I've been thinking about this for a long time recently. Because, to be honest, so few of we pastors ever deal with the real tragedies to our selves and our relationships (and even our marriages) that pornography creates.
So, let me go on the record and be clear: Porn is bad.
I say this not because I'm a prude or a kill-joy. I say this because the research backs me up, my counseling experience confirms the research, and I've seen too many wives ask me with tears in their eyes, "Why does he watch this, when I'm just in the next room? Does this mean he'll be cheating on me now?"
This post is my attempt to set out, once and for all, why we Christians don't watch porn. And some book resources to work toward healing.
What is porn, first?
The Greek word porneia (πορνεία) means "sexual immorality". It's the word from which we get our concept of porn. 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.
So, what's sexual morality?
Really, this is just another way of asking a really important question: What's sexual attraction for?
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 Kendra and have more children or gain social status, but that cheating will undermine other relationships (between myself and her, sure, but also more largely -- between friends and family). That means these relationships in the natural order need more.
This more is where we Christians bump into a boundary that marks porn off limits. Because that more is the Kingdom of God.
So what's 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 has nothing to do with how a woman dresses or doesn't dress. I know that steps on the toes of the purity culture in so much evangelicalism. But it's true: 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.
Kendra is attractive. She's beautiful. But not because I lust after her. She's beautiful because of who she is and is becoming in Christ. Her attractiveness -- the attractiveness of any woman -- is a public thing. Even if it has private benefits.
All of this to say that attraction, for Christians, isn't just about advantageous relationships; it's for right relationships.
Attraction is for right relationships. Let that sink in for a minute.
Because that's the baseline for Christian thinking about sex. All righteous and unrighteous sex starts there.
And it's why I want to make a really bold claim: Porn is unrighteous sex. It falls short of maintaining right -- even advantageous -- relationships. There's no more silent a deadly killer to marriage for Christians than porn. Period. Full stop. No qualifying if or but to follow.
Let me say it again: Porn will kill a marriage.
Again: That's because pornography falls short of maintaining right relationships. But what's more: It falls short of advantageous relationships.
How so? Let me count the ways. (Here comes the research, complete with links.)
1. Porn 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.
Don't believe me? Think about the act of watching porn. You're always placed in the role of voyeur. You're objectively looking into the sex, not participating in it. By it's very essential nature, porn objectifies people, even as it objectifies sex.
That objectification further keeps us from the intimacy we crave. The screen literally creates a barrier. And so we try to overcome that barrier with even more disastrous things like masterbation. Which only serves to isolate and objectify even more.
2. Porn 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.
That's why the porn always goes from "soft" to "hardcore". (I hate those phrases, because it makes us think one is less destructive than the other; it isn't.) 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 thatTed 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.
This is a huge deal!
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.
I'm tempted 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.
3. Porn 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.
4. 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.
And the result? With trust destroyed, guilt goes unchecked. And intimacy dies. Which is why I say: Nothing will kill a marriage more quickly than porn.
That's why Kendra and I guard our marriage. We both know that 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.
5. The heart of the problem here is that so many of us Christians think we can separate out how we think about sex from how we think about our faith.
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".
My wife is beautiful. I could never reduce her to "hot".
6. With porn, we're robbed ourselves 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 just 10, that it genuinely makes me sad.
I realized this recently when I heard about someone sharing naked pictures. Make no doubt about it, those pictures cut genuine intimacy off at the pass. Because naked pictures make us need to present ourselves in ways that atomize who we are into nothing more than two-dimensional bits and pieces of information.
And the lengths to which we go to make our pictures look like Playboy pictures!
Believe me: 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 do we do?
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.
1. "All that is in the world -- the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches -- comes not from the Father but from the world" (1 John 2.16).
We have to make ourselves opaquely, completely, thoroughly accountable to our spouses. Where we are. What we're looking at. Who we're with. What we're spending our money on. Because our world teaches us to consume, in private. Without this level of honesty, the trust destroyed by porn has no change to be reborn.
2. What's your vision of God? In my experience in counseling, this is a huge deal.
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 guilt.
3. Don't buy into the lie that you can't change. Change really is available. Set porn aside for something better (1 Peter 4.3). Make a new habit, and stick with it. Use your judgment and imagination.
4. Don't try to go it alone. Have a group of accountability -- not your spouse or your pastor, either. Lean on relationships to learn genuine intimacy. Let other Christians help.
Now, some resource ideas:
1. Lauren Winner's Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity
2. Steven Arterburn's Worthy of Her Trust: What to Do to Rebuild Sexual Integrity and Win Her Back
3. Gary Thomas' Sacred Marriage: What if God Designed Marriage to Make Us More Holy than to Make Us Happy?