A friend asked that I write a bit about pornography from my Christian perspective.
So reader alert: What follows is a meditation on pornography. It's something lots of folks -- especially those of us in the Church -- never talk about. But it's something that deserves to see the light of day in a reasonable way. What follows beneath the fold may or may not be of interest. Read at your own discretion.
The Greek word porneia (πορνεία) means "sexual immorality". It's the word from which we get our concept of pornography. Pornography is the depiction of "sexual immorality".
Im-morality. That means we're dealing with a negative here. Rather than a thing per se, it's more the absence of something. In order to understand what that absence is, we need first of all to get sexual morality right.
What is sexual attraction for? (I'm not going down that road we all dreaded back in seventh grade, so don't worry about any traumatic flashbacks.)
Let's start with a cultural myth -- which is also a lie. And not just any lie, but a persuasive lie -- that we love to use as a lame excuse in our culture. "Sexual desire is for its own gratification." It's this thing -- or, in Freudian language, this "need" -- that we have which exists in order to be met. This creates sexual desire to be an end in itself.
This lie, though, doesn't even make sense. What other human pleasure, or drive, that's so pleasurable and carries so many profound consequences (and costs!) is simply for its own gratification? We should be amazed that an idea this stupid is so widely believed.
Flowers are attractive, biologically, but not to other flowers; they're attractive to bees. Human sexual attraction, in much the same way, is beautiful for its effects. For what it does, not for itself. In the natural order, human sexual attraction seems to serve several purposes: (1) Gaining a mate; (2) keeping a mate; (3) creating children; (4) creating and maintaining a healthy family context for those children to mature; and (5) social status, beyond just immediate family. Attractiveness is a public thing, not just private. (That's one reason why it gets us in trouble.) In the natural order, social status means (6) social power.
In other words, in the natural order, sexual attraction isn't for the purpose of meeting "needs". It's for advantageous relationships.
Sometimes those relationships conflict, though. For example, I may be able to cheat on a mate and have more children or gain social status, but that cheating will undermine other relationships (between myself and my mate, sure, but also more largely). That means these relationships in the natural order need more.
What's that more? It needs the discipline of the Kingdom of God. So what is sexual attraction for in the Kingdom?
Here's another lie: "Sexual desire in the Kingdom is bad". Sexual gratification was created in Genesis 2, long before any "fall" ("This is now bone of my bones ..."). Moreover, sexual attraction is an aspect of a holy relationship. See Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 about marriage between a believer and an unbeliever.
Sexual attraction is a public thing. Which is to say the problem of lust isn't to adopt burkahs. Jesus rooted the problem of adultery in our hearts -- in us -- not in others; the problem of lust isn't in how a woman dresses or doesn't dress. The problem is that we've worked sexual attraction into something that isn't right, into lust.
Attraction is not only for the good of keeping a spouse -- but for keeping a spouse in the right way. Attraction is a good for having families, but not just families for their own sake. Instead, families are meant to be a blessings for those around them. Attraction is even a good for community's joy -- we should delight in beauty when we see it. (This is why the Bible doesn't have any qualms about describing beautiful people as beautiful.) We rightly enjoy the beauty of bride and groom at weddings. It's right for us to look our best.
Attractiveness is a public thing, even if it has its private benefits. All of this to say that attraction, for Christians, isn't just about advantageous relationships; it's for right relationships.
It's for right relationships. That's the baseline for talking about sex among Christians. From there, we talk about "righteous" sex or "unrighteous" sex. But, I'm talking about pornography here, so I want to claim that pornography is that one part of unrighteous sex.
That's because pornography falls short of maintaining right relationships. But what's more: It falls short of advantageous relationships, too.
First, pornography makes it difficult to gain, keep and love one's mate. It trains us to see them not as persons but as objects -- meant for our sexual gratification. Pornography will pull our real relationships into the imaginary world of the viewer. People loose their personhood.
Second, pornography changes the people who are involved in it. It changes our brain structures, much as other addictions do. The brain's reward centers are hijacked. This takes away our created ability to enjoy people as people. Not only that, but as pornography gets more extreme, it pulls in previously unrelated brain centers, artificially focusing our whole being on attaining orgasms.
