Sex Story: Fifty Shades of Grey
Directed by Marcie Hume, Eleanor Scoones
TheoScope Rating
Worldview · content · moral framework
Plot
A look at the phenomenal success of novel, Fifty Shades of Grey.
Discern Score Breakdown
30%
30%
25%
15%
Audience Suitability
Kids
Under 10
Teens
10–17
Adults
18+
Family
Mixed ages
Content Flags
This documentary examines the cultural success of the explicitly sexual novel Fifty Shades of Grey, and by its own framing participates in normalizing and celebrating that content. It offers no meaningful moral, theological, or critical counterweight. It lands as one of the least appropriate films a Christian family could watch together, at any age.
Pastoral Take
This film has no appropriate audience within a Christian home — not for children, not for teenagers, and not as entertainment or education for adults. It exists to celebrate and amplify content that treats human sexuality as spectacle and romanticizes what the Bible would recognize as exploitation, and there is no redemptive framework whatsoever to justify the exposure. Parents should skip this entirely and, if their teenagers have already encountered the Fifty Shades phenomenon through peers or social media, that is a worthwhile conversation to have — but this documentary is not a tool for it.
Discussion Points
- 1This documentary celebrates a book where a powerful man pressures a young woman into a sexual relationship on his terms. How does that compare to what the Bible says in Ephesians 5 about how a husband should love his wife — as Christ loved the Church, giving himself up for her? What's the difference between that kind of love and what the book describes?
- 2The film treats the enormous popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey as evidence that it tapped into something real in people. Do you think something can be both wildly popular and deeply harmful? Can you think of other examples from the Bible where people pursued something eagerly that led them away from God?
- 3The documentary seems to treat sexual desire as something that just needs to be expressed and celebrated. How does that compare to what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6 — that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and that sexual sin is uniquely destructive? Why do you think God draws those boundaries, and what does that say about how seriously He takes our dignity?
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Cast
Miranda Richardson, Edward Lewis French, Rosie Violet Wise
Community Reviews
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