shared commitment to review and revise that promise as conditions change. It would explicitly build forgiveness into its structure, recognizing that under saturated regimes people will fail, compromise, and sometimes betray their own best intentions. The vow would be less a heroic declaration than a shared rule for returning, again and again, to the questions that define sacramental consent.
Christian theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rowan Williams add another layer. Bonhoeffer, in his writings on discipleship and in his letters from prison, speaks of the church as a community that vows to live for others, to take responsibility for the world, and to accept guilt when necessary in order to resist evil. Williams, as noted earlier, emphasizes that doctrine is not simply content but a school for perception, a way of training attention so that one sees God and neighbor more truthfully. For both, vows are not private guarantees of sincerity. They are entryways into disciplines of practice and discernment shared with others and accountable to the vulnerable.
From this perspective, a vow of sacramental consent would not be something a reader invents from nothing. It would draw on existing liturgical and civic forms of promise, yet subvert them by centering the right to opacity, the demand for nonreformist reform, and the recognition of institutional emptiness. It might sound something like this, though the point is less the wording than the orientation:
I promise, as far as I am able and with others, to treat no signature, checkbox, or yes as sufficient proof that consent has been given or deserved. I promise to ask, in the institutions where I work and live, what those who sign are able to do and to be under the terms offered, and to resist arrangements that tie survival to surrender of dignity. I promise to guard the opacity of others and of myself, to refuse to demand disclosures that cannot be safely given, and to honour complaints about coercion even when they trouble the peace of my community or institution. I promise to seek reforms that reduce the power of harmful systems and expand spaces of refusal, and to support abolitionist and mutual aid projects that build life beyond captivity. I promise to remember that every institution is contingent, that no design guarantees justice, and that I must be ready to revise, restrain, or relinquish even forms I love when they begin to devour those they were meant to shelter.
Such a vow is vulnerable to irony. It can be coopted as a branding device for organizations that wish to appear ethical. It can be performed as a personal identity marker rather than lived as a discipline. It can become a way to feel virtuous without taking material risks. That is why, if it is to have any substance, it must be made in communities that can call one another to account and must be tethered to concrete practices. It must sit alongside commitments to unionization, redistribution, decolonial and anti racist struggle, disability justice, queer and trans liberation, and ecological repair, rather than imagining that sacramental consent is a standalone ethic.
The third movement turns from the self who might vow to the temporal horizon in which such vows will unfold. Earlier chapters, guided by Darwin and Hartman, have already refused any guarantee that institutions of sacramental consent will endure or that they will not be captured by forces they were meant to resist. This chapter deepens that refusal by asking what it might mean for sacramental consent to become part of a tradition that knows it will be judged by descendants who will see its blind spots more clearly than we can.
Here the work of Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau offers a final set of companions. Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” writes of a weak messianic power with which the past is charged, a claim that the oppressed of previous generations have upon the present, and he pictures the historian as one who, in a moment of danger, seizes hold of a memory as it flashes up, rescuing it from the conformism of victorious narratives. De Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, argues that ordinary people invent tactics to inhabit and subvert the strategies of institutions, turning imposed spaces into lived places through wandering, poaching, and improvisation.
If we transpose Benjamin and de Certeau into this project’s register, sacramental consent becomes a way of remembering and walking that is always partial and always subject to interruption. It invites present actors to look back at scenes where consent was claimed and voided, to listen to the testimony of those harmed, and to let those memories interrupt the smooth functioning of current law, policy, and design. It encourages tactics that bend existing institutional strategies toward reverence and refusal, even when the structures themselves remain hostile. It also accepts that future communities will look back at our practices, including our sacraments of consent, and see in them failures we cannot yet perceive.
The institutional implication is sobering. No code of ethics, no list of design principles, no theology of sacrament will protect sacramental consent from ossifying into a new normal. The only protection is to embed into institutions mechanisms that invite future critique and facilitate change: archives that preserve dissenting voices, governance structures that reserve seats and veto powers for those most affected, legal requirements for periodic sunset and renewal, and liturgies that confess institutional sin rather than only individual transgression. Some communities already experiment with such mechanisms in truth and reconciliation processes, participatory budgeting, restorative and transformative justice circles, and Indigenous led land back initiatives.
What, then, does this chapter ask of the reader at the kitchen table. It does not ask for belief that sacramental consent will win. It does not promise that attention, reverence, and refusal will be rewarded. It does not suggest that if enough individuals make the right vows, welfare systems will cease to punish, platforms will cease to extract, or friendships will cease to break. Instead it offers an orientation for continuing to live and work when one has seen too much to be innocent and not enough to be certain.
The reader is invited to do three things, none of which are spectacular. First, to identify one institution in which they have standing, whether as worker, member, client, or citizen, and begin to ask, with Nussbaum’s discipline, what those who interact with it are able to do and to be, and with Young’s clarity, how their own position participates in structural injustice there. Second, to choose or form at least one small community of practice, perhaps as simple as a reading and reflection circle, where the work of sacramental consent can be spoken aloud without pretense, informed by the mystics and abolitionists who have already learned to live in the tension between reverence and refusal. Third, to make, in some form, a modest vow that names how they will attend to consent and refusal in their own sphere, and to submit that vow to the judgment of others, including those whose consent has been most consistently voided.
If sacramental consent names anything real, it is not a triumph of design but a way of standing in a tired world without giving in to the two most available temptations: the temptation to call domination care and the temptation to call all care a lie. Between these, there is a narrow path on which people still share bread without documents, still walk out of institutions that break them, still build fragile rooms where complaint is heard, still write code that slows extraction, still preach sermons that refuse to sanctify hierarchy, still craft laws that open space for refusal, still hold the hands of friends without demanding that they explain themselves.
This book cannot guarantee that such acts will be enough. It can only testify that they are possible, that they have been glimpsed in archives and communities and rooms like the one above the clinic, and that they can be named as sacramental because they treat the other’s dignity and opacity as something like a presence of God. Whether readers take up this language or translate it into their own traditions and idioms, the wager is the same: that there are better and worse ways to ask for and to give consent under regimes that are not of our choosing, and that to choose the better, even intermittently, is a form of worship as well as of politics.
The pages end here, but the work does not. The next scene will not be in a footnote but in a waiting room, a code review, a kitchen conversation, a protest, a budget meeting, a prayer. Sacramental consent, if it lives at all, will live there, in acts no one will cite, in decisions no one will record, in refusals no one will praise. The hope is that some readers, remembering this book anamnetically rather than argumentatively, will recognize those acts as the quiet center of what they have been studying and will be a little less willing to sign what should never be signed, a little more willing to pause a process that should not go on, a little more ready to say that certain forms of agreement are not worthy of the name consent at all.
Chapter Thirteen: Informed Consent, Privacy, and the Failure of Forms
Begin with a clipboard in a waiting room. A receptionist hands over a stack of forms on a thin plastic board, invites a quick signature, and gestures toward a line of chairs. The papers contain phrases that have become so familiar they vanish into background noise: informed consent, notice of privacy practices, authorization to disclose, understanding of risks and benefits. The television above the chairs plays a news segment on data breaches and facial recognition in airports. The phone in the pocket vibrates with a notification that an app has updated its terms of service and needs the user to review and accept. On the wall behind the receptionist hangs a framed poster about patient rights. The same building contains a social work office that administers benefits eligibility through an online portal, a research unit recruiting participants for a clinical study, and a nonprofit landlord that uses credit and eviction data to screen tenants. Everywhere, consent is being collected. Almost nowhere is it being deserved.
This chapter enters the terrain of informed consent and privacy not to discard them, but to show in patient detail how the dominant forms of consent have become saturated, how they fail, and what remains salvageable once sacramental consent has been defined as reverent attention, asymmetrical responsibility, and institutional design under conditions of exhaustion. It moves between bioethics, feminist privacy theory, critical contract theory, and data governance, in conversation with Ruth Faden and Tom Beauchamp, Onora O Neill, Anita Allen, and Carole Pateman. The aim is not to add another reform proposal to a crowded literature, but to expose how the standard grammar of informed consent and privacy notices is structurally unable to carry the weight of sacramental consent, and to sketch how institutions could treat consent practices as liturgical events rather than bureaucratic rituals.
The modern doctrine of informed consent emerged within medicine and research as a belated response to scandal and harm. In their foundational study A History and Theory of Informed Consent, Ruth Faden and Tom Beauchamp trace how twentieth century atrocities, including the Nazi experiments addressed by the Nuremberg Code and the long brutality of the Tuskegee syphilis study, forced law and ethics to confront the fact that patients and research subjects had been used as means rather than as agents. They argue that informed consent became central as a way to protect autonomy by requiring disclosure of information, comprehension, voluntariness, and explicit authorization before intervention. In their account, informed consent is not a simple moment but a cluster of conditions: the patient or subject receives adequate information about nature, risks, benefits, and alternatives; understands this information; makes a decision voluntarily, without coercion or manipulation; and authorizes the intervention or enrollment.
The power of this doctrinal architecture should not be understated. It gave courts and oversight bodies a vocabulary for naming harms that had previously passed as ordinary practice. It provided grounds for liability when physicians acted with paternalistic secrecy and when researchers enrolled subjects without clear disclosure. It seeded institutional forms such as the institutional review board, the research ethics committee, and the standardized consent script. In public life it contributed to a broader intuition that meaningful consent requires both information and freedom from coercion, an intuition that now underlies debates about sexual ethics, labor contracts, and data collection.
Yet from the beginning, critics suspected that the doctrine was haunted by a fantasy of individual autonomy that did not match reality. Onora O Neill, in Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, argues that informed consent as commonly practiced too often reduces morality to the securing of forms and signatures while leaving wider structures of power intact. She notes that the very settings in which consent is sought often involve asymmetries of knowledge, dependency, and fear that cannot be erased by disclosure alone. A patient facing cancer treatment, an undocumented migrant seeking emergency care, a low income tenant presented with a dense lease, a platform user presented with a long privacy policy, all confront a choice that is constrained long before the form appears. O Neill suggests that a better ethic would emphasize not only patient autonomy but institutional trustworthiness, in which professionals and organizations adopt principled constraints on deception and coercion and design practices that are transparent and responsive, rather than relying on the fiction that a hurried signature equals shared understanding.
Anita Allen’s feminist privacy work pushes the critique further by showing how consent and privacy have been structured by gendered and racialized power. In Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society, Allen argues that the abstract language of privacy and consent obscures the ways in which women, particularly women whose race and class expose them to intensified surveillance, face distinctive obstacles to meaningful control over information and bodily boundaries. Privacy, she notes, has often been used to shield domestic violence and workplace harassment from scrutiny, even as women’s lives are subject to intense regulation by employers, welfare officials, and state actors. In later essays she raises the uncomfortable question of whether the law should ever require people, especially women, to exercise their privacy rights in ways that enhance their own and others’ autonomy, suggesting that the simplistic language of choice can conceal harmful patterns of self disclosure and self exposure under social pressure.
Carole Pateman, in The Sexual Contract, offers a parallel critique at the level of political theory. She argues that classical contract theory has always relied on a hidden sexual contract in which women are the subject of agreement rather than parties to it. The social contracts imagined by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are presented as pacts among equal men who consent to a sovereign authority, yet in practice they presuppose patriarchal relations in which women are subordinated in marriage and labor. Pateman calls attention to contracts for what she terms property in the person, such as wage labor contracts, surrogacy arrangements, and prostitution, where the appearance of consent masks deep structural coercion and dependency. The illusion of consent, in her account, sustains an entire order in which domination appears voluntary.
Taken together, Faden and Beauchamp’s history of informed consent, O Neill’s focus on trustworthiness, Allen’s feminist privacy critique, and Pateman’s contract analysis yield an uncomfortable picture. The modern regime of forms and notices was born out of genuine efforts to prevent atrocities and to respect autonomy. Over time, however, informed consent and privacy have been increasingly proceduralized in ways that risk absorbing critique into compliance. Researchers secure signatures; physicians recite risk lists; corporations present privacy policies that few read; platforms reward themselves for providing granular settings that do little to change actual behavior. The presence of consent forms becomes evidence that ethics has been done.
From the perspective of sacramental consent, this is a liturgy of abdication. The institution washes its hands in the basin of disclosure and authorization, even when it knows that the person signing cannot refuse without significant harm. The problem is not that informed consent and privacy are bad ideas. The problem is that they have been operationalized as thin, individualized transactions in environments structured by structural injustice, saturated surveillance, and exhaustion.
This chapter therefore advances three linked claims. First, that informed consent and privacy regimes as currently practiced are structurally incapable of realizing sacramental consent because they remain focused on protecting institutions rather than honoring the opacity, fragility, and limited capacities of persons and communities. Second, that the resources within bioethics, feminist theory, and critical contract theory can be reinterpreted as proto sacramental once they are read through the lens of reverence, asymmetrical responsibility, and institutional emptiness. Third, that institutions can redesign consent and privacy practices as liturgical events that redistribute power, time, and intelligibility, even while acknowledging that no design will secure purity.
The first claim can be seen most starkly in the ritual of the consent form under conditions of time scarcity. Studies of clinical practice repeatedly observe that patients often sign forms at the end of rushed consultations, with limited opportunity to ask questions and with strong implicit pressure to proceed. O Neill notes that the legal centrality of informed consent in medicine has driven an expansion of documentation requirements without a corresponding expansion of deliberative space. Physicians and administrators internalize the idea that once the form is signed, liability is reduced and ethical obligations have been discharged. Patients learn that refusing to sign may delay needed treatment or signal distrust.
In digital contexts, the situation is harsher. Privacy scholars point out that the average user would need to spend hundreds of hours each year reading privacy policies in order to understand the terms under which their data are collected and processed. Allen and others argue that this expectation is ridiculous and unethical. Institutions design consent flows assuming rapid acceptance; the interface itself penalizes slow, careful reading. Options to refuse are often hidden, fragmented, or framed as loss of service. The person who clicks agrees is not choosing in any robust sense. They are performing a gesture required for participation in basic social and economic life.
Sacramental consent, by contrast, requires that institutions acknowledge the asymmetry of power and time explicitly. A sacramental consent event would not be compressed into a hurried signature in a waiting room or a single click on a tiny screen. It would be staged in such a way that the person asked to consent is given time, translation, and community support commensurate with the gravity of the decision. It would include true refusal options that do not threaten survival or essential access. It would be accompanied by institutional practices of listening and revision, rather than by one way disclosure.
The second claim, that existing theories contain proto sacramental impulses, becomes evident when we read their emphases through this lens. Faden and Beauchamp already distinguish between autonomous authorization and the validity of consent in law, acknowledging that a signature can satisfy legal conditions while failing to meet ethical ones. Their insistence on comprehension and voluntariness echoes the sacramental concern that a vow pronounced without understanding or free assent is void. O Neill’s call for an ethic grounded in principled constraint on deception and coercion rather than in fetishized choice aligns with sacramental consent’s insistence that institutions owe reverent protection of the vulnerable even when those vulnerable persons cannot fully articulate or defend their own interests.
Allen’s uneasy privacy and Pateman’s sexual contract both expose the ways in which the language of consent has been used to naturalize domination. When Allen critiques the romanticization of choice in contexts where women are pressured to disclose intimate information for work, welfare, or family survival, she is demanding that institutions treat opacity as a right rather than as a failure of transparency. When Pateman shows that wage labor and marriage contracts rely on a background in which some parties have little realistic alternative to agreement, she is calling for a political theory that recognizes sacrificial consent as a badge of injustice rather than as a sign of freedom.
These critiques already contain sacramental seeds. They identify situations where consent has been hollowed out and call for forms of relationship that respect the integrity and opacity of persons. What the language of sacramental consent adds is an explicit theological and liturgical frame, in which consent is not a commodity to be collected but a form of shared presence under conditions of risk.
The third claim concerns design. If sacramental consent is to be more than a critique, institutions must experiment with consent and privacy practices that structurally embody reverence and refusal. Here it is useful to think of consent processes as social liturgies, repeated scenes in which bodies, words, and artifacts are arranged to enact a vision of relation. In many present systems, that liturgy is one of compliance: the person approached is asked to perform trust in the institution through a signature or click, while the institution reserves the right to change terms unilaterally.
A sacramental consent liturgy would reverse the orientation. The institution would perform trustworthiness before asking for consent. In a medical context, this might mean that the clinic shares with patients not only information about risks and benefits of a procedure, but also information about its own incentives, constraints, and error systems, including data on complication rates, complaint procedures, and the availability of second opinions. In a research context, it might mean that consent processes include explicit acknowledgement of past abuses, such as Tuskegee, and concrete descriptions of how the current study’s governance structure includes community oversight and avenues for refusal, withdrawal, and complaint.
In data governance, sacramental privacy would require institutions to minimize collection by default, to provide simple ways to opt out without loss of essential services, and to design interfaces that slow users down at points of genuine risk. It would also require collective decision making about data uses, for example through data trusts or community data councils, rather than assuming that individual consent is adequate authorization for uses that affect entire neighborhoods or demographic groups.