This alone explains why pornography continues to get more extreme. What porn does, is create something that's new -- it doesn't just feed what's natural. By stimulating the release of additional chemicals -- like adrenaline -- and wiring those centers into our sexual response, the shock of seeing violent sex makes the rush more intense. (This is the very thing that Ted Bundy warned about, by the way.) So what our porn makers mean by "we're pushing the envelope" is that they must, because their customers are building up a tolerance to its content.
Let me say that again: Pornography creates its own audiences. What's more, this experience ends up teaching us who we are. It forms our sexual tastes and desires as a society. We don't realize the extent to which pornography has reshaped our brains over the past 30 years. This is why lovemaking often loses its power and makes people need to put themselves in a porn script. Our sexual scenarios are increasingly dominated by those we've "downloaded" into our brains.
Real sex is being sucked into adrenaline-dominated fantasy. This fantasy captures women just as much as it does men, too, even if done differently. Women are drawn to chat rooms and trashy novels, where ultimately they have a need to act out in their own sex lives. Men dive into lusts visually.
It's tempting to say that porn addicts are turning into animals. But that's not true: Animals don't do that to one another. What we're doing is rewriting our own humanity. We're becoming mere stimulus response mechanisms. We're dismantling our personhood.
Porn also kills our families, or prevents them from beginning anyway. It strips our ability to maintain genuine relationships in marriage, prevents the context within which we bring healthy children, even takes away our ability to be real with one another.
What's more, porn causes us to hide from one another. Think about how computers are structured around secrecy and browsers make it able to wipe our viewing histories. Electronic fig leaves. This turns trust into distance, isolation and suspicion. Then, the ones who most need help feel withdrawn from their nearest sources of support and help.
This is all so off. Sex is better when there are experiences, histories, and memories that are shared -- so that our brains are literally wired for one another, even as we age. Just as we can wire our brains toward porn, we can wire our brains for intimacy. "One flesh", remember? That is what we want. That is also what we need. Not brains wired for overdoses of chemicals.
We want to believe that one part of our lives can be separated from another. Thing is, when one part suffers, the whole suffers. Pornography throws our whole lives out of whack. Not just our bodies, but our societies.
Christians need to appreciate beauty. Pornography makes it impossible, because it trains us to be lust-full. This is the difference between "beauty" and "hot".
With porn, we're robbed of the ability of genuine intimacy. You can tell whether someone has been uninfluenced by pornography just in hearing them talk about sex. I'm not talking about repression, but about discretion. You can tell how prepared a society is for nurturing genuine intimacy in hearing how it talks about relationships between beauty and privacy in the right ways. We have so much less intimacy now than we did when I was young, that it genuinely makes me sad.
We're cutting ourselves and chemically enhancing ourselves in order to look like what we're seeing in the porn. In that way, we're cutting genuine intimacy off at the pass. A world where teenagers fear not looking like models in Playboy is a world incapable of genuine intimacy.
And this is just the beginning. The explosion of pornography that was the Internet is 15 years old. What will this culture do to marriages a decade from now? What will this do to the worldviews of our children's children? Quite honestly, we don't know. And that's the scary part.
The two big sins in the Book of Revelation are idolatry and sexual immorality. Beginning to see why? Thing is, Revelation is a message of hope, not despair. Our backs may be against the wall as Christians when it comes to porn, so there's good news: The Lamb has conquered.
What should Christians do, then?
Casual users can overcome just by truths like what I've been writing. There's leverage in knowing.
Brains that can be warped can be straightened out -- though it's not so easy. Exposing lies, much as I've tried to do here, zaps the power of those lies.
The Gospel gives us knowledge of what attractiveness is truly for. It takes us beyond what the world knows to the Kingdom of God. There was light to a perverse first century world, and that light still shines here.
Also, what's your image of God? I find that folks who have a traffic cop image of God -- waiting to bust you when you've done wrong -- often trap themselves in cycles of guilt and abuse. This turns God out to be an oppressor and a foolish tyrant, who just wants to trip you up. Instead, God desires our full lives, deliverance from the cycles of oppression that addictions like pornography create. Jesus didn't come to pile up convictions or dismiss cases through judgment. He came to bring light, deliverance, fruitfulness and life. Saving and healing are what Jesus came to do -- not just absolving us of our guilts.
Don't buy into the lie that you can't change. Change really is available. Set porn for something better (1 Peter 4.3). Make a new habit, and stick with it. Use your judgment and imagination.
Finally, don't try to do it alone. Lean on relationships. Let others help.