None of this can be accomplished by new forms alone. Arendt’s account of promise and forgiveness in The Human Condition reminds us that promises stabilize action only when there are communities willing to remember them and to hold one another accountable, and that forgiveness is needed when unavoidable failures occur. Sacramental consent requires institutions to make promises about how they will seek, guard, and respond to consent, and to build into their structure mechanisms for confession and repair when they fail. It also requires that communities of users, patients, workers, and neighbors be empowered to hold those institutions to their vows, through unionization, litigation, collective bargaining, and organized refusal.
The liturgical metaphor is not sentimental. It forces the recognition that every consent scene already functions as a ritual that shapes expectations and distributes honor or shame. When a person is asked to sign a form in front of others without privacy, the institution signals that their consent is a mere formality. When a welfare claimant must repeatedly tell humiliating stories to justify need, the institution insists on a ritual of abasement. A sacramental consent liturgy would be crafted so that the person asked to consent is addressed with dignity, given space to think and ask, allowed to bring others into the process, and assured that refusal will not be punished beyond the natural consequences of declining a service.
There is a temptation to end by proposing a catalogue of new standards, certifications, or legal reforms. Those have their place, and other chapters have already discussed non reformist reforms and abolitionist strategies in relation to welfare, policing, and platforms. This chapter’s task is narrower and more stubborn. It insists that while informed consent and privacy regimes cannot bear the full weight of sacramental consent, they cannot be abandoned either. They are, for the foreseeable future, the main languages through which many institutions acknowledge that they may not simply do as they please. The work, then, is to hollow out the complacency that has settled around these languages and to infuse them with the grammar developed throughout this book.
To sign a consent form under sacramental conditions would mean something different from the clipboard ritual that began this chapter. It would still involve disclosure and authorization, but it would be embedded in a wider practice of institutional transparency, communal oversight, and openness to refusal. It would be written in a language shaped by the histories of those who have been harmed by false consent, including enslaved people forced to perform acquiescence, women coerced by economic necessity, racialized communities subject to technocratic surveillance, disabled persons pressured into invasive treatment, and queer and trans persons compelled to narrate their lives under hostile interrogation. It would be accompanied by institutional vows, publicly articulated and periodically renewed, to seek not only formal authorization but also the flourishing of those affected.
At the end of this chapter, the clipboard returns. The person in the waiting room has read the form more carefully than usual, perhaps because some trace of this argument has lodged in memory. They notice that certain clauses are non negotiable. They see that refusal would mean loss of access. They sign anyway, because they need the service. Sacramental consent does not romanticize this moment. It names it as constrained, perhaps as sacrificial. The ethical question shifts from whether they made a free choice to whether the institution has done everything in its power to reduce coercion, to open paths of refusal, and to bear the moral weight of the signature rather than placing it on the person alone.
The remaining chapters and codas of this volume have already addressed how institutions might be restructured to make such scenes more frequent and less damaging. This one has tried to clear a space in which informed consent and privacy can be seen both as failures and as sites of possible transfiguration. The challenge is to inhabit that space without naivete and without abandoning the fragile protections that existing regimes, for all their harms, still sometimes provide.
Sacramental consent will not redeem every form. It will not turn the consent screen of a predatory lender into a covenant, nor will it cleanse a welfare portal that treats applicants as suspicious cases by default. What it can do is sharpen the eye and stiffen the conscience of those who design, interpret, and contest such forms, so that consent is no longer treated as a magic word but as a demanding practice. That practice, if it is to deserve the adjective sacramental, must be anchored in the kind of reverent attention that sees the signer not as a risk to be managed or an asset to be exploited, but as a presence whose yes and no bear the weight of a life.
Chapter Fourteen: Democratic Data and Sacramental Protocols: Platforms after Privacy Self Management
Imagine a person who never signs a clipboard in a waiting room because the waiting room has moved inside their pocket. The platforms that handle their social life, navigation, medical reminders, banking, and news have already collected the equivalents of those signatures many thousands of times. Their feed of posts, purchases, and movements is not a set of isolated records about a private individual. It is a set of relations among people, neighborhoods, and institutions, continuously updated and continuously mined. Law still speaks as if this person were the owner of their data and as if consent were an event in which that owner grants or withholds permission. In practice, their life is governed by systems that treat data as raw material for population level inferences and as coordinates for algorithmic regulation.
This chapter asks what sacramental consent could mean once we stop pretending that platforms and artificial intelligence systems are dealing primarily with individual secrets and start acknowledging that they govern relations. It begins from the critique of privacy self management and informed consent developed in the previous chapter and then moves outward to confront three influential proposals for reform: Julie Cohen’s networked self, Salomé Viljoen’s relational data governance, and Karen Yeung’s analysis of algorithmic regulation. Along the way, it engages Daniel Solove’s diagnosis of the consent dilemma in privacy law and Jack Balkin’s fiduciary model of platform responsibility, reading both as partial attempts to rebuild trust in spaces where consent has been hollowed out.
The chapter’s wager is offensive at the level of argument and defensive at the level of method. It claims that the familiar liberal grammar of rights and contracts around personal data has become a theology of bad faith that treats people as sovereign choosers while structuring their lives through invisible population level manipulation. At the same time, it does not discard existing privacy and data protection regimes as useless. Instead it treats them as material that can be reconfigured, in concert with abolitionist and commons traditions, into sacramental protocols. These protocols would approach data as a set of relations that can hurt or heal worlds and would treat consent as collective, situated, and revocable rather than as a one time license.
Julie Cohen’s Configuring the Networked Self provides a starting point because it refuses the myth of the data subject as an isolated chooser. She argues that information law and technical architecture co produce networked subjectivities by shaping the conditions under which people create, share, and receive cultural and personal information. For Cohen, flows of personal information are not simple leakages from a preexisting private sphere. They are part of the way selves come to exist at all, through patterns of exposure, concealment, recognition, and misrecognition. Legal regimes that treat personal data as a commodity to be traded, or as a resource that individuals can manage through consent, ignore the fact that the costs and benefits of data flows are distributed unequally and that surveillance shapes not only what others know about a person but what that person can imagine.
Cohen’s analysis destabilizes the premise of privacy self management that Solove critiques. Solove argues that current privacy law rests on the idea that individuals can manage their own privacy by giving or withholding consent, provided that they receive adequate notice. He shows that this model fails because people lack the time, information, and cognitive capacity to understand complex data practices, because harms are diffuse and delayed, and because structural power makes refusal unrealistic for many. Cohen deepens this diagnosis by insisting that it is not only cognitive overload that renders privacy self management incoherent. It is the fact that networked environments configure subjectivity through code and business models in ways that individuals cannot unilaterally alter. The user of a platform can rarely choose the underlying incentive structure that rewards outrage, the recommendation algorithms that channel attention, or the data brokerage markets that monetize their connections.
Viewed in sacramental terms, privacy self management asks networked persons to sanctify their own domination with a ritual of choice. The consent screen becomes a secularized analog of the liturgy that demands a spoken affirmation in order to proceed. Yet unlike a sacrament, it offers no thick community, no real possibility of refusal, and no institutional structure oriented toward the flourishing of the participant. The platform writes the liturgy, collects responses, and treats the archive of agreed actions as raw material for further optimization.
Salomé Viljoen’s relational theory of data governance therefore marks an important turning point. In her article “A Relational Theory of Data Governance,” she argues that data should be understood not as discrete pieces of information about individuals but as social relations that place people into populations and configure supra individual interests. A location trace, for instance, is not only about one person’s movements. It reveals patterns about neighborhoods, workplaces, protest routes, and migration. A health record is not only about one patient. It contributes to inferences about racialized disease risk, genetic predispositions, and environmental harms. When law treats these relational data as property owned by individuals, managed through consent and trade, it fails to address the population level effects that are the real stakes of data governance.
Viljoen advocates a turn from individualist data subject rights to democratic forms of data governance that recognize these supra individual interests. She proposes that data relations be governed through legal and institutional structures that represent the communities and populations that data implicate and that decisions about collection, use, and sharing be treated as matters of public concern rather than as private transactions. In this view, consent remains important but cannot function as the primary legitimating device. A person’s agreement to a platform’s terms cannot justly authorize data practices that affect neighbors, workers, or future generations.
Sacramental consent is naturally at home in a relational framework. If data are relations, then consent to data practices must be sought at the level of relations rather than at the level of isolated individuals. This implies that sacramental protocols for data would involve assemblies, councils, and commons rather than only screens and forms. Communities would deliberate about acceptable uses of relational data, about thresholds for opacity, about who may pause or veto certain inferences, and about how to distribute the benefits and harms of data driven systems. Consent here becomes something like a communal vow, subject to renewal and revocation as conditions change.
Karen Yeung’s work on algorithmic regulation provides a complementary lens. In her often cited article “Algorithmic Regulation: A Critical Interrogation,” she defines algorithmic regulation as decision making systems that use algorithmic tools to monitor behavior and adjust rewards or penalties in order to steer populations. Examples include dynamic pricing, predictive policing, credit scoring, content ranking, and personalized nudging. Yeung argues that algorithmic regulation differs from traditional law and administrative rulemaking because it often operates in real time, at a granular level, through opaque systems controlled by private actors. She warns that these systems can undermine rule of law values such as transparency, contestability, and equality, especially when they adjust behavior based on correlations that individuals cannot perceive or challenge.
Read sacramentally, algorithmic regulation looks like a parody of liturgy. It offers continuous, automated governance without explicit ritual. Instead of discrete moments where a community gathers to deliberate and to commit itself to certain forms of life, algorithmic regulation produces ongoing micro adjustments that nudge populations toward desired outcomes. There is little room for genuinely sacramental consent because the governed are rarely asked, and even when they are presented with choice architectures, those architectures are often designed to produce predictable selections. People learn to feel free while their environments are tuned to elicit certain clicks, purchases, and movements.
Solove’s consent dilemma reappears here in intensified form. When algorithmic regulation is legitimized through privacy self management and informed consent, law asks people to accept not only data collection but also unknown future uses and inferences. Under these conditions, consent becomes a faith act extended toward systems that cannot be comprehended. The sacramental vocabulary reminds us that such faith should never be demanded by those who wield power. It belongs, if at all, to relations of reverence, not to platforms and scoring regimes.
Jack Balkin’s concept of information fiduciaries is one influential attempt to re moralize this space. He argues that certain firms, especially large online platforms, should be treated as fiduciaries of their users’ information, bound by duties of care, confidentiality, and loyalty analogous to those that govern doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. On this model, consent remains relevant but is supplemented by a structural obligation on the part of platforms to act in their users’ interests, to avoid harmful conflicts of interest, and to refrain from exploiting informational vulnerabilities. Balkin’s proposal has been criticized from multiple directions, including concerns that fiduciary duties might be too vague or that they might unduly restrict platforms’ speech. Yet the model remains significant because it shifts focus from what individuals agree to toward what institutions owe, given their power over personal and relational data.
Sacramental consent aligns with the fiduciary impulse to reassign moral weight from the user’s signature to the institution’s obligations. Yet it also demands more than fiduciary loyalty. A sacramental data institution would recognize not only duties to individual users but also duties to the communities and populations implicated in relational data. It would accept that certain profitable uses of data are incompatible with reverent consent, even if they could be made consistent with fiduciary law. For example, a platform that derives revenue from targeted advertising based on inferred vulnerabilities might technically avoid certain conflicts while still structuring its entire enterprise around attention capture. Sacramental consent would call that business model into question at its root.
The chapter now turns to the constructive question. If privacy self management is inadequate, if data are relational, if algorithmic regulation threatens rule of law values, and if fiduciary models are only partial remedies, what might sacramental protocols for platforms and artificial intelligence look like. The answer must remain tentative and fragmentary, both because the technical landscape is rapidly shifting and because the abolitionist commitments of the book forbid sanctifying any single reform. Still, several features can be named.
First, sacramental protocols would treat data minimization as a spiritual discipline rather than as a compliance checkbox. Cohen’s networked self analysis shows that environments saturated with surveillance narrow people’s imaginative horizons and make deviation costly. Viljoen’s relational account shows that unnecessary data collection creates population level vulnerabilities even when no individual consents. Sacramental minimization would ask institutions to justify every category of data collected in terms of concrete communal goods that cannot be realized otherwise, and to treat any surplus collection as a violation of reverence. This discipline would be codified in law and in community charters, not left to volunteerist virtue.
Second, sacramental protocols would foreground collective consent through democratic data governance. Viljoen’s proposal for public forms of data governance suggests legal structures in which data councils or trusts represent supra individual interests. Sacramental consent would push these structures to include representation for those most vulnerable to data harms, including racialized communities, disabled persons, migrants, and gig workers. These councils would have real power to prohibit certain uses, demand transparency of algorithms, and require that benefits from data driven systems be shared with affected communities rather than captured by shareholders alone.
Third, sacramental protocols would require that algorithmic regulation be subject to liturgical interruption. Yeung worries that continuous algorithmic steering erodes the possibility of contestation. Sacramental consent would respond by building in regular pauses where the operation of regulatory algorithms is reviewed by human communities. During these pauses, the criteria for optimization, the patterns of impact across populations, and the experiences of those governed would be examined. People would be invited to testify to harms and to suggest changes. The algorithms might be slowed, constrained, or switched off entirely in certain domains. The point is not to restore nostalgic human discretion, which is itself often biased and violent, but to prevent the continuous, unreflective operation of opaque systems.
Fourth, sacramental protocols would make institutional confession and penance part of data governance. When breaches occur or when harms are revealed, the default institutional reflex is strategic denial, minimal disclosure, and limited liability settlements. A sacramental approach would instead call platforms and agencies to practice structured acknowledgment of wrongdoing, to transparently describe how consent was voided or manipulated, to invite affected communities into designing reparations, and to accept ongoing monitoring. This is not naïve. It reflects the recognition, drawn from both Hartman and Benjamin in earlier chapters, that harm cannot be undone and that apology without structural change is manipulation. It treats confession as a practice that must be backed by material shifts, including deletion of harmful datasets, halting of harmful inferences, and redistribution of power.
Finally, sacramental protocols would honor the right to opacity not as an exception but as a central principle. Glissant’s defense of opacity as a condition for genuine relation and Moten’s insistence on fugitive presence remind us that not all truths about persons and communities should be rendered into data. In a relational data regime, this means setting not only individual rights to access and correct data but also community rights to keep certain domains unmeasured. That might include spiritual practices, informal care networks, undocumented mutual aid, or certain forms of political organizing. Sacramental consent here functions as a disciplined refusal to believe that safety or justice can be engineered through sheer visibility.
The chapter ends where it began, with a person surrounded by invisible forms. The consent they give to platforms and AI systems today is, in most cases, neither informed nor free in any strong sense. Yet they are not powerless. They can join or form tenants unions that contest algorithmic eviction screening, participate in campaigns that demand bans on certain forms of surveillance, support legislation that enacts relational data governance, and contribute to communities that practice data fasting and mutual aid. Their individual choices will not redeem a relational data economy structured by extraction. They can, however, participate in sacramental experiments where consent is treated not as a thin license for harm but as a shared act of reverence.
Sacramental consent in the age of platforms will remain a minority practice for some time. It will often be dismissed as unrealistic or idealistic by those whose metrics depend on frictionless consent. The argument of this chapter, and of the book as a whole, is that realism without reverence is simply another name for complicity. To design and inhabit data systems that see persons and communities as relations worthy of consent that costs the powerful something is to worship differently in a world where worship has been captured by dashboards and price signals. Whether that worship takes explicitly theological form or not, it names a way of being with data that refuses to treat anyone’s life as a resource to be optimized without their say.
Chapter Fifteen: Borders, Citizenship, and Exile: Sacramental Consent beyond the Nation State
Begin with a shoreline that has become an archive. On certain Mediterranean beaches, in the Sonoran desert, along the Rio Grande, the remains of people in transit accumulate in ways that local volunteers and anthropologists struggle to name. Jason De León describes the desert between Mexico and the United States as a land of open graves, a space where the policy of prevention through deterrence turns heat, terrain, and scavenging animals into a networked killing apparatus. Vicki Squire speaks of the Mediterranean as a zone where the European Union governs migration through death, treating drowning and disappearance as a form of population management rather than as contingent tragedy. Nicholas De Genova writes of the borders of Europe as sites where the autonomy of migration confronts tactics of bordering that attempt to immobilize and sort unwanted mobilities. Harsha Walia names a global border regime that does not simply block movement but selects, channels, and disciplines labor under conditions of racial capitalism and ecological collapse.
In each of these accounts, consent appears only as a broken promise. People on the move have not been asked whether they consent to being routed into deserts and seas, to being immobilized in camps, or to being sorted into legal categories that determine whether they will live, work, or be removed. Their deaths are often described as accidents or as the regrettable side effects of necessary security measures. At the same time, the citizens of wealthy states are told that borders protect their way of life and that their consent has been secured through elections and public debate. The entire apparatus of migration control is thus framed as an exercise of democratic self determination, even when those most affected had no voice in its design.
This chapter refuses that framing. It advances the argument that contemporary border and citizenship regimes operate as vast machines for the production of non consent and that any theology of sacramental consent worthy of the name must confront them directly. It does so offensively in the sense that it names border control, birthright citizenship, and selective asylum as ongoing structures of sacrificial violence, not as tragic residues of a more innocent past. It proceeds defensively in method, grounding its claims in the work of scholars who have analyzed borders as necropolitical infrastructures, citizenship as inherited privilege, and humanitarianism as a moral economy that governs precarious lives.
The first task is to see borders as liturgies of non consent. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics is indispensable here. In his work on sovereignty and death, Mbembe argues that contemporary power often manifests not through direct rule over productive life but through the creation of death worlds, zones where certain populations are exposed to slow or sudden death as a matter of policy. Borders, in this view, are not simply lines on maps or checkpoints staffed by guards. They are assemblages of infrastructure, law, and environment that differentiate who may move and who must risk dying in the attempt. Migration scholars have extended Mbembe’s analysis by showing how European and North American border policies deliberately displace risk onto deserts and seas, where exposure, dehydration, and drowning become policy instruments.
De León describes how the United States Border Patrol’s strategy of prevention through deterrence redirects migrants away from urban crossings into remote desert stretches where water is scarce and temperatures lethal. Squire analyzes how European authorities have withdrawn rescue assets and criminalized solidarity at sea, producing what she names governance through death in which the likelihood of drowning is used as a deterrent signal. De Genova and his collaborators argue that this constellation of practices constitutes a European question in which migration becomes the proxy through which deeper anxieties about race, class, and postcolonial responsibility are displaced onto the bodies of those who move.
From the vantage point of sacramental consent, what is most striking in these analyses is not simply the scale of suffering, though that is staggering, but the way in which the affected are positioned as permanently unasked. They are summoned by war, dispossession, and ecological ruin, compelled to move by conditions they did not choose, then encountered as intruders whose very attempt to cross is treated as a crime or as a threat to sovereign order. There is no moment in which the border regime asks, in any meaningful sense, whether they consent to the terms under which they will be admitted, detained, or expelled. Their bodies are the terrain upon which others enact projects of security, prosperity, and national identity.
Didier Fassin’s work on humanitarian reason helps explain how such regimes can present themselves as moral enterprises. In Humanitarian Reason he shows how humanitarian discourse has become a central mode through which states and nongovernmental organizations govern precarious lives, directing attention to suffering while simultaneously legitimating forms of control and exclusion. In the context of asylum and migration, Fassin observes that the language of compassion often masks procedures that demand that applicants perform their trauma in highly scripted ways, that sort the deserving from the undeserving based on narrow criteria, and that subject the unwanted to indefinite waiting in camps and detention centers. The moral economy he describes offers precarious protection at the price of deep asymmetry. Migrants are invited to submit to medical examinations, credibility interviews, and surveillance in exchange for the possibility of legal recognition. Their consent to these intrusions is, at best, constrained; refusal would mean deportation or the loss of any hope of regularization.
Walia’s Border and Rule pushes the critique further by situating migration control within global histories of conquest, capitalist accumulation, and racial ordering. She argues that border regimes do not simply respond to migration flows but actively produce and manage those flows as a pillar of global governance. Migrants are rendered deportable and precarious in ways that supply cheap labor and enforce discipline across racial and national lines. The rhetoric of crisis obscures the long standing patterns that make certain populations move and others stay. When states strengthen borders, they are not exercising neutral sovereignty; they are deciding whose displacement will be tolerated, whose labor will be captured, and whose lives can be treated as collateral.
To introduce sacramental language into this scene is to risk piety where outrage is required. The point is not to baptize border struggles but to insist that any theology of consent that confines itself to interpersonal relations or domestic institutions would be false. If sacramental consent means reverent attention to the other, institutional willingness to absorb costs, and a refusal to instrumentalize fragile lives, then border regimes appear as anti sacramental. They are liturgies in which the powerful consecrate their right to comfort and security by staging the vulnerability of others as necessary and inevitable.
The second task of this chapter is to examine citizenship as a structure that organizes whose movement is free and whose is criminalized. Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery offers a devastatingly simple thesis: in an unequal world, birthright citizenship functions like inherited property, conferring massive unearned advantages on those born into wealthy states while excluding others from basic opportunities. She argues that membership in affluent polities should be understood as a scarce and valuable resource allocated on the basis of accident and defended through law. The passports that citizens carry are not simply identity documents; they are tickets in a global lottery that distributes security, income, and mobility. In this frame, borders are not merely lines of defense; they are mechanisms for protecting inherited privilege.
Shachar does not call for the abolition of citizenship altogether. Instead she proposes reforms, such as a birthright privilege levy that would tax the unearned benefits of citizenship to fund global redistribution and membership principles that take into account actual connections to a polity rather than only blood and soil. Her work matters here because it exposes the ways in which consent is misnamed in the language of national self determination. When citizens of wealthy states are told that they have consented to border policies through democratic processes, they are rarely invited to consider that their own membership is the result of a lottery they did not choose. Nor are they asked whether they consent to the exclusionary consequences of that lottery for others. Citizenship thus appears as an unexamined sacrament of belonging, one that binds insiders to each other while rendering outsiders permanently petitioners.
From a sacramental perspective, this is a distorted sacrament. Sacramental belonging, in many religious traditions, is marked by initiation rites that are open in principle to all and by obligations of hospitality toward strangers. The Eucharistic table, for instance, is meant to signify a community that remembers its own status as guest and refugee. When citizenship functions instead as an inherited enclosure of advantage, guarded by deadly borders, it becomes an anti sacrament that memorializes conquest and exclusion.
The chapter’s third task is constructive. It asks whether sacramental consent can offer any guidance in imagining institutions that respond to displacement, mobility, and exile without reproducing border necropolitics or birthright privilege. Here the book’s earlier movements on welfare, workplace, and welfare analytics must be carried outward to the planetary scale, in conversation with migration studies, political theology, and decolonial practice.
One starting point is the tradition of sanctuary. Long before contemporary sanctuary cities and church based asylum networks, ancient legal and religious systems recognized spaces where those pursued by vengeance or unjust authorities could claim temporary protection. Biblical cities of refuge, for example, were instituted as places where those accused of manslaughter could flee to avoid immediate retributive violence and await fair adjudication. Sanctuary in medieval Christianity and in some Islamic legal traditions functioned as a suspension of ordinary jurisdiction within sacred spaces. In each case, sanctuary did not abolish law but created zones where law could not act in its usual way until certain conditions were met.
Modern sanctuary movements reinterpret this tradition in relation to migrants and asylum seekers. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and community centers commit to sheltering those facing deportation, sometimes in open defiance of state law. Municipal governments declare themselves sanctuary jurisdictions, limiting their cooperation with immigration enforcement. These practices are fragile and uneven; they can be co opted into symbolic gestures that change little in material terms. Yet they embody an intuition that sacramental consent may require local institutions to refuse participation in national projects of exclusion, even when those projects are democratically authorized.
Sacramental consent, in this context, would not mean that sanctuary communities claim moral purity or deny their own implication in border regimes. It would mean that they take on specific obligations toward those they shelter: to share risk, to listen without demanding total narrative transparency, to protect opacity where exposure would harm, and to advocate for structural change beyond their walls. It would also mean that they engage in processes of collective discernment about when and how to accept people into sanctuary, recognizing that they cannot shelter everyone and that their selections carry their own injustices.
Another constructive horizon is suggested by calls for global mobility justice and for the decolonization of borders. Walia’s insistence that migration should be understood in relation to land theft, labor exploitation, and climate violence implies that sacramental consent cannot be realized without addressing the underlying structures that force people to move. If communities and states were to take sacramental consent seriously, they would treat their own consumption patterns, resource extraction, and military interventions as forms of consent given or withheld to global arrangements that produce displacement. They would ask not only whether migrants consent to the conditions under which they are admitted but also whether citizens consent to benefiting from systems that render others disposable.
Legal scholars and activists have proposed a range of mechanisms for more just mobility, from expanded refugee resettlement and humanitarian visas to regional free movement zones and forms of transnational citizenship. None of these, on their own, fulfills the demands of sacramental consent. Many risk reinforcing hierarchies by selecting only the most skilled or the most vulnerable for mobility. Yet they indicate an opening, a recognition that the present world of passports and walls is a recent construction rather than a natural order. Sacramental consent would press these experiments to be accountable to those most affected, to build in avenues for refusal and contestation, and to avoid sanctifying any particular border arrangement as final.
The chapter must also descend to the micro practices of consent and refusal that shape everyday encounters with migrants and citizens at borders and within interior spaces. Front line officials, social workers, teachers, and neighbors constantly make decisions about whether to call authorities, whether to ask for papers, whether to translate or to remain silent. Fassin’s account of humanitarian reason shows how officials can oscillate between compassion and suspicion, granting aid in some cases while framing others as abusers of the system. Sacramental consent would ask these actors to see their choices not as peripheral but as central sites where borders are enacted or disrupted. To decline to call immigration enforcement on a tenant, to help someone navigate asylum procedures, or to refuse to participate in discriminatory profiling are forms of consent and refusal that shape the lived border.
Such micro practices cannot substitute for structural transformation. They can, however, prefigure sacramental institutions. A school that chooses not to cooperate with immigration raids, a hospital that treats all who arrive without asking about status, a union that organizes undocumented and documented workers together, all enact fragments of a different border ethics. Their consent is given not to the border regime but to the presence of vulnerable others among them. Their refusals are not abstract but operational: they say no to specific demands that would turn them into extensions of necropolitical control.
The final movement of this chapter returns to the theological core of sacramental consent. Borders and citizenship regimes force a confrontation with the temptation to treat community and identity as goods that require exclusion. Religious communities are not innocent here. Churches have blessed empire and its frontiers; synagogues and mosques have sometimes aligned themselves with nationalist projects that depend on border violence; temples and monasteries have made peace with caste and ethnic enclosures. To speak of sacramental consent beyond the nation state is therefore to speak against centuries of religious complicity.
Yet the same traditions contain resources for another imagination. The biblical injunction to remember the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt, the Christian identification of Christ with the foreigner and prisoner, the Islamic emphasis on hospitality to travelers and refugees, the practices of pilgrimage and exile that mark many traditions, all testify to the fragility of belonging and the call to share that fragility. Sacramental consent in this register would mean that communities take upon themselves the disciplines of mobility and dispossession: limiting their claims to land and privilege, opening their institutions to those displaced by the very systems from which they benefit, and refusing to equate divine favor with national membership.
This is not a call for religious institutions to take over migration governance. It is an invitation for them to examine their own borders, their own birthright lotteries, their own necropolitics. Which languages, aesthetics, and bodies feel at home in the sanctuary and which feel foreign. Whose stories are believed when they narrate persecution or hunger. Who is allowed to remain opaque and who must submit to scrutiny. Without such examination, sacramental language becomes another form of bad faith, sanctifying communities that remain structurally aligned with border violence.
In the end, sacramental consent beyond the nation state will not be a policy model but a posture, a way of standing in relation to movement and enclosure. It will recognize that borders, in some form, are inevitable so long as there are differences in language, law, and political organization. It will refuse, however, to treat any existing border as morally self evident or as beyond question. It will measure border practices by their willingness to absorb risk on behalf of the vulnerable rather than by their success in protecting privilege. It will insist that consent in matters of mobility must be sought not only from citizens who vote but from those whose lives are made precarious by every change in visa regime or patrol pattern.
Such a posture will be costly. It will require citizens of wealthy states to accept that their own comfort and security cannot be preserved intact if sacramental consent is to be extended to those currently excluded. It will require institutions to relinquish some of their power to decide unilaterally who belongs. It will require communities to live with unresolved tensions, knowing that every opening creates new lines of exclusion elsewhere. This costliness is precisely what marks sacramental consent as distinct from the thin, procedural consent of forms and checkpoints. Sacraments, in their better moments, do not confirm the world as it is. They interrupt it, making possible relations that would otherwise be unthinkable.
The graves in the desert and the bodies in the sea remain. No theology of consent can redeem them. What it can do is refuse to let their deaths be narrated as the price of order and insist instead that they are the measure of any border that claims to be just. To speak of sacramental consent beyond the nation state is therefore to hold open a wound, to keep asking what would have to change in our law, our economies, and our communities for no one’s movement to depend on such risk. It is to refuse to grant consent on behalf of those who were never asked.
Chapter Sixteen: Climate, Extraction, and Collective Continuance: Sacramental Consent in a Warming World
Begin with a shoreline that is already leaving. On a low lying coast, an Indigenous community watches the water climb over the roots of trees that once marked a boundary between land and sea. The elders remember when storms arrived with warning and departed with a season’s rest. The younger people learn instead to read evacuation routes, insurance exclusions, and opaque risk scores that determine whether their houses will be rebuilt or written off. They have never been asked whether they consent to the terms under which their land becomes buffer, sacrifice, or carbon offset for somewhere else. They are summoned as data points into flood models and relocation plans but almost never as authors of those plans.
Kyle Powys Whyte has insisted that for many Indigenous peoples climate change is not a surprising disruption but one more phase in an ongoing pattern of environmental injustice, settler colonialism, and erasure of socioecological relations required for collective continuance. He describes collective continuance as the capacity of a people to maintain their distinctive relationships with land, waters, species, and one another over time, and he argues that climate policies are unjust when they undermine this capacity by imposing solutions that fragment communities, sever them from homelands, or force them into economies that erode their practices. In that frame, climate governance is not simply a question of atmospheric chemistry or global averages. It is a question of who consents to what kinds of futures and whose continuance is treated as optional.
This chapter presses the argument further. It claims that the dominant regimes of climate policy, extractive industry, and energy transition function as planetary theatres of non consent, where communities and more than human beings are enrolled in long emergencies without meaningful say. It does so offensively at the level of substance, naming decarbonization plans, carbon markets, and adaptation programs as potential extensions of sacrificial ordering rather than easy remedies. It proceeds defensively at the level of method, staging these claims alongside work by Rob Nixon on slow violence, Elizabeth Povinelli on geontopower, Whyte on collective continuance, Robin Wall Kimmerer on reciprocity, and legal developments in the rights of nature tradition. The aim is not to offer a cheerful theology of resilience under catastrophe but to discover whether sacramental consent can become a name for planetary practices that refuse to treat climate harm as a reasonable price for someone else’s comfort.
Nixon’s language of slow violence provides a first grammar. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor he names as slow violence those forms of harm that unfold gradually and often invisibly, dispersed across time and space, including toxic drift, deforestation, and the drawn out aftermath of war. He emphasizes that slow violence thrives on the layered invisibility of both victims and perpetrators, and that it is disproportionately borne by poor and racialized communities who lack the political visibility required to make their losses count as violence at all. Climate change is a paradigmatic case. Carbon emissions accumulate from innumerable industrial and everyday acts; their atmospheric effects unfold over generations; the resulting floods, droughts, and heat kill in ways that are rarely dramatized as assault.
From the standpoint of consent, slow violence presents a double distortion. Those who have contributed most to greenhouse gas emissions can persuade themselves that no one has been directly attacked; they have simply participated in normal economic life. Those who bear the brunt of climate impacts cannot point to a discrete moment in which they were asked whether they agreed to their homes becoming uninsurable, their crops failing, or their islands submerging. Slow violence evacuates the scene of consent by stretching causality out of recognizable shape.
The language of sacrifice zones deepens this picture. Environmental justice scholars and activists use the term sacrifice zone to describe communities subjected to disproportionate pollution and hazard in order to secure energy and consumption for others. Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where petrochemical plants crowd predominantly Black communities along the Mississippi, is one often cited example. Recent analyses have extended the concept to green sacrifice zones, places where landscapes and livelihoods are destroyed in the name of renewable energy installations, rare earth mineral mining, or carbon offset plantations designed to decarbonize the global economy. In each case, a political ecology of sacrifice renders some lives and lands expendable so that others can maintain lifestyles branded as sustainable or secure.
Sacramental consent cannot coexist easily with sacrifice zones. Sacramental traditions remember sacrifice as something offered by a community that takes responsibility for the cost, not something imposed on unwilling others without their voice. When climate policy produces sacrifice zones, especially under the banner of green transition, it rehearses liturgies in which the powerful vow security on behalf of the vulnerable and call it progress. Consent here is replaced by what this book has called institutional ventriloquy: agreements announced as if the affected had spoken.
Povinelli’s concept of geontopower moves the analysis toward the more than human. In Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism she argues that contemporary governance increasingly operates by drawing and policing the distinction between Life and Nonlife, managing not only populations of humans but also the very conditions under which land, water, and air are treated as animate or inert. She identifies figures such as the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus as ways in which geontopower imagines and regulates nonhuman entities that are nonetheless entangled with human flourishing. In the context of climate change, geontopower appears in decisions about which ecosystems are allowed to die, which are designated as carbon sinks, and which are granted legal or symbolic protection.