So reader alert: What follows is a meditation on pornography. It's something lots of folks -- especially those of us in the Church -- never talk about. But it's something that deserves to see the light of day in a reasonable way. What follows beneath the fold may or may not be of interest. Read at your own discretion.
The Greek word porneia (πορνεία) means "sexual immorality". It's the word from which we get our concept of pornography. Pornography is the depiction of "sexual immorality".
Im-morality. That means we're dealing with a negative here. Rather than a thing per se, it's more the absence of something. In order to understand what that absence is, we need first of all to get sexual morality right.
What is sexual attraction for? (I'm not going down that road we all dreaded back in seventh grade, so don't worry about any traumatic flashbacks.)
Let's start with a cultural myth -- which is also a lie. And not just any lie, but a persuasive lie -- that we love to use as a lame excuse in our culture. "Sexual desire is for its own gratification." It's this thing -- or, in Freudian language, this "need" -- that we have which exists in order to be met. This creates sexual desire to be an end in itself.
This lie, though, doesn't even make sense. What other human pleasure, or drive, that's so pleasurable and carries so many profound consequences (and costs!) is simply for its own gratification? We should be amazed that an idea this stupid is so widely believed.
Flowers are attractive, biologically, but not to other flowers; they're attractive to bees. Human sexual attraction, in much the same way, is beautiful for its effects. For what it does, not for itself. In the natural order, human sexual attraction seems to serve several purposes: (1) Gaining a mate; (2) keeping a mate; (3) creating children; (4) creating and maintaining a healthy family context for those children to mature; and (5) social status, beyond just immediate family. Attractiveness is a public thing, not just private. (That's one reason why it gets us in trouble.) In the natural order, social status means (6) social power.
In other words, in the natural order, sexual attraction isn't for the purpose of meeting "needs". It's for advantageous relationships.
Sometimes those relationships conflict, though. For example, I may be able to cheat on a mate and have more children or gain social status, but that cheating will undermine other relationships (between myself and my mate, sure, but also more largely). That means these relationships in the natural order need more.
What's that more? It needs the discipline of the Kingdom of God. So what is sexual attraction for in the Kingdom?
Here's another lie: "Sexual desire in the Kingdom is bad". Sexual gratification was created in Genesis 2, long before any "fall" ("This is now bone of my bones ..."). Moreover, sexual attraction is an aspect of a holy relationship. See Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 about marriage between a believer and an unbeliever.
Sexual attraction is a public thing. Which is to say the problem of lust isn't to adopt burkahs. Jesus rooted the problem of adultery in our hearts -- in us -- not in others; the problem of lust isn't in how a woman dresses or doesn't dress. The problem is that we've worked sexual attraction into something that isn't right, into lust.
Attraction is not only for the good of keeping a spouse -- but for keeping a spouse in the right way. Attraction is a good for having families, but not just families for their own sake. Instead, families are meant to be a blessings for those around them. Attraction is even a good for community's joy -- we should delight in beauty when we see it. (This is why the Bible doesn't have any qualms about describing beautiful people as beautiful.) We rightly enjoy the beauty of bride and groom at weddings. It's right for us to look our best.
Attractiveness is a public thing, even if it has its private benefits. All of this to say that attraction, for Christians, isn't just about advantageous relationships; it's for right relationships.
It's for right relationships. That's the baseline for talking about sex among Christians. From there, we talk about "righteous" sex or "unrighteous" sex. But, I'm talking about pornography here, so I want to claim that pornography is that one part of unrighteous sex.
That's because pornography falls short of maintaining right relationships. But what's more: It falls short of advantageous relationships, too.
First, pornography makes it difficult to gain, keep and love one's mate. It trains us to see them not as persons but as objects -- meant for our sexual gratification. Pornography will pull our real relationships into the imaginary world of the viewer. People loose their personhood.
Second, pornography changes the people who are involved in it. It changes our brain structures, much as other addictions do. The brain's reward centers are hijacked. This takes away our created ability to enjoy people as people. Not only that, but as pornography gets more extreme, it pulls in previously unrelated brain centers, artificially focusing our whole being on attaining orgasms.