When courts in Colombia recognize the Atrato River as a legal subject with rights to protection, conservation, and restoration, they are, in one sense, interrupting geontopower by refusing to treat a river as mere resource. The Atrato decision, widely noted in rights of nature jurisprudence, declares that the river itself has standing and that human guardians must act on its behalf. Yet subsequent reports by United Nations rapporteurs reveal that illegal mining and mercury contamination continue to devastate the basin, and that implementation of the court’s mandate has faltered. Legal personhood alone does not guarantee sacramental consent if the economic and political structures that treat the river and its peoples as sacrificial remain in place.
Still, the Atrato and similar cases, including the legal recognition of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand, show that law can begin to imagine more than human entities as subjects of rights rather than objects of exploitation. Sacramental consent would press further, asking not only whether rivers are granted rights but whether the communities who live with them have meaningful authority over how those rights are interpreted and defended, and whether the global demand for energy and minerals is constrained in light of those rights.
Whyte’s language of collective continuance offers a constructive anchor. In his work on Indigenous climate justice he argues that settler colonialism commits environmental injustice precisely by undermining Indigenous collective continuance while building its own collective continuance on ecologically unsustainable and morally troubling relationships. Climate policies that treat Indigenous lands as sites for renewable energy projects, mining, or relocation, without full Indigenous decision making power, repeat this pattern even when they use the language of sustainability. Sacramental consent, in this register, would require that climate action be evaluated by its effects on collective continuance, not only by its contributions to emission reduction targets.
Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass brings the conversation to the level of daily practice. She writes as a botanist and Potawatomi thinker who refuses the modern separation between scientific knowledge and Indigenous wisdom, arguing that humans owe gifts of gratitude and care to the more than human world that feeds and shelters them. She describes practices of reciprocity in which people harvest plants with restraint, return gifts to the land, and speak to other beings as relatives rather than as stock. While her book does not present itself as climate policy, it articulates a sacramental ecology in which consent is expressed through ongoing mutual acknowledgment and restraint rather than through discrete contracts.
If slow violence, sacrifice zones, geontopower, collective continuance, and reciprocity are taken together, a stark picture emerges. The fossil fueled and supposedly green economies that dominate this century ask neither current frontline communities nor future generations nor rivers and forests whether they consent to the forms of life being built. They rely on a thin notion of public consent mediated through elections, infrastructure siting hearings, and consumer choice, all structured by deep inequalities of power, knowledge, and necessity. They treat the atmosphere as a commons open to exploitation, then treat the resulting instability as a naturalized condition to which some must adapt more than others. That is the planetary field into which sacramental consent must speak if it is not to remain a pious concern of comfortable institutions.
What, then, would sacramental consent look like in climate governance. The answer cannot be a single model. It must instead take the form of a family of practices that share several commitments.
First, sacramental consent would refuse to treat decarbonization as a technocratic process that can be optimized without asking who bears the costs. A just energy transition cannot simply replace fossil fuel sacrifice zones with green sacrifice zones where Indigenous and marginalized communities absorb the damage of lithium mining, rare earth extraction, and mega scale solar and wind installations. Sacramental consent would require that affected communities have real power to veto or reshape projects, that cumulative historical harms be taken into account, and that alternatives that reduce overall energy demand be seriously considered rather than dismissed as politically impossible.
Second, sacramental consent would insist that climate adaptation be measured not only by infrastructure metrics but by its effects on collective continuance. Managed retreat, sea walls, and climate resilient agriculture all involve deep decisions about which places are preserved, which are allowed to flood, and which ways of life are supported. Whyte’s work warns that adaptation strategies can perpetuate injustice when they demand that Indigenous and other marginalized peoples leave homelands or surrender practices while majority populations are protected in place. Sacramental consent would require adaptation policies that prioritize the continuance of those who have been structurally endangered, that recognize obligations to maintain relations between peoples and particular lands and waters, and that treat relocation, where unavoidable, as a last resort undertaken with deep consultation and reparative commitments.
Third, sacramental consent would transform the way climate finance and loss and damage mechanisms are conceived. Current debates in international negotiations focus on how much money wealthy states will transfer to vulnerable countries for adaptation and recovery, in what forms, and under what conditions. These flows are often framed as aid or solidarity rather than as partial restitution for harms inflicted through centuries of extraction and recent emissions. A sacramental approach would recognize that those who have benefited from fossil fueled development owe more than charity. They owe concrete, long term commitments shaped by the voices of those harmed. Consent here would mean that communities in the global South and in sacrifice zones have decisive authority over how funds are used, that they can refuse projects that reproduce dependency or dispossession, and that they can demand deep structural changes in trade, finance, and debt rather than incremental project funding.
Fourth, sacramental consent would expand the circle of those recognized as participants in climate decisions. This includes not only marginalized human communities but also more than human collectives whose wellbeing is indispensable to collective continuance. Rights of nature jurisprudence around rivers, forests, and ecosystems signals one path, but sacramental consent would demand that such rights not be symbolic. They must be backed by guardianship structures that are accountable to both human and more than human communities, empowered to say no to profitable projects, and grounded in cosmologies that treat earth beings as more than resources.
Fifth, sacramental consent would involve local communities of practice that take on climate as an examination of conscience rather than as a distant policy issue. Faith communities, municipalities, universities, and professional associations would need to ask, in detail, to which climate arrangements they are currently consenting through their investments, procurement policies, and daily operations. They would need to identify concrete refusals: for instance, refusing to accept sponsorship from companies that depend on new fossil fuel expansion, refusing to site new facilities on land that has been extractively seized, refusing to participate in research partnerships that treat vulnerable populations as data sources for resilience technologies without giving them governance power. Such refusals are sacramental when they flow from sustained attention to the harms at stake and from commitments to redirect resources toward collective continuance.
All of this might seem impossibly ambitious when measured against the pace and scale of climate change. The temptation is to retreat into a realism that treats sacrifice zones, slow violence, and geontopower as regrettable but inevitable consequences of any large scale transition. Sacramental consent resists that realism by insisting that the distribution of harm is not a neutral variable to be optimized but a theological question about what and whom we are willing to offer up. The offense of the argument lies precisely here: it declares that climate policies that leave certain peoples and places permanently expendable are liturgies of idolatry, worship of growth and security in the form of carbon budgets and gross domestic product, no matter how green their rhetoric.
Yet sacramental consent is not a call to purity. It recognizes that every community already lives inside structures it did not choose and that sudden withdrawal from those structures would harm the very people it seeks to protect. The point is not to imagine a world where no one is ever harmed. It is to practice forms of deliberation, institutional design, and shared discipline in which harms are named honestly, in which those most exposed have decisive voice, and in which the powerful consent to constraints and losses that align their lives with the continuance of others rather than their depletion.
In that sense, sacramental consent in a warming world is a practice of shared vow. It is the decision of communities to bind themselves to certain patterns of energy use, land care, and mobility that are compatible with the flourishing of others and of more than human kin. It is the institutionalization of confession, where histories of extraction and emission are faced without euphemism and where commitments to repair are made in concrete, revisable forms. It is the cultivation of gratitude and grief in the manner of Kimmerer’s teachings, where the gifts of plants, soils, and waters are received with reverence and with a willingness to lessen demands.
The chapter concludes by returning to the shoreline that began it. The water continues to rise. Some houses will be moved, some abandoned, some rebuilt on stilts that cast new shadows on the tidal grasses. The community will need to decide how to remain itself while its geography shifts. Those decisions will be shaped by global forces beyond its reach: sea level trajectories, national adaptation funds, insurance algorithms, and distant appetites for cheap energy. Sacramental consent does not promise that these forces will relent. It does, however, name a horizon in which communities and institutions elsewhere refuse to treat this shoreline as expendable. It names a practice in which the people who live there are not only consulted but invited to set terms, in which the river and marsh are recognized as co participants in any decision, and in which those who have benefited most from the fuels that warmed the sea accept that their consent to present arrangements must be withdrawn.
Only then can the question shift from whether the vulnerable consented to their own submergence to whether the powerful are willing to consent to a different way of life. That question is sacramental because it reaches to the level of worship: what we love enough to protect at cost to ourselves, what we refuse to offer up, and whose continuance we are willing to treat as non negotiable.
Chapter Seventeen: Sex, Marriage, and Exhausted Intimacy: Sacramental Consent after Me Too
Begin with a bedroom that doubles as a courtroom and a confessional. Two people share a life, a mortgage, a bed, perhaps children. One of them says afterward that they did not really want to have sex that night, that they submitted out of fear of sulking or withdrawal or anger, that saying no would have cost them sleep, security, or peace. The other says that they thought the sigh and the lack of resistance counted as consent, that they never wanted to be that person, that everyone has obligations in a relationship. Outside this room, a workplace circulates training materials about harassment and affirmative consent. A church or synagogue or mosque teaches that marriage is a sacrament or covenant. A criminal code defines rape and domestic violence in ways that hinge on proof of non consent. Nowhere in this scene is there a stable place to stand and ask the question this book has been circling: what does it mean to say yes or no when intimacy is structured by inequality, exhaustion, and shared dependence, and when law, religion, and culture have for centuries naturalized unequal access to sex and care.
This chapter takes that room as its object. It argues that contemporary sexual consent discourse, while indispensable, cannot sustain the weight we have placed upon it in households, workplaces, and courts. It does so in explicit conversation with Catharine MacKinnon’s feminist theory of sexuality as a social construct of male dominance, Joseph Fischel’s critique of the consent paradigm, Aya Gruber’s account of carceral feminism, John Witte’s history of marriage as sacrament and contract, and Sarah Coakley’s attempt to think God, desire, and the self together. The chapter proceeds offensively at the level of its claim that much ordinary sexual life in late modernity is organized as tolerated non consent, and defensively at the level of method by refusing to romanticize either marriage or casual sex and by acknowledging the limits of law. Its constructive aim is to sketch what sacramental consent would require of institutions and communities that claim to bless or regulate sex, so that intimacy does not remain the one theater where the book’s ethic is politely ignored.
MacKinnon’s work provides the most uncompromising starting point. In essays such as “Sexuality, Pornography, and Method” and in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State she argues that sexuality as such has been constructed within a social order of male supremacy, such that the very distinction between sex and violence is already shaped by dominance. For MacKinnon, sex under male dominance is not a neutral domain into which coercion sometimes intrudes. It is a social sphere of male power in which forced sex is continuous with socially approved heterosexual intercourse. Consent in this setting does not mark a threshold between violation and mutual desire. It marks the moment when women tolerate the less costly of bad alternatives. As one recent commentator summarizes her view, the presence of consent does not make an interaction equal. It makes it tolerated.
MacKinnon’s thesis is offensive in the precise sense intended by this book. It offends liberal intuitions that treat consent as the central moral boundary and that imagine sex as a domain of private choice. Yet her insistence that sexual consent is structured by social dominance rather than by individual preference remains a necessary corrective whenever we are tempted to equate verbal agreement with justice. It is especially uncomfortable in the context of marriage and long term partnership, where a thick web of dependence, economic inequality, and emotional entanglement shapes what can be asked and refused.
At the same time, MacKinnon’s own proposals have been contested by feminists and queer theorists who worry that collapsing sex into domination risks denying the possibility of non coercive desire, criminalizing a wide range of practices that are desired by participants, and empowering punitive state apparatuses that disproportionately harm racialized and poor communities. It is here that Fischel’s Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice enters the conversation. Fischel does not deny that consent matters. He argues instead that the consent paradigm, which treats consent as the primary or even sole marker of sexual wrong, has been asked to do too much conceptual and legal work.
Fischel’s book turns the screw, as he puts it, by analyzing sexual practices at the margins of normative imagination, including relationships marked by large age differences, transactional sex, and other atypical scenes. Through these cases he shows that consent is insufficient, inapposite, and internally contradictory as an all purpose tool. It is insufficient because many encounters that are formally consensual remain exploitative or degrading. It is inapposite because some practices we rightly condemn, such as bestiality or incest, may involve consent as ordinarily defined but trouble deeper relational norms. It is contradictory because the law sometimes voids consent in contexts where we might want to respect sexual autonomy, for example between certain classes of adults, while overvaluing consent in contexts where it is implausible, for example in the presence of extreme economic dependence.
Fischel therefore calls for a politics of sexual justice that foregrounds autonomy, access, and the relational context of sex rather than treating consent as a talisman. This aligns closely with sacramental consent’s insistence that institutions must examine the conditions under which a yes is sought, the distribution of risk and benefit, and the histories that surround any scene. It exposes the way in which a narrow focus on securing a yes or no can serve powerful actors who wish to insulate themselves from critique while preserving structural inequalities.
If Fischel exposes the conceptual strain on consent, Gruber exposes the carceral consequences of attempts to enforce sexual justice through punitive law. In The Feminist War on Crime she documents how certain strands of antiviolence feminism in the United States embraced tough on crime policies, including mandatory arrest, no drop prosecution, and sentence enhancement, as tools against domestic and sexual violence. These policies sometimes produced short term gains in recognition of harms. They also entwined feminist movements with a criminal legal system that is historically hostile to women of color and that often punishes survivors themselves. Gruber shows how the celebration of convictions and long sentences can obscure the extent to which poor and racialized women are arrested as co offenders, lose housing or custody through the same enforcement that purports to protect them, and remain economically dependent on the very partners who are prosecuted.
From a sacramental perspective, this history matters because it reveals that not every attempt to make consent enforceable serves the vulnerable. When feminist politics treat the state as a priestly figure who can sanctify intimacy through punishment, they risk consecrating institutions that are themselves structured by racial and class domination. Gruber’s analysis makes it impossible to imagine sacramental consent as a simple extension of criminal law. It must instead be an ethic that asks which institutions are capable of bearing responsibilities for protection and repair and which are so compromised that their involvement deepens harm.
Parallel to these feminist and queer critiques, Witte’s From Sacrament to Contract traces how Christian and secular traditions have understood marriage and consent across the centuries. He shows that in medieval canon law marriage increasingly came to be defined by the mutual consent of the spouses rather than by parental arrangement or sexual consummation. The church insisted that a valid marriage required free consent, expressed in recognizable form, and that coercion could render a union void. Over time, however, this sacramental insistence on consent was absorbed into secular contract traditions that conceptualized marriage as a civil contract between two individuals.
Witte uncovers how different confessional traditions developed distinct models of marriage, some emphasizing indissolubility and sacramentality, others emphasizing covenant and companionship, still others leaning toward contractual liberal understandings. Across these models, consent retains a central role, yet this historical record also shows how often consent rhetoric coexisted with deeply unequal gender and economic structures. Wives could be legally subordinate, marital rape could be imagined as conceptually impossible, and divorce could be accessible only to the powerful, even when marriages were nominally grounded in mutual choice.
This history matters for sacramental consent because it reveals both the power and the limits of sacramental language itself. The church did, in some periods, defend the right of individuals to consent and to refuse parental arrangements. At the same time, it often sacralized unions in which women’s capacity to refuse sex or violence inside marriage was nonexistent. Sacrament without structural justice became a way of demanding endurance of harm in the name of holiness.
Coakley’s God, Sexuality, and the Self offers another theological resource and warning. She proposes that desire for God and sexual desire are not opposed domains but interwoven drives that can be purified through contemplative practice. In her account, prayer is an ascetical discipline in which persons learn to receive divine desire rather than to aggrandize their own will. She calls for a theology in which vulnerability, waiting, and receptivity are not signs of weakness but of mature relation to God. This retrieval of contemplative and erotic desire has inspired many who seek a non moralistic, non puritan account of sexuality.
Yet any retrieval of vulnerability and surrender in a world structured by gendered and racialized dominance must be handled with extreme care. When women, queer persons, and survivors of abuse are told that they should learn to surrender their wills in sexual and spiritual life, the risk of re sanctifying exploitation is evident. Sacramental consent therefore takes from Coakley the insight that desire is never purely under individual control and that prayer can remake what we want, but it insists that the disciplines of surrender must be practiced primarily by those with greater power, not imposed on those whose wills have already been overruled.
Synthesizing these strands, the chapter advances three claims. First, that much sexual consent discourse functions as a thin protective shell over structures of non consent in marriage and partnership. Second, that sacralized models of marriage and family have often reinforced those structures even where they speak of mutuality. Third, that sacramental consent requires a reordering of intimate life in which institutions shoulder the burden of creating conditions for genuine yes and no, rather than demanding that individuals somehow exercise free choice inside unaltered conditions.
The first claim is most evident in the phenomenon that many feminists and therapists describe as coerced acquiescence. A partner who is tired, depressed, or afraid of conflict agrees to sex that they do not want. They may do so repeatedly over years. Law rarely names this as assault, especially within marriage, and religious communities often describe it as part of mutual obligation. The person who asks may not recognize their behavior as coercive, because they never raise their voice or inflict physical harm. They have simply learned to interpret reluctance as negotiable and to treat endurance as a reasonable expectation.
Here MacKinnon’s insistence that consent often marks the less costly alternative is clarifying. The person who consents in order to avoid sulking or withdrawal is acting under structural pressure. Their dependence on the relationship for financial survival, immigration status, or emotional stability renders refusal costly. The moral question cannot be confined to whether they said no. It must include whether the environment makes refusal genuinely thinkable.
The second claim, concerning sacralized models of marriage, emerges when we read Witte’s history through MacKinnon and Fischel. Witte shows that Christian traditions often described marriage as a school of charity, a place where spouses learn to give themselves to one another. In practice, this school has frequently assigned the curriculum of sacrifice disproportionately to wives and to those whose social position is weaker. Coakley’s theology of desire can be read in continuity with this tradition. Without structural analysis, such teachings appear as invitations to holy self giving. In an unequal world they can become spiritual rationales for endurance of harm.
Fischel reminds us that sexual justice requires attention to status relations and material conditions, not only to inner dispositions. A theology of sacramental marriage that does not examine who can refuse sex without losing housing or facing violence becomes complicit in the very structures it claims to transcend.
The third claim is constructive. If sacramental consent is to have any meaning in intimate life, it must be embodied in institutional and communal practices that redistribute power, time, and intelligibility. Several illustrations can be sketched.
First, religious and civil marriage preparation could be redesigned as spaces where couples and communities confront concrete questions of power, labor, and refusal rather than focusing only on communication skills or romantic ideals. This would include explicit conversation about economic dependence, reproductive labor, childcare, and caregiving for elders, with attention to how these burdens have historically fallen along gendered and racialized lines. Communities could expect couples to articulate not only how they will share joy but how they will ensure that each partner can say no without catastrophic consequences. Sacramental consent here would mean that a community refuses to bless a union that depends on unacknowledged imbalance and exploitation.
Second, pastoral care, therapy, and peer support structures must become sites where people can disclose experiences of coerced acquiescence without being told that they are simply failing in duty. This requires that those who receive such disclosures be trained not to minimize harm because it does not fit legal definitions, and not to respond with immediate pressure to forgive or to reconcile. Gruber’s warning about the dangers of immediate recourse to the criminal legal system remains relevant. Sacramental consent requires alternative forms of accountability, including community processes where those who have coerced intimacy are confronted, given the chance to confess and change, and constrained where necessary, without assuming that incarceration is the primary tool.
Third, legal regimes around marriage, custody, and support must be evaluated in light of their impact on the practical possibility of refusal. If leaving a marriage means losing access to health care, immigration status, or one’s children, then consent inside that marriage is structurally compromised. Sacramental consent would align with feminist calls for social provision of health, housing, childcare, and income support, so that relationships do not function as the only path to survival. It would also align with queer and trans critiques of legal marriage regimes that confer basic benefits only on those who conform to certain relational forms. The point is not that the state should sacralize relationships. It is that the possibility of sacramental consent inside relationships depends on a wider ecology of support.
Fourth, communities must attend to how sexual ethics are taught to young people. Many consent education programs focus on slogans such as yes means yes, which, while necessary, risk conveying that the moral task is to secure a verbal formula. A sacramental curriculum would teach that asking for consent is an exercise of power and that the one who asks has a responsibility to ensure that the other can refuse without retaliation. It would include instruction on reading context, noticing patterns of exhaustion and fear, and understanding structural factors such as poverty, racism, and disability that shape ability to consent. It would also make space for desire, pleasure, and queer experiment, acknowledging Fischel’s refusal to let sexual politics collapse into carceral purification.
Finally, sacramental consent must reach into the interior life. The person who discovers that they have pressured a partner into unwanted sex needs more than denunciation. They need practices of examination and confession that allow them to face what they have done without self annihilation yet without evasion. Here Coakley’s contemplative emphasis on desire being reshaped through prayer can be reoriented toward the powerful. Those who inhabit positions of relative power in relationships can be taught to pray in ways that expose their desire to the other’s vulnerability, to ask what it would mean to be willing to forego sex when the other is depleted, and to see refraining not as deprivation but as participation in the other’s continuance.
None of these practices will erase the tangled histories and present realities of sexual harm. Sacramental consent is not a promise that anyone can arrive at a fully just sexual life. It is a refusal to let consent remain a ritual word that covers over inequality, especially in the places where law is least likely to reach and where religious and cultural narratives are most formative.
Return, then, to the bedroom that began the chapter. The next time one partner asks, they do so with explicit awareness of the other’s exhaustion. They say that they want mutual desire and that they would rather forego sex than receive a reluctant yes. The other, sensing that this is not a test, feels free to say no, or perhaps to say yes in a different register. Outside, the legal and economic environment still limits options, but perhaps now the household is connected to communities that will help them leave if harm escalates, to public benefits that make survival without this relationship imaginable, to liturgies that teach them that they are not obligated to endure abuse in the name of covenant.
Such scenes will always be fragile. They will fail as often as they succeed. Sacramental consent does not pretend otherwise. It simply insists that any theology or ethics that honors sacraments must attend as seriously to this room as to any altar. If consent is to be more than a dangerous fiction, it must be made costly for those who request it and protective of those who give it. In a world where sex is still too often the place where power hides in the language of love, that cost is the only sign that anything like sacrament remains.
Chapter Eighteen: Contracts, Covenants, and Institutional Vows: Sacramental Consent against the Market of Persons
Begin where most people meet law: at a desk or a screen, signing what they did not write. An employment offer with mandatory arbitration and noncompete clauses. A lease that shifts most repair obligations and many risks onto the tenant. A terms of service agreement that licenses a company to mine attention, harvest data, and alter the bargain at will. A student loan contract whose interest rates will outlive the degree. In each case, the scene is framed as a moment of choice. One can sign or walk away. The signature is read as consent, the contract as neutral form, the institution as a party among others.
This chapter treats that scene as a theological problem. It argues that contemporary contract practice and corporate governance function as vast engines for producing formal consent under structural non consent, and that any ethic of sacramental consent must therefore reckon with the market’s attempt to turn persons into contract bearers and corporations into fictional persons worthy of deference. The argument is offensive because it names ordinary contract law, not only extreme exploitation, as a continuing theater of sacrificial ordering. It is defensive because it works with careful legal and philosophical sources, including Margaret Jane Radin on market inalienability and boilerplate, Carole Pateman and Charles Mills on the sexual and racial contracts, Iris Marion Young on structural injustice, Roberto Unger on institutional imagination, and Lynn Stout on the myth of shareholder value.
The aim is not to discard contracts as such. People will continue to need ways of specifying obligations and enforcing promises. The aim is to expose how the grammar of contract has been conscripted into a theology of autonomy that masks deep asymmetries of power, and to sketch what it would mean for institutions to bind themselves by sacramental vows rather than by exploitable forms.
Radin’s work on market inalienability and boilerplate provides a precise entry point. In Contested Commodities and Boilerplate she argues that some things ought not to be treated as market goods because their sale erodes the conditions of personhood and community, and that boilerplate contracts have become a device for stripping people of legal rights without meaningful consent. She distinguishes between incomplete commodification, where certain dimensions of a good or relation remain outside market logic, and full commodification, where everything about that relation is open to trade. For example, selling one’s labor for a time is different from selling one’s political vote or parental rights, because the latter fundamentally transform the person’s status as a citizen or a caregiver.
Boilerplate contracts, in Radin’s account, make a mockery of consent. Standard form agreements, often not read and not realistically negotiable, include clauses that waive rights to jury trial, class actions, or substantive remedies, and that authorize unilateral changes in terms. Courts often enforce these terms under the fiction that signers have assented. Radin calls this phenomenon rights deletion by contract, arguing that it undermines the rule of law by allowing private actors to hollow out public guarantees in the name of freedom of contract.
From the standpoint of sacramental consent, boilerplate looks like a liturgy of dispossession. Institutions write elaborate texts that they never expect their counterparties to absorb, require gestures of assent as a condition of participation in basic life spheres, and then treat these gestures as morally legitimating. The institution confects consent as an appearance, much as earlier chapters described welfare systems and platforms confecting consent from exposure and exhaustion. The offense lies not only in particular unfair clauses but in the entire theatricality of the scene.
Pateman and Mills press the critique deeper by insisting that the very form of contract in liberal theory has been built on prior, submerged contracts that organize sex and race. Pateman’s The Sexual Contract argues that classic social contract narratives, from Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau, purport to describe the origins of political society in a pact among free and equal men. In reality, she claims, these stories mask an underlying sexual contract through which men secure rights of access to women’s bodies and labor. Marriage, prostitution, and wage labor become forms of property in the person, where consent is invoked to legitimize domination. Mills, in The Racial Contract, similarly argues that the modern social contract presupposes a racial contract that divides persons into fully human contractors and sub persons whose lives and lands can be appropriated.
In their combined view, contract law and contract rhetoric are not neutral tools that can be used for good or ill. They grew inside gendered and racialized orders that assigned full contractual capacity to some while treating others as objects or semi subjects of agreement. Historically, the enslaved could not contract but could be contracted over; married women were often constrained in their contractual capacity; colonized peoples were brought under treaties that erased their sovereignty. The modern language of contract as free exchange among equals thus rests on centuries in which many were coerced into arrangements that were then described as consensual once formal bondage was abolished.
Sacramental consent cannot simply graft new pieties onto this structure. If contracts are to be used at all, their history as vehicles of sexual and racial ordering must be acknowledged. Institutions that rely on contract to govern work, housing, and services should treat this history as part of their own examination of conscience rather than as a distant past. To ask whether consent is present in a particular contract is not only to ask whether the individual understood the terms. It is to ask whether the arrangement reproduces patterns of property in the person that Pateman and Mills exposed: contracts that assume one party’s life and labor are more expendable than the other’s.
Young’s account of structural injustice helps explain why individualistic notions of contract cannot handle these realities. In Responsibility for Justice she argues that many harms are produced not by isolated wrongdoers but by the confluence of countless ordinary actions within unjust structures. Structural injustice arises when social processes place some at systematic disadvantage and others in positions of privilege, even if no one actor intends this outcome. Responsibility in such cases is shared and forward looking; it consists less in assigning blame than in assessing one’s position within a structural process and acting with others to transform it.
Contract scenes, in Young’s framework, are often points of structural reproduction. An employer who uses standard nonnegotiable forms may not personally intend exploitation, yet participates in a labor market that renders refusal costly for workers. A landlord may treat their lease as a neutral instrument while participating in housing markets that have been racially segregated and financially extractive for decades. Structural injustice means that consent cannot be assessed transaction by transaction, as if each stood outside history. Sacramental consent, therefore, demands institutions that are capable of seeing their contracts as sites where structural patterns are either reinforced or disrupted, and that accept responsibility for redesigning these arrangements even when the law would allow them to do otherwise.
Unger’s work on institutional imagination pushes this argument toward constructive possibility. Throughout his career, including in False Necessity, he has rejected the idea that existing market and democratic institutions are natural or inevitable. He describes them as frozen conflicts that embody particular compromises, and he calls for empowered democracy in which ordinary people participate in remaking institutional arrangements. For Unger, contracts can be sites of institutional experimentation, not only legal instruments. Cooperative firms, solidaristic enterprises, and alternative property regimes exemplify this.
Sacramental consent shares Unger’s refusal of false necessity. It insists that institutions are not doomed to rely on contracts that treat persons as interchangeable bearers of obligations. Instead, institutions can make vows that redefine what it means to hire, to rent, to lend, to insure. These vows would not simply add spiritual language to standard terms but would commit institutions to concrete constraints and redistributions: for instance, pledging never to use mandatory arbitration to silence harassment claims, never to condition essential services on rights waivers, never to profit from products that depend on deceptive or coercive contract practices. The vow is sacramental when it costs the institution economically and reputationally, signaling that reverence for persons and communities is not secondary to returns.
At this point the chapter must confront corporate governance itself. Corporations are among the primary actors who deploy contracts and claim fictional personhood. Stout’s The Shareholder Value Myth is decisive here. She argues that the widely repeated notion that corporations are legally bound to maximize shareholder value is neither doctrinally accurate nor ethically defensible. Corporate law in the United States generally grants directors broad discretion to manage the firm in its best interests, which may include attention to workers, customers, and communities. The obsession with shareholder value arose from ideological shifts in finance and economics rather than from legal compulsion.
Stout warns that this ideology incentivizes managers to pursue short term stock price gains at the expense of long term stability, environmental health, and worker welfare. In the context of sacramental consent, the myth of shareholder primacy functions as a kind of anti liturgy. It invites executives to offer every other stakeholder on the altar of price, then comforts them with the story that they had no choice. It also distorts contract practice, since contracts with workers, suppliers, and customers are evaluated primarily in terms of how they serve shareholder enrichment rather than mutual flourishing.
If corporations are going to speak of purpose, as many now do in environmental, social, and governance statements, then sacramental consent demands that they treat those statements as vows rather than as marketing. To name a purpose of advancing human well being while maintaining contract practices that exploit precarious workers, obscure risks, and evade accountability is to profane sacramental language. Conversely, a firm that publicly binds itself not to profit from contracts that depend on misrepresentation, rights waivers, or displacement of harm onto marginalized communities begins to approximate sacramental posture, even if imperfectly.
A concrete example helps. Consider the use of nondisclosure agreements in settlements around workplace harassment and discrimination. Legal scholarship and investigative reporting have documented how NDAs have been used to silence survivors while allowing serial offenders and complicit institutions to avoid public scrutiny. Formally, these agreements are consensual; parties sign in exchange for money or other relief. Substantively, they often reflect enormous power imbalances and contribute to structural injustice by hiding patterns of harm. A sacramental institution, once confronted with this analysis, would vow not to use NDAs in ways that prevent survivors from speaking about their own experiences, even if the law would allow it. It would accept the risk of reputational damage as part of its penance and its commitment to communal safety.
Another example arises in consumer finance. Payday lending contracts frequently include arbitration clauses, steep interest rates, and automatic rollovers that trap borrowers in cycles of debt. Courts may enforce these contracts as products of choice. Sacramental consent would name them as contracts in which the appearance of consent is generated under conditions of desperation. An institution committed to sacramental practice could not participate in such lending, nor could it purchase debt generated under such terms. It would seek alternative forms of credit and mutual aid that do not depend on the borrower’s structural vulnerability.
The chapter now turns from critique to the architecture of vows. What might it mean for institutions to rewrite their own contractual practice in light of sacramental consent. Several dimensions can be named, without pretending to exhaust them.
First, sacramental institutions would treat certain rights and relationships as non alienable, in Radin’s sense. They would refuse to enforce or benefit from contracts that require waiving the right to seek redress for bodily harm, to organize collectively at work, to leave abusive relationships, or to speak about injustice. They would reject models of employment that claim ownership over employees’ intellectual and bodily capacities beyond what is reasonably required for the work. They would design leases that protect tenants from arbitrary eviction and from hidden clauses that shift unreasonable repair costs onto them. The non alienable here are not abstractions; they are the concrete conditions under which persons can act as agents rather than as instruments.
Second, sacramental institutions would commit to transparency in contract drafting, not only in the thin sense of plain language but in the thick sense of sharing their own constraints, incentives, and risks. In an employment contract, for instance, this might mean disclosing not only duties and wages but also salary bands, promotion criteria, and grievance procedures. In a data processing contract, it would mean stating clearly what secondary uses of data are foreseen, what partners are involved, and how individuals and communities can object. This transparency aligns with Onora O Neill’s insistence that trustworthiness requires institutions to limit deception and manipulation, not merely to secure signatures.
Third, sacramental institutions would embed structural checks into their governance so that those most affected by contractual terms have a voice in designing them. This might include worker councils with veto power over certain labor contract provisions, tenant unions with standing in landlord policy making, or community boards that review data sharing agreements involving local populations. Here Young’s model of shared responsibility and Unger’s vision of empowered democracy converge. Consent becomes sacramental when it is collectively deliberated rather than extracted from isolated individuals under pressure.
Fourth, sacramental institutions would establish formal practices of review, confession, and amendment for their contractual regimes. They would periodically audit their contracts for patterns of harm, exclusion, and opacity, and would invite testimony from those bound by them. Where harm is identified, they would revise terms retroactively where possible, offer restitution, and publicly acknowledge how their prior arrangements failed sacramental standards. This echoes earlier chapters on confession in data governance and climate, but here it is applied to the grain of legal form.
It is important to notice that none of these practices can be required by sacramental language alone. They demand legal change, collective organizing, and shifts in professional cultures. Lawyers who draft contracts, for instance, would need to repurpose their skills from maximizing advantage for the already powerful toward crafting instruments that are enforceable yet reverent. Corporate boards would need to accept that certain profitable practices are off limits as a matter of vow, not only regulation. Regulators and judges would need to recognize that the fiction of fully informed consent is untenable in many contexts and would need to recalibrate doctrines of unconscionability and adhesion accordingly.
At the limit, sacramental consent calls contract and corporation themselves into question. There will be spheres where the logic of exchange, even with vows attached, cannot do justice to the relations involved. The earlier chapters on sex, borders, and climate suggested as much. There are forms of care, of knowledge, of land relation, and of political belonging that are harmed by being rendered contractual. In those domains, sacramental ethics point toward covenant, commons, and gift rather than bargain. Covenants, in this sense, are not simply religious promises. They are mutual commitments that are not fully specifiable in advance, oriented toward shared flourishing rather than precise equivalence. Commons are shared resources governed by agreed rules, as Elinor Ostrom’s work has shown, where access is balanced with care and exclusion rules serve sustainability rather than private accumulation. Gifts, in Marcel Mauss’s sense, create obligations of reciprocity that are social rather than contractual, and they can structure economies of mutual aid that resist commodification.