This alone explains why pornography continues to get more extreme. What porn does, is create something that's new -- it doesn't just feed what's natural. By stimulating the release of additional chemicals -- like adrenaline -- and wiring those centers into our sexual response, the shock of seeing violent sex makes the rush more intense. (This is the very thing that Ted Bundy warned about, by the way.) So what our porn makers mean by "we're pushing the envelope" is that they must, because their customers are building up a tolerance to its content.
Let me say that again: Pornography creates its own audiences. What's more, this experience ends up teaching us who we are. It forms our sexual tastes and desires as a society. We don't realize the extent to which pornography has reshaped our brains over the past 30 years. This is why lovemaking often loses its power and makes people need to put themselves in a porn script. Our sexual scenarios are increasingly dominated by those we've "downloaded" into our brains.
Real sex is being sucked into adrenaline-dominated fantasy. This fantasy captures women just as much as it does men, too, even if done differently. Women are drawn to chat rooms and trashy novels, where ultimately they have a need to act out in their own sex lives. Men dive into lusts visually.
It's tempting to say that porn addicts are turning into animals. But that's not true: Animals don't do that to one another. What we're doing is rewriting our own humanity. We're becoming mere stimulus response mechanisms. We're dismantling our personhood.
Porn also kills our families, or prevents them from beginning anyway. It strips our ability to maintain genuine relationships in marriage, prevents the context within which we bring healthy children, even takes away our ability to be real with one another.
What's more, porn causes us to hide from one another. Think about how computers are structured around secrecy and browsers make it able to wipe our viewing histories. Electronic fig leaves. This turns trust into distance, isolation and suspicion. Then, the ones who most need help feel withdrawn from their nearest sources of support and help.
This is all so off. Sex is better when there are experiences, histories, and memories that are shared -- so that our brains are literally wired for one another, even as we age. Just as we can wire our brains toward porn, we can wire our brains for intimacy. "One flesh", remember? That is what we want. That is also what we need. Not brains wired for overdoses of chemicals.
We want to believe that one part of our lives can be separated from another. Thing is, when one part suffers, the whole suffers. Pornography throws our whole lives out of whack. Not just our bodies, but our societies.
Christians need to appreciate beauty. Pornography makes it impossible, because it trains us to be lust-full. This is the difference between "beauty" and "hot".
With porn, we're robbed of the ability of genuine intimacy. You can tell whether someone has been uninfluenced by pornography just in hearing them talk about sex. I'm not talking about repression, but about discretion. You can tell how prepared a society is for nurturing genuine intimacy in hearing how it talks about relationships between beauty and privacy in the right ways. We have so much less intimacy now than we did when I was young, that it genuinely makes me sad.
We're cutting ourselves and chemically enhancing ourselves in order to look like what we're seeing in the porn. In that way, we're cutting genuine intimacy off at the pass. A world where teenagers fear not looking like models in Playboy is a world incapable of genuine intimacy.
And this is just the beginning. The explosion of pornography that was the Internet is 15 years old. What will this culture do to marriages a decade from now? What will this do to the worldviews of our children's children? Quite honestly, we don't know. And that's the scary part.
The two big sins in the Book of Revelation are idolatry and sexual immorality. Beginning to see why? Thing is, Revelation is a message of hope, not despair. Our backs may be against the wall as Christians when it comes to porn, so there's good news: The Lamb has conquered.
What should Christians do, then?
Casual users can overcome just by truths like what I've been writing. There's leverage in knowing.
Brains that can be warped can be straightened out -- though it's not so easy. Exposing lies, much as I've tried to do here, zaps the power of those lies.
The Gospel gives us knowledge of what attractiveness is truly for. It takes us beyond what the world knows to the Kingdom of God. There was light to a perverse first century world, and that light still shines here.
Also, what's your image of God? I find that folks who have a traffic cop image of God -- waiting to bust you when you've done wrong -- often trap themselves in cycles of guilt and abuse. This turns God out to be an oppressor and a foolish tyrant, who just wants to trip you up. Instead, God desires our full lives, deliverance from the cycles of oppression that addictions like pornography create. Jesus didn't come to pile up convictions or dismiss cases through judgment. He came to bring light, deliverance, fruitfulness and life. Saving and healing are what Jesus came to do -- not just absolving us of our guilts.
Don't buy into the lie that you can't change. Change really is available. Set porn for something better (1 Peter 4.3). Make a new habit, and stick with it. Use your judgment and imagination.
Finally, don't try to do it alone. Lean on relationships. Let others help.