Sacramental consent does not abolish contract but locates it within a larger ecology of obligation where covenant, commons, and gift temper its reach. Institutions that make vows about when they will refuse to contract, when they will return value without requiring exchange, and when they will treat resources as shared rather than as assets to be monetized, begin to practice this ecology. They accept that their own continuance depends on the continuance of others and of more than human worlds, not on contracts alone.
Return finally to the desk and the screen. The person signing a standard form contract today often does so with a sense of inevitability. They need the job, the housing, the service. Their consent is formal but not free. The project of sacramental consent is not to scold them for signing. It is to indict the institutions that have made signing under such conditions morally acceptable and legally sufficient. It is to call those institutions to make vows that reshape their use of law, to confess where they have treated persons as material to be bound, and to accept that some liberties to exploit must be surrendered if any consent is to be worth the word.
In the chapters that follow, as the book moves toward its conclusion, the argument will need to gather these threads: welfare systems that automate eligibility, platforms that regulate attention, borders that decide who may move, climate regimes that designate sacrifice zones, households and marriages where intimacy is negotiated under exhaustion, and now contracts and corporations that organize much of the rest. Sacramental consent will stand or fall on whether it can hold together across these theaters, demanding from institutions not only new forms but new vows, and from persons not only sharper awareness but shared refusal to sanctify what harms.
Chapter Nineteen: Universities, Experiments, and the Consent to be Formed
Begin in two rooms that rarely speak to each other, although they inhabit the same campus and sometimes the same hallway. In the first room, a research coordinator places a stapled consent form in front of a prospective participant. The document explains that this is a randomized controlled trial, that some people will receive a new drug and others a placebo, that there are known side effects and unknown risks, that participation is voluntary, that refusal will not affect access to usual care. The coordinator points to the signature line. In the second room, a professor hands out a syllabus. On the first page is a statement that continued enrollment indicates acceptance of course policies, that attendance and participation count toward the grade, that student work may be used for research on learning outcomes, that the classroom is a space for rigorous debate where some material may be disturbing. There is no signature line, yet everyone understands that by remaining, they have effectively agreed. Across the campus, an institutional review board meets to decide whether the first scene is ethical. No committee is convened to judge the second.
This chapter treats both scenes as instances of consent to being formed, and it argues that the institutions charged with research and education routinely treat that consent as a thin formality rather than as a sacramental responsibility. The argument proceeds offensively by naming universities and research hospitals among the primary sites where persons are rendered into material for experiments and curricula, often under conditions of deep inequality and historical distrust. It proceeds defensively by honoring the genuine attempts that bioethics and critical pedagogy have made to repair these practices, while insisting that informed consent and classroom freedom, as commonly imagined, are structurally insufficient. The constructive aim is to sketch what sacramental consent would require of epistemic institutions that claim to seek truth, cure, and formation.
The modern doctrine of informed consent in research is often traced, quite properly, to scandal and remorse. The Tuskegee syphilis study, conducted by the United States Public Health Service from 1932 until its exposure in 1972, enrolled hundreds of poor Black men under false pretenses, withheld known effective treatment for decades, and treated their bodies as instruments for observing the natural course of disease. The public outcry that followed helped precipitate the National Research Act and the creation of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which issued the Belmont Report in 1978. Belmont articulated three basic principles for research ethics: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, with informed consent presented as the primary application of respect for persons. Ruth Faden and Tom Beauchamp’s A History and Theory of Informed Consent offered a conceptual and historical account of this practice, treating it as both a legal doctrine and an ethical ideal rooted in respect for autonomy.
Ezekiel Emanuel and collaborators later argued that many believe informed consent makes research ethical, but in fact consent is neither necessary nor sufficient as a guarantor of justice. Trials can be exploitative even when participants sign forms, for example when risks and benefits are distributed unfairly across social groups or when alternative care is unavailable. Conversely, some emergency research can be ethical even without prior consent, provided that risks are minimized and later disclosure is robust. From the beginning, then, contemporary research ethics acknowledged that consent alone could not carry the moral weight of entire institutional arrangements.
Sacramental consent enters this terrain with both gratitude and suspicion. Gratitude, because without the painfully won doctrine of informed consent there would be little formal recognition that subjects are not mere material. Suspicion, because informed consent as currently practiced often functions as an institutional shield rather than as a shared vow. The consent conversation becomes a ritual through which the researcher and the institution reassure themselves that responsibility has been discharged, even when participants do not understand what is being asked or cannot realistically refuse. In a learning health system, where clinical care and research blend, the line between therapeutic intervention and data extraction can become so blurred that consent is more a matter of institutional paperwork than of relational discernment, a fact that Faden herself has acknowledged in later work on ethical frameworks for such systems.
University classrooms participate in a similar tension. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed describes what he calls the banking concept of education, in which teachers deposit information into passive students whose task is to receive, memorize, and repeat. This model treats students as objects of instruction rather than subjects of liberation, and it reproduces oppressive social relations under the guise of neutral pedagogy. Freire proposes a dialogical pedagogy where teachers and students co investigate reality, make oppression and its causes objects of reflection, and engage together in praxis aimed at transformation.
Bell hooks, drawing on Freire and Black feminist thought, describes education as the practice of freedom. In Teaching to Transgress she narrates her own movement from segregated Black schools where education was a form of collective struggle against racism into predominantly white institutions where learning no longer felt emancipatory but disciplinary. For hooks, a classroom that honors freedom requires teachers who are willing to transgress racial, gendered, and class boundaries, to risk conflict and discomfort, and to see students as whole people whose histories and bodies matter. This is an ethical, not only a technical, vision of teaching, and it presupposes some notion of consent that is deeper than enrollment.
Gert Biesta adds that education serves at least three purposes: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. Qualification concerns the acquisition of knowledge and skills; socialization concerns insertion into existing orders; subjectification concerns the emergence of a person who can stand in relation to these orders, sometimes affirming, sometimes resisting. For Biesta, education that focuses exclusively on measurable qualifications neglects the risk inherent in subjectification, where the student appears as someone irreducible to institutional aims. He names this risk beautiful, precisely because it resists reduction to machine like processes and keeps education human.
Research ethics and critical pedagogy, read together, thus already recognize that institutions can harm those they form, that consent is not simply a matter of signatures, and that authentic formation involves risk, dialogue, and structural change. Sacramental consent takes these insights one step further. It insists that the production of knowledge and the formation of subjects are liturgical activities in the broad sense: they organize attention, distribute suffering, and shape what is revered. Experiments and classrooms are forms of worship, whether or not they invoke God. The question is therefore not simply whether individuals have agreed to take part, but what is being worshipped when they do.
Here Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice becomes indispensable. She defines epistemic injustice as a distinct kind of wrong in which someone is harmed specifically in their capacity as a knower. She identifies testimonial injustice, where prejudice makes a hearer give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker, and hermeneutical injustice, where structural identity based disadvantage leaves someone without the interpretive resources to make sense of their experiences.
Universities and research institutions are prime producers of both forms. When Black communities express distrust of medical research after Tuskegee, their testimony can be pathologized as irrational rather than recognized as historically grounded knowledge. When Indigenous peoples encounter scientific narratives that deny the validity of their cosmologies, they face hermeneutical injustice, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith has argued in Decolonizing Methodologies. Research is not only a set of methods; it is a regime of truth that organizes whose knowing counts. Consent forms that purport to secure willingness to participate in such regimes without addressing their epistemic violence do not deserve the name.
From a sacramental perspective, then, consent in universities and research hospitals involves at least three layers. First, the familiar layer of bodily and cognitive risk: will this intervention, trial, or curriculum harm me. Second, the layer of epistemic risk: will this institution misrecognize me as a knower, discount my testimony, or erase my ways of making sense. Third, the layer of worship: will this institution treat my body, data, or attention as an offering to deities of progress, ranking, and prestige, or as part of a shared practice of reverence for finite and vulnerable life.
The first layer has rightly occupied bioethics. The Belmont Report’s emphasis on respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, and Faden and Beauchamp’s detailed account of informed consent, have shaped a regulatory environment in which many forms of overt exploitation are at least formally proscribed. The second and third layers have received less sustained institutional attention, although they animate work by Smith, Fricker, hooks, and Freire. Sacramental consent insists that all three layers must be engaged at once if consent is to be more than a paper ritual.
Consider a first concrete theater: the recruitment of participants from communities who have been made vulnerable by poverty, racism, and colonial dispossession. A research team offers small stipends and access to some level of care in exchange for participation in a study that carries real risk and uncertain benefit. Legally, informed consent is obtained. Ethically, however, sacramental consent asks whether the study is structured so that those who already bear disproportionate burden of illness and neglect are being invited once again to bear the burden of risk for the sake of science and institutional prestige. Belmont’s principle of justice warns against such patterns, yet global and domestic research continues to rely heavily on populations with few alternatives, including the uninsured, prisoners, and residents of the global South.
Sacramental consent does not claim that such research is always forbidden. It demands that institutions treat the decision to invite participation from such communities as a matter for communal discernment and vow. This would involve public acknowledgment of historical abuses like Tuskegee, open discussion with community leaders about risks, benefits, and governance, and shared authority over data, results, and any profits. It would entail commitments that materially cost the institution: for example, long term investment in local health infrastructure rather than short term study specific clinics, and guarantees that participants and their communities will have priority access to any successful interventions. Only when such vows are made and kept can consent move toward sacramental integrity.
A second theater is the ordinary classroom. Students consent to be graded, evaluated, and formed within curricula that they did not design. Many are saddled with debt that will shape the rest of their lives. Their ability to refuse assignments, readings, or pedagogical practices is limited. Freire and hooks remind us that the question is not whether students consent to receive information but whether they are invited into dialogue about how their formation is structured, and whether the classroom acknowledges the racial, gendered, and economic dynamics that shape whose voices are heard.
Biesta’s language of subjectification clarifies that there is always an irreducible risk in education: the student may emerge as someone who does not fit institutional expectations, who questions the curriculum itself, who resists being made into human capital. Many contemporary universities tacitly treat this risk as a problem to be managed. Learning outcomes, standardized assessments, and data driven evaluation reduce education to qualification and socialization, sidelining the disruptive emergence of subjects. When students consent to study under such regimes, they are rarely told that the institution has structured their formation toward employability and compliance rather than toward unpredictable subjecthood.
Sacramental consent in education would mean that institutions confess this orientation and allow it to be contested. Syllabi and program descriptions would not only list content and competencies. They would name the implicit images of the human that underwrite them: the entrepreneurial self, the employable graduate, the flexible knowledge worker. They would make explicit space for collective critique of these images, drawing on traditions that imagine education as liberation, as hooks and Freire do, and as the cultivation of responsibility for justice, as Young and others argue.
Moreover, sacramental consent would treat students not only as individual consumers of education but as members of communities that have historically suffered epistemic injustice. When Indigenous students enter disciplines whose methods have been used to delegitimize their peoples’ knowledge, the institution owes more than an invitation to office hours. Smith’s call to decolonize methodologies means that the research university must interrogate the ways in which its disciplines, archives, and peer review systems have functioned as instruments of imperial power, and must open institutional space for Indigenous epistemologies to shape research agendas, data practices, and curricular canons. Students’ consent to be formed in such disciplines is morally intelligible only if the institution is simultaneously engaged in this work of decolonization.
The third theater where sacramental consent must intervene is the research relationship itself, especially when the line between participant and learner blurs. Many universities now present themselves as learning health systems and data driven campuses, where every interaction, from library use to online course platforms, becomes a potential data point for research on behavior and learning. Faden and colleagues have argued that such systems require new ethical frameworks, since the traditional distinction between research and care no longer maps cleanly onto practice. If every patient is always a potential research subject and every student a potential data source, then informed consent as a discrete event cannot handle the ongoing character of participation.
Sacramental consent responds by insisting on governance forms in which those whose lives are continuously mined for data participate in decisions about what questions are asked, what risks are taken, and what benefits are sought. It would require that learning analytics, for example, be designed and overseen by bodies that include students and staff, not only administrators and vendors. It would refuse models in which data are treated as a free resource that institutions may monetize or share without deliberate communal discernment. Consent becomes a matter of shared vow: a commitment by the institution to treat data as relational rather than as extractive, to halt research practices that reproduce injustice even when they promise scientific gain, and to prioritize the flourishing of those who are most vulnerable to harm.
Throughout these theaters, the point is not to discard written consent or to romanticize informal trust. Consent forms, when genuinely understood and accompanied by ongoing dialogue, can be instruments of respect. What sacramental consent refuses is the belief that a signed document or an enrolled student can absolve institutions of the need to ask three harder questions: who bears risk, who gains from this knowledge, and what is being worshipped here.
If the answer to the first question is that those who have historically borne the harms of research and schooling continue to do so, if the answer to the second is that prestige, ranking, and profit accrue primarily to those already powerful, and if the answer to the third is that efficiency, growth, and competitive advantage are the primary objects of reverence, then no amount of formal consent can sanctify the arrangement. Sacramental consent would instead push institutions toward practices of confession, restitution, and redesign, in which they accept limits on their own knowledge seeking for the sake of justice.
The chapter concludes, not with a protocol, but with an image. Imagine a research university that begins each academic year with a liturgy not of self celebration but of confession. It remembers Tuskegee and every other instance where bodies were used as material without respect. It names the disciplines that have been enlisted in dispossession and the classrooms that have silenced testimony. It then renews a series of vows: never to conduct research on a community without its governance, never to treat data as property rather than relation, never to expel from the classroom the student who refuses to accept the institution’s image of the good life. These vows are written into policies, contracts, and budgets. They cost money and prestige. They reshape what research grants are pursued and what curricula are required.
In such a place, to consent to be formed or to participate in research would be to enter a shared practice of attention, not a marketplace of extraction. That is the horizon to which sacramental consent gestures for universities and laboratories: not purity, which is impossible, but a different kind of worship, one in which knowledge is sought under constraint, with reverence for the fragility and opacity of those who make it possible.
Chapter Twenty: Churches, Sacraments, and Institutional Betrayal: Consent inside Communities that Name God
Begin with a door that many people still cross believing they will be safer on the inside than on the street. A child arrives for catechism or youth group because their parents trust the priest, the elder, the imam, the rabbi. An undocumented worker comes to a parish office or mosque charity committee because the state has made every other doorway dangerous. A woman arrives at a pastor’s study carrying the story of domestic violence, looking for counsel and refuge. Each has been taught that this building houses sacraments or their analogues, that the people who preside here speak for God or at least for a tradition of holiness. None have signed a consent form. Yet they are all consenting to be formed, counseled, bound, and sometimes exposed in the name of that holiness.
This chapter argues that religious institutions are among the most charged and dangerous sites of consent on earth because they claim to mediate divine presence while operating as human bureaucracies with long histories of betrayal. It proceeds offensively by naming clerical sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, and sacramental exclusion as structures of non consent, not as exceptional failures. It proceeds defensively by drawing on survivor accounts, official inquiries, and theological voices who have tried to think power, sacrament, and abuse together, including Marie Keenan, the John Jay College report, the Irish Ryan and Murphy reports, the French Sauvé commission, Lisa Oakley on spiritual abuse, Rowan Williams on power, Willie James Jennings on the Christian imagination, Delores Williams on surrogacy and sacrifice, and James Cone and womanist theologians on ecclesial complicity in racial terror. It asks what sacramental consent would require of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and religious communities that speak of covenant, grace, and reverence while wielding considerable power over bodies, stories, and futures.
The scale of clerical sexual abuse within Christian churches, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, has been documented in painful empirical detail. The John Jay College of Criminal Justice study commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops found that between nineteen fifty and two thousand two, four thousand three hundred ninety two diocesan priests and deacons in the United States had credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors, involving at least ten thousand six hundred sixty seven individual victims. The Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, known as the Ryan report, and the Murphy report on the Dublin archdiocese described systemic physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in religious run institutions and patterns of concealment by church authorities. The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church in France, chaired by Jean Marc Sauvé, estimated in two thousand twenty one that over two hundred thousand minors had been abused by priests and religious in France since nineteen fifty, with additional abuse by lay employees bringing the total toward three hundred thousand.
Keenan’s Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church analyzes these crimes not simply as the work of individual pathological clergy but as products of clerical culture, institutional secrecy, and patterns of denial and spiritual manipulation. Survivors report, again and again, that their abuse was framed by perpetrators as special spiritual intimacy, as forgiveness, as love, sometimes even as a sacramental gift. They describe attempting to disclose abuse to superiors or family members and being silenced in the name of protecting the church’s reputation or preserving vocations. In many accounts, the deepest wound is not only the abuse itself but the betrayal of trust and the use of theological language to justify and conceal it.
From the vantage point of sacramental consent, these episodes reveal a particularly intense form of what trauma scholars call institutional betrayal. Jennifer Freyd uses that term to describe harm that occurs within institutions that people depend on, such as universities or the military, and the additional trauma produced when those institutions fail to respond appropriately. In the case of churches, the betrayal is intensified by claims of divine mandate and sacramental power. When a priest who has presided at a child’s baptism or first communion then abuses that child, the sacramental signs that were meant to signify divine welcome become entangled in predation. When church leaders respond to disclosure with disbelief or minimization, they not only deny justice but also deform the victim’s relationship to God and self, often for decades.
Oakley and Justin Humphreys have argued that spiritual abuse should be recognized as a distinct category of harm. In their definition, spiritual abuse involves coercion, control, manipulation, and domination in a religious context, including misuse of scripture, claims of divine authority, demands for absolute obedience, and shaming practices that damage a person’s spiritual life and psychological wellbeing. Survivors of spiritual abuse describe pastors or leaders who demand disclosure of intimate details, dictate major life decisions, ostracize dissenters, and equate disagreement with rebellion against God. While not always accompanied by sexual violation, spiritual abuse often prepares the ground for it by eroding boundaries and normalizing asymmetrical authority.
Theologically, these patterns expose a profound contradiction. Sacraments are meant to be signs and instruments of grace, practices in which the community remembers its dependence on God and its responsibility to one another. The Eucharist, baptism, the reading of scripture, the call to prayer, the shared meal in a synagogue, the recitation of the Shahada, the offerings in a temple, all involve forms of consent. People come forward, speak words, receive bread and wine or water or blessing, offer themselves in prayer. Yet when sacramental practices are embedded in institutions that protect abusers and silence the harmed, consent becomes theater. The community pretends to say yes to God while refusing to hear the no of those who have been crushed in its midst.
Jennings’s The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race shows that this contradiction is not new. He traces how European Christian mission entangled sacrament, land seizure, and racial formation, producing communities where baptism and Eucharist were administered in societies built on slavery and colonization. The colonial church preached union in Christ while maintaining structures in which Black and Indigenous peoples’ bodies were owned and violated. Sacramental life proceeded as if this were normal. In that world, consent to baptism did not mean consent to just belonging; it often meant consent to deeper incorporation into violent orders, or more precisely, a lack of choice dressed in sacramental language.
Cone and womanist theologians such as Delores Williams and Kelly Brown Douglas have insisted that Black bodies, especially Black women’s bodies, have been treated as surrogates and sacrificial offerings in Christian societies, used to sustain white comfort in the name of redemption. Williams’s critique of atonement imagery that glorifies suffering and surrogacy is directly relevant. In Sisters in the Wilderness she argues that the life of Hagar, the enslaved Egyptian woman in Genesis, reveals a pattern of surrogacy in which Black women are expected to bear children, labor, and suffering for others’ benefit. When churches treat the endurance of abuse by women and children as a site of sanctifying sacrifice, they perpetuate this pattern under sacramental and pastoral language.
These theologies make clear that sacramental consent cannot be confined to individual piety. It must address the institutional histories in which sacraments are embedded. A survivor’s consent to receive communion in a parish with a history of abuse is not morally equivalent to a consent in a community that has confronted such history and restructured its life. A queer person’s consent to remain in a congregation that teaches their desire is disordered cannot be equated with a consent to formation in a community that honors their dignity. The same external rituals can participate in very different economies of consent and non consent.
Rowan Williams has repeatedly reflected on power and vulnerability in Christian life. In essays such as “The Body’s Grace” he argues that sexual ethics should be oriented around the possibility that the body of the other can become a place where one recognizes the gracious, unpossessive love of God, which requires a relinquishing of control and a refusal to treat the other as an instrument. In his work on church and politics he has emphasized that the church exercises power legitimately only when it makes room for the voice of the marginal and the wounded, allowing them to shape the community’s self understanding. These lines converge in an image of sacramental life in which consent is central, because grace cannot be forced, and institutional authority must be answerable to those who have suffered under it.
If sacramental consent is to become more than rhetoric inside religious institutions, several dimensions of ecclesial life must be reimagined.
First, governance. The major abuse reports converge on a pattern: concentration of decision making in small clerical elites, lack of lay participation, and near absence of survivor voice. The Murphy report in Ireland described a culture of secrecy, internal loyalty, and deference to bishops that prioritized the protection of the institution over the safety of children. The Sauvé commission similarly identified systemic failures of reporting, supervision, and accountability. Sacramental consent would demand governance structures in which those most at risk and those already harmed have decisive roles. This includes survivor advisory councils with real authority, lay and especially women’s participation in oversight, transparent publication of abuse cases, and external audits. Such reforms are not optional decor; they are the institutional form of consent to being held accountable by those whom the institution claims to serve.
Second, formation and discipline of leaders. Many seminaries and religious training programs have only recently begun to integrate trauma awareness, power analysis, and anti abuse training into their curricula. Keenan’s research indicates that clericalism, entitlement, and an idealized image of priestly status contribute to abusive dynamics. Sacramental consent would require that candidates for ministry be formed in practices of shared decision making, financial transparency, and vulnerability to critique. It would also require robust mechanisms for removal from office and laicization or equivalent when harm is done, with the community’s safety treated as prior to institutional reputation.
Third, pastoral care and confession. In many traditions, the seal of confession or the confidentiality of pastoral counseling has been invoked to justify silence about abuse disclosures. While there are real theological commitments at stake, sacramental consent demands that churches distinguish clearly between genuine penitential practice and the protection of ongoing harm. Some jurisdictions have already moved to require clergy to report child abuse even when disclosed in confessional contexts, a move that has sparked debate about religious freedom. A sacramental ethic would press churches to develop internal practices in which confessors and counselors are trained to accompany penitents toward turning themselves in where criminal harm has been done, and in which survivors are always free to disclose and seek external protection without being told that forgiveness demands silence.
Fourth, teaching about suffering and obedience. As Williams, Williams, and Douglas all remind us from different angles, Christian and other religious narratives of sacrifice can easily be turned against the vulnerable. Sermons and catechesis that present submission to authority, endurance of unjust treatment, or silence in the face of harm as holy can groom communities to accept abuse as spiritual formation. Sacramental consent would require rewiring homiletic and catechetical traditions so that obedience is never preached without attention to the character of the authority one obeys, and suffering is never praised without naming the structures that inflict it. The cross cannot be presented as divine endorsement of victimization. Instead, it must be read with Williams and Cone as God’s judgment on systems that crucify the innocent and God’s solidarity with those who refuse to consent to their own erasure.
Fifth, liturgical practice itself. Sacraments are enacted with bodies in shared space. For abuse survivors, proximity, touch, and ritual language can be both healing and retraumatizing. Communities that take sacramental consent seriously will adjust their liturgies accordingly. This may include inviting people to receive communion in ways that do not require kneeling before a cleric, offering alternative signs of peace that do not assume comfort with touch, providing trauma informed blessings that recognize and honor boundaries, and building in moments where congregants can opt out of certain actions without stigma. Consent here is not primarily about legal protection. It is about creating an ecclesial atmosphere in which the body is not taken for granted as available.
Sacramental consent also entails honest reckoning with exclusion. Many religious communities formally exclude women, queer people, divorced people, or adherents of other faiths from full sacramental participation. Those who remain often do so because their spiritual lives are bound up with a tradition that does not fully recognize them. Their continued presence is sometimes interpreted by institutional leaders as consent to the exclusionary system itself. A sacramental ethic would resist this inference. It would insist that religious institutions name frankly where they are not prepared to change, and that they refuse to treat the commitment of marginalized members as retroactive consent to harm. At minimum, this would require listening seriously to the testimonies of those who stay on the edge, not as problem cases but as bearers of knowledge about what the community’s sacraments mean under contested conditions.
There is also the question of God. Sacramental consent cannot be reduced to institutional ethics, because sacraments purport to be encounters with divine presence. For many survivors of abuse and spiritual betrayal, the hardest task is to disentangle their image of God from the faces of abusers and complicit leaders. Therapists and theologians who work in this space often describe a long process of reimagining God as one who did not will the abuse, who was present with the harmed rather than with the perpetrators, and who may call survivors out of institutions that refuse to repent. Any religious body that speaks of sacrament must recognize that its conduct shapes the very possibility of belief in a trustworthy God. In that sense, institutional failure of consent is also a form of blasphemy.
Sacramental consent, then, is not the church’s gift to survivors. It is the church’s overdue attempt to respond to God after having treated divine name and sacrament as cover for violence. The vows that churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples must make are not optional adornments. They are necessary acts of repentance: never to move an accused leader quietly to another assignment without public accountability; never again to instruct a harmed person to forgive in ways that require silence or continued exposure; never to prioritize institutional reputation over the safety of children and vulnerable adults; never to treat sacramental life as a sphere above law and justice.
There are already signs of such vows in practice. Some dioceses and denominations have established independent safeguarding bodies with survivor representation. Others have committed to public naming of credibly accused leaders, financial reparations, and cooperation with civil authorities. Grassroots groups of survivors and allies have held liturgies of lament outside cathedrals or in city squares, reading names, telling stories, and demanding structural change. These practices are imperfect and often contested. They do, however, mark a shift from viewing abuse as isolated sin to viewing it as a sacramental crisis that calls institutional consent itself into question.
To bring this chapter into the larger arc of the book, churches and religious communities appear as both objects and potential agents of sacramental consent. As objects, they must submit their histories and structures to the same scrutiny that this volume has directed toward welfare systems, platforms, borders, climate regimes, and universities. As potential agents, they possess symbolic resources and practices that could sustain communities in costly refusal of abusive arrangements. Traditions of covenant, confession, liturgy, and vow have the capacity to nurture institutions that actually restrain their own power and redistribute risk.
Whether they will do so is an open question. What should be clear is that sacraments cannot be invoked to absolve communities of their failures of consent. They can only be celebrated truthfully where those failures are acknowledged and where institutions commit themselves, at cost, to practices that make trust possible again. Anything less is not sacramental life. It is idolatry wrapped in ritual.
Chapter Twenty One: Mutual Aid, Abolition, and the Consent to be Held
Begin not with an institution but with a kitchen table. It is the week after a hurricane or the first months of a pandemic or the slow unfolding of a housing crisis that some insist is a market correction. Someone has set out pots of rice and beans, stacks of masks, envelopes of cash or grocery cards, a sign up sheet, a bail fund spreadsheet, a rides list for clinic appointments and court dates. There is no grant officer here, no branded logo, no evaluation dashboard. There is a handwritten poster that says something like “We keep us safe” or “Solidarity not charity.” People come because their landlord will not wait, because the state has already disappeared them once, because they are tired of filling out eligibility forms that treat need as a moral flaw. They consent to be held by strangers who may also become kin, and they offer to hold in turn. No science review board meets to approve this project, yet everything that matters for a sacramental account of consent is present: vulnerability, risk, shared vow, and the stubborn refusal to treat survival as a private achievement.
This chapter turns to mutual aid and abolitionist organizing as laboratories where sacramental consent is already being practiced without that name. It proceeds offensively by naming the non profit industrial complex, foundation driven reform, and platform branded philanthropy as regimes that domesticate consent, turning collective needs into professionalized services and movements into deliverables. It proceeds defensively by listening closely to organizers and theorists who work in these borderlands, especially Dean Spade on mutual aid, the INCITE collective on the non profit industrial complex, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on abolition, and Mariame Kaba on non reformist reforms. It asks what sacramental consent would require from movements that seek to dismantle carceral and extractive institutions while building different forms of shared life.
Dean Spade defines mutual aid in stark contrast to charity. In an essay and later in his book titled Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) he describes mutual aid as collective coordination to meet survival needs, usually among people who are already marginalized and for whom state and market systems have failed or were never designed. Mutual aid projects are grounded in the understanding that all people deserve to have their needs met, that the existing systems are structured to abandon some lives, and that communities can build forms of safety and support that do not rely on professional service models. Charity, by contrast, presumes a donor and a recipient, a hierarchy of generosity and gratitude, and a logic in which the giver retains control over resources and conditions. In Spade’s account, mutual aid is not simply a method of distribution. It is a pedagogy and a politics that teaches participants about structural abandonment and about their capacity to act together.
From a sacramental perspective, mutual aid is also about the consent to be held by a community that does not claim innocence. Participants consent to share resources with people whose histories they do not fully know and whose lives may unsettle their own sense of safety. They consent to be seen as needy without being reduced to deficiency. Organizers consent to forms of accountability that run horizontally and diagonally rather than vertically through professional hierarchies. This is not a space without power, conflict, or harm; Spade is explicit about burnout, conflict, and the need for conflict resolution practices within mutual aid groups. Yet the central vow is that no one will be framed as a client whose consent is secured by scarcity, nor as a donor whose consent is always already assumed by their financial contributions.
To understand why mutual aid must be distinguished from institutionalized charity, INCITE’s anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is indispensable. The contributors describe what they call the non profit industrial complex: a dense mesh of foundations, state agencies, and professional non profits that channels social movement energy into grant cycles, deliverable metrics, and narrow issue silos, often in ways that blunt radical critique and protect the very structures that produce harm. The anthology narrates how organizations that began as radical feminist or antiviolence collectives found themselves reshaped by funding requirements: forced to de emphasize anti police and anti prison critique in order to secure grants, to adopt managerial language, and to prioritize services that could be easily measured over organizing that challenged structural violence.
For INCITE, the question is not only whether non profit staff and boards consent to these arrangements. The deeper question is how communities become accustomed to a landscape in which their suffering must be translated into grant narratives and outcome metrics before it becomes legible. Consent is domesticated when people must agree to be represented in ways that exaggerate their passivity and erase their own organizing, in order to secure resources. Sacramental consent refuses this domestication. It insists that any institutional form that claims to hold communities in their vulnerability must make visible its own funding constraints and political compromises, and it calls communities to discern when to disentangle from money that demands silence about police, prisons, borders, or capitalism.
Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore provide the conceptual frame within which mutual aid and movement infrastructures can be read as abolitionist practices of sacramental consent. In Are Prisons Obsolete Davis argues that prison abolition is not primarily a project of destroying buildings but of transforming the conditions under which prison has become the default solution to social problems. She reads the prison industrial complex as a nexus of economic interests, racial hierarchies, and political calculations that presents caging as necessary and inevitable. Abolition therefore requires building institutions that address harm and conflict without resorting to cages. Her later work on abolition democracy names the need for new democratic forms that extend beyond formal political structures into economic and social life.
Gilmore, in Golden Gulag and subsequent essays, defines abolition as the creation of life enhancing institutions that render prisons and policing obsolete. Her often cited formulation that abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems captures this orientation. In conversation, she emphasizes that abolition is less about disappearance of specific carceral sites and more about the presence of infrastructures that make life livable in the first place: housing, health care, education, meaningful work, clean water, community decision making.
When read together with Spade and INCITE, Davis and Gilmore push sacramental consent into an abolitionist register. Consent is not only about saying yes or no to particular institutions. It is about whether communities are resourced to build and sustain forms of life that do not require carceral solutions. Mutual aid, then, becomes one manifestation of abolitionist consent: people declare through their shared projects that they refuse to consent to a world in which survival is contingent on obedience to punitive welfare systems, predatory landlords, and militarized policing.
Mariame Kaba gives this abolitionist orientation a strategic language in her discussions of non reformist reforms. Drawing on work with Dan Berger and David Stein, she defines non reformist reforms as changes that reduce the power of oppressive systems while making clear those systems’ inability to resolve the harms they produce. Such reforms may be incremental yet they aim not at improving prisons or policing but at shrinking their reach and building alternatives. Examples include campaigns to decriminalize minor offenses, to end cash bail, or to reallocate funds from police to housing and social services. In each case the question is whether a given policy shift makes it easier or harder to imagine and build a world without cages.
Sacramental consent can be understood as a non reformist reform in the domain of institutional ethics. It is not satisfied with revising consent forms, adding transparency dashboards, or hiring a few ethicists to review data practices, although such steps may be necessary. It seeks changes that redistribute power and risk away from extractive institutions and toward communities, while exposing the inability of those institutions to become just simply by securing better consent. In this sense, sacramental consent is offensive in the way that Kaba’s abolitionism is offensive: it names some institutional arrangements as incapable of redemption and calls for their replacement rather than their management.
Seen from the perspective of people whose lives are at the sharp end of policing and poverty, mutual aid groups often function as de facto sacramental institutions even when they use no theological language. Bail funds consent to take on legal risk by posting bail for strangers; in doing so they treat those strangers as family whose freedom is the community’s shared responsibility. Tenant unions consent to collective negotiations that may expose them to eviction or blacklisting, because they refuse the individualized consent forms of lease agreements that isolate each household. Cop watch programs consent to be physically present at sites of potential violence, not as vigilantes but as witnesses who hold cameras, hotlines, and community knowledge.
The ethics of consent in these spaces is subtle. People are not always fully informed of all risks; resources are uneven; burnout is real. Yet the structure is different from that of foundation funded non profits and carceral institutions. Consent in mutual aid projects is shaped by relational accountability rather than formal contract. Participants can see and confront one another; decisions are made in assemblies, group chats, and shared kitchens; power is at least in principle contestable. Spade notes that these projects often include explicit agreements about decision making, conflict resolution, and care for organizers who are exhausted or harmed, and that many groups experiment with horizontal structures and collective leadership. These are precisely the kinds of institutional forms that sacramental consent would recognize as bearing fragments of a different institutional imagination.
The contrast with the non profit industrial complex becomes sharper here. INCITE’s analysis shows that non profits reliant on foundation and state funding must often seek consent not from the communities they serve but from funders and regulators. Program participants may sign intake forms and waivers, but the fundamental consent relation is between board members and grant officers. Communities may be invited to advisory panels or focus groups, yet budget lines, strategic plans, and evaluation frameworks are structured elsewhere. In such arrangements, sacramental consent is violated even if individual participants assent to services, because the institution’s primary vows are to capital and legitimacy rather than to the flourishing of the most vulnerable.
Sacramental consent does not require that movements reject all formal incorporation or funding. It asks that movements name clearly the conditions under which they accept such funds, and that they establish governance practices in which communities can revoke consent when funding structures begin to deform priorities. Non reformist reforms in this sphere include decisions to cap the share of an organization’s budget that comes from foundations, to refuse state contracts that demand collaboration with policing or immigration enforcement, and to create movement wide funds under collective control. INCITE recounts the moment when the group lost a two hundred thousand dollar grant due to its stance on Palestine and decided to raise smaller donations directly from community members instead, thereby preserving political autonomy. That decision can be read as an act of sacramental consent: a willingness to accept scarcity rather than consent to conditions that would silence solidarity with those under occupation.
Abolitionist thinkers insist that the horizon here is not a world with better funded non profits but a world with different institutions altogether. Davis’s notion of abolition democracy and Gilmore’s insistence on life enhancing infrastructures both direct attention to the kinds of institutions that sacramental consent would bless. These are institutions in which the consent relation is not between the vulnerable and distant authorities but among people who share risks and resources. Public libraries, free and accessible health clinics, tenant run housing cooperatives, community gardens, land trusts, and fully funded public schools under community governance are examples of such infrastructures. Mutual aid projects often prefigure them in miniature, using volunteer labor and donated resources to enact forms of care that should by right be public and guaranteed.
Sacramental consent here becomes a lens through which to differentiate between infrastructures that deserve to be built out and those that must be dismantled. When a community chooses to invest time and energy into a mutual aid network or a community land trust, it is consenting to be formed by practices of shared decision making, open books, and mutual obligation. When it chooses instead to rely on police led youth programs, corporate philanthropic campaigns, or public private partnerships shaped by real estate interests, it is being invited to consent to forms of formation that normalize surveillance, debt, and dispossession. Abolitionist organizing works to make these choices visible, then to widen the space in which communities can say no to the second and yes to the first.
Kaba often emphasizes that abolition is a practical and present orientation, not a distant horizon. In interviews and essays she describes abolitionist work as the construction of many small experiments in non carceral safety, accountability, and support, from transformative justice circles to campaigns to free criminalized survivors of violence. Each experiment requires specific, situated acts of consent. People must agree to participate in circles that ask them to speak honestly about harm. Communities must agree to hold people who have caused harm rather than handing them over to police. Survivors must be given genuine choices about what justice would mean for them. Sacramental consent names the gravity of these agreements. It refuses to trivialize them as private preferences or technical procedures. Instead it treats them as vows that shape the moral architecture of shared life.
This chapter therefore argues that mutual aid and abolitionist organizing are not auxiliary topics for an account of sacramental consent. They are among its primary teachers. Where welfare offices, corporate platforms, climate regimes, and universities have largely inverted sacramental consent into rituals of extractive agreement, mutual aid kitchens, bail funds, tenant unions, and abolitionist study groups enact a different grammar. They say that consent is not valid when people face starvation or imprisonment if they refuse; that institutions must be answerable to those who bear the most risk; that vows should be made in the open and revisited as conditions change; and that some systems do not deserve consent at all, only organized refusal and replacement.
From inside these projects, sacramental consent appears less as an abstract ethical principle and more as a daily practice of deciding where to stand, with whom to share, and which institutions to treat as legitimate. Abolitionist organizers will not often use theological language, and many would rightly be wary of sacralizing any institution. Yet their insistence that life must be organized around solidarity rather than punishment, around presence rather than abandonment, resonates deeply with a sacramental imagination that sees every act of consent and refusal as a participation in a larger liturgy of what is held sacred.
If earlier chapters have described sacramental consent under regimes of exhaustion, surveillance, and managed non transparency, this chapter marks a turn toward those places where alternative infrastructures are being constructed. The question is not whether they are pure. Gilmore warns against framing abolition as a search for purity rather than a long labor of building and defending fragile institutions. Sacramental consent follows her warning. It does not imagine that mutual aid groups or abolitionist collectives are free of harm or exclusion. It does insist that they locate consent in relationships of solidarity and shared risk, and that they remain answerable to those whose lives they claim to center.
In that sense, mutual aid projects and abolitionist organizations are already living some of the sacramental consent that the rest of this book has demanded of states, corporations, universities, and churches. They are laboratories where the consent to be held and to hold others is treated as a serious, sometimes terrifying, sometimes joyful undertaking. They reveal that consent, understood sacramentally, is less about individual autonomy and more about the kinds of worlds we agree to build together.
Chapter Twenty Two
Consent without Illusion: Sacramental Orientation after the Institutions
Begin again with the problem of light. Simone Weil insists that study, at its best, is an exercise in attention that does not guarantee success yet slowly trains the soul to wait in a truthful way, to hold its gaze on what resists easy capture and to accept that illumination is given rather than seized. Saidiya Hartman speaks of critical fabulation as a practice of writing with and against the archive, stretching narrative to honor the dead and the disappeared without pretending to restore what cannot be restored. Elinor Ostrom shows that institutions governing shared resources succeed not when they impose a perfect blueprint from above but when they learn to align with local knowledge, particular ecologies, and fragile agreements, accepting limits on what can be centralized. James Scott warns that states and corporations are perpetually tempted by the fantasy of legibility, the belief that complex human and ecological life can be rendered transparent to administrative vision without violence. Wendy Brown traces how neoliberal reason reconfigures every domain of life into scenes of competition and human capital, hollowing out democratic hopes while presenting this impoverishment as freedom.
This book has tried to think sacramental consent inside that convergence of attention, archive, institutional design, administrative fantasy, and economic rationality. It has stayed with automated welfare systems that decide whether someone eats, with predictive policing platforms that stalk neighborhoods as if suspicion were a natural resource, with quantified workplaces that turn fatigue into data, with climate regimes that invite people to consent to their own dispossession in the name of green transition, with universities that treat students and research subjects as material, with churches that invoke God while protecting abusers, and with mutual aid and abolitionist projects that build infrastructures of solidarity in the cracks. Along the way it has read institutional traces as theologico political texts, constructed experimental institutions of sacramental consent, and descended into micro practices of refusal and friendship.
The argument can now be stated plainly. Consent in its ordinary legal and managerial sense, understood as a discrete voluntary agreement by an individual who is sufficiently informed, is a necessary but radically insufficient concept for life under saturated regimes. Under conditions of deep inequality, informational opacity, and institutional fatigue, such consent often functions as a way to redistribute blame rather than power, to legitimate extraction rather than limit it. Sacramental consent names a different orientation. It treats consent as liturgical practice rather than as a box to tick, as a set of shared vows made under recognized limits rather than as a private transaction. It asks institutions to confess what they worship when they seek assent, asks communities to decide together which institutions deserve any consent at all, and asks persons to see their own yes and no as participations in a larger moral drama that will never be transparent in this life.
The archival chapters showed what happens when consent is severed from reverence and constraint. Automated eligibility systems treat human need as a set of variables to be optimized; police databases and scoring tools treat neighborhoods as terrains of risk to be preemptively governed; workplace analytics treat exhaustion as a signal to be correlated and monetized. The visible consent in such systems is thin: a click on a terms of service page, a signature on an employment contract, the decision to apply for a benefit administered through scores. Scott’s account of high modernist schemes that flatten complexity in order to administer it, and Brown’s analysis of neoliberal reason that recasts every person as a competitive unit, help explain why these systems feel at once rational and sacrilegious. They are liturgies of clarity and market reason that cannot abide opacity, delay, or unprofitability. Under such conditions, consent is demanded precisely at the points where refusal would be impossible without catastrophic cost, which is to say, it is not consent in any morally intelligible sense.
The constructive chapters refused the temptation to respond with abstraction or purity. Instead they built thought experiment institutions that tried to take sacramental consent seriously under conditions of exhaustion and compromised structure: a workplace that accepts limits on measurement, a public service agency that treats time and attention as sites of reverence, a clinic that holds altered states without immediate pathologization, a university that confesses its complicity in epistemic injustice, a church that confronts its history of spiritual and sexual abuse, mutual aid collectives and abolitionist infrastructures that organize survival without waiting for permission. Ostrom’s careful description of common pool resource governance offered one of the most concrete templates here, because her work insists that durable institutions emerge where communities craft rules that they themselves monitor, enforce, and revise in light of lived experience, rather than where an external authority imposes a design that pretends to universality. Sacramental consent extends this insight into the moral register: those who will bear the costs of an institutional design must participate in its vows, and those vows must be written in such a way that they can be contested and amended by those harmed.
The micro practice chapters made the same case at a different scale. They treated friendship, complaint, spiritual companionship, and interior life as places where consent and refusal are learned. Weil’s meditation on study as attention reminds us that much of the work of consent happens before any explicit agreement, in the habits of waiting, listening, and not grasping that we cultivate or abandon. Hartman’s critical fabulation reminded us that our attempts to honor the harmed in our narratives will always be partial and risk new violences, yet that the refusal to narrate is its own form of abandonment. Sacramental consent therefore cannot promise purity at the level of speech any more than at the level of institutions. It can only promise that we will not treat the limits of our knowledge as excuses to stop tending to the wounded traces in front of us.
At this point it is reasonable to raise three objections. The first says that sacramental consent is simply too demanding. If we accept that every consent is embedded in complex histories and power structures, that every institution reflects worship of something, and that every archive is partial, then consent seems to dissolve as a usable norm for policy, design, or daily life. The temptation is to retreat to legal minimalism: let the forms be as clear as possible, let people sign or refuse, and let the rest be handled by courts and markets. The second objection says that sacramental language is sectarian. Consent is already a contested term in secular law and ethics; to attach it to sacraments risks smuggling theology into spaces where it will be experienced as one more form of domination. The third objection says that any new theory of consent will be captured. Platforms, states, and corporations will appropriate sacramental language as branding, just as they have appropriated diversity, responsibility, and sustainability, turning moral critique into asset.
The response to the first objection is that sacramental consent is demanding in the way that honesty is demanding, not in the way that perfectionism is demanding. Scott and Ostrom together show that designs which deny complexity in the name of efficiency do not in fact simplify the world; they displace complexity into ungoverned spaces where suffering intensifies. Brown shows that neoliberal rationality, which claims to free us from heavy collective norms by turning everything into market choice, in fact saturates life with demands for self optimization and constant exposure to assessment. To treat consent as a simple event in such an environment is not modest; it is fantastical. Sacramental consent does not require that we know every consequence of every agreement. It requires that we acknowledge the structural asymmetries that shape those agreements, that we build institutions which recognize their own limits, and that we craft refusals that are as coordinated as possible when consent can no longer be given in good faith. It is a discipline of realism under scarcity, not a demand for omniscience.
The response to the second objection is that sacramental language is dangerous when it claims a monopoly on meaning, but life giving when it functions as translation between different traditions of reverence and refusal. Sacrament in this volume has meant visible practices that shape desire and distribute trust, not only Christian rites. It has named the way in which community meals, courtrooms, welfare offices, classrooms, prisons, mosques, temples, and mutual aid kitchens all function as sites where a community reveals what it holds holy. Some will narrate that holiness as God, others as dignity, solidarity, or the inviolability of persons. The theological words matter, but the structural question is shared: who is asked to carry the cost of what a community worships. Sacramental consent invites those from religious traditions to read their own rites against the grain of institutional betrayal, and it invites those outside those traditions to consider how their own practices of consent and refusal already bear a liturgical weight they may not have named.
The response to the third objection is perhaps the most sobering. It is very likely that phrases from this book, like phrases from abolitionist and feminist work, will be adopted by institutions intent on continuing business as usual. There will be corporate guidelines that speak of reverence for users, government reports that mention sacramental consent in passing, university task forces that promise new forms of attention to students and staff. Some of these gestures may be sincere attempts at reform; others will be a form of inoculation. Hartman’s reminder that every act of narration risks collusion, and Brown’s account of how neoliberal orders absorb critique without structural change, mean that sacramental consent cannot rely on naming alone. The only test is whether power, risk, and the right to refusal actually move.
For that reason, this conclusion does not offer a checklist but rather a set of orientations that must be enacted and contested in particular struggles. Designers and engineers who work on platforms and automated systems can ask, in every project, whether consent is being used as a shield for extraction or as a limit on it, whether any person or community can in fact refuse without catastrophic loss, and whether the design introduces friction on behalf of the vulnerable rather than only on behalf of efficiency. Lawyers and legislators can treat consent doctrines not as neutral tools but as terrains of struggle where sacramental consent would push toward redistribution of bargaining power, presumptions in favor of opacity and silence for those at risk, and recognition that some contracts are void not only individually but structurally.
Teachers, pastors, clinicians, and researchers can refuse to treat their own positions as harmless. They can read their syllabi, liturgies, protocols, and consent forms as archives of worship, asking whose suffering has been normalized in the name of formation, care, or knowledge. They can invite those who have been harmed to speak in their own time and on their own terms, and they can treat those testimonies not as background noise but as directives for institutional change. Mutual aid organizers and abolitionist workers can continue to experiment with infrastructures in which consent is located among those who share risk, whose presence and refusal are not abstractions but daily realities. Dean Spade’s descriptions of mutual aid groups that write their own conflict and care agreements, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s insistence that abolition is about life giving infrastructures rather than vacancies where prisons once stood, give concrete models here.
Individuals inside overwhelming institutions can understand their own small refusals differently. To decline a data sharing option, to walk away from a platform that demands limitless exposure, to refuse an unpaid committee assignment that exists mainly to shield senior leaders, to organize with colleagues for different conditions, to say no to a pastor who demands disclosure as proof of obedience, to withdraw consent to a research project that no longer feels trustworthy, to say yes to a mutual aid kitchen when official programs fail, all of these are limited acts. None will change regimes on their own. Yet sacramental consent treats them as seeds of a different liturgy, where the dignity of persons and communities is not a line in a mission statement but a constraint on what can be asked in the first place.
At several points this book has insisted that sacramental consent is not a state to be achieved but an orientation to be renewed. That claim can sound evasive, as if it were a way to avoid specifying demands. In fact it is a recognition of the way institutions decay, knowledge fails, and political settlements erode. Brown describes neoliberalism as a rationality that has already reshaped our desires, vocabularies, and expectations; Scott and Ostrom describe states and organizations that will continue to pursue legibility and control. There will be no final structure immune to these forces. Sacramental consent asks instead for a shared promise that we will keep reading our institutions as liturgies, that we will keep listening to those whose consent has been voided in practice, and that we will keep building and defending fragile infrastructures where consent is something more than a trace on a screen.
The book began under conditions of tiredness and opacity. It has moved through welfare offices, call centers, server farms, courtrooms, parishes, campuses, kitchens, and cells. It ends at a table again, not as romantic return but as acknowledgment that every practice of consent and refusal is local in the most literal sense. Somewhere a social worker is deciding whether to override a scoring system to keep a family housed. Somewhere a team of engineers is deciding whether to ship a feature that will addict people more deeply to surveillance. Somewhere a pastor is deciding whether to believe the first disclosure rather than the respected elder. Somewhere a small group is deciding whether to accept a grant that would silence its solidarity. Somewhere a student is deciding whether to bring a complaint forward even though the complaint system is built to exhaust.
Sacramental consent, as this book understands it, is what happens when those decisions are made with the awareness that they are not private. They take place before the faces of the living and the dead, before archives that already misrepresent, before institutions that will outlast their current agents, before futures that will judge us for what we normalized and what we refused. It is a way of saying that consent is not only a right we claim but a vow we make: a promise to attend, to constrain our power, to tell the truth about what we worship, and to refuse to call consent what is in fact coerced surrender.
There is no closing hymn that makes this safe. The regimes described here will continue to mutate. New platforms, new forms of welfare automation, new surveillance tools, new climate compacts, new forms of non profit capture will appear. This conclusion can offer only a stubbornly modest confidence: that if enough people treat their own consents and refusals as sacraments rather than as private transactions, if enough institutions accept limits in the name of those they claim to serve, and if enough communities build infrastructures of solidarity that withdraw assent from the worst arrangements, then sacramental consent will not remain a phrase in a book. It will be one of the ways a tired world remembers that saying yes and saying no were never meant to be matters of paperwork alone.
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