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Evangelical Christians and Pornography: A Complicate Relationship [1]

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Date: 2023-01-26  

Mere decades ago, acquiring porn took a great deal of effort; perhaps a visit to the back of a seedy bookstore, scanning material behind the curtain at a video store, or surreptitiously subscribing to Playboy or Penthouse magazines, and having them delivered in brown paper covers. In recent years, pornography has become much more readily available at home through a proliferation of Internet hubs. Is pornography use amongst evangelicals as big a problem as some evangelical leaders claim?

Writing for Baptist News’ in January 2021, Michael Chancellor, argued that porn is “toxic” and “it has consumed many of our youth and our men.”

Chancellor, who served 33 years as pastor of four Baptist churches in Texas, seven years as a mental health manager in a maximum-security Texas prison and now is a therapist in private practice in Round Rock, Texas, listed a bunch of statistics that he called “shocking” (https://baptistnews.com/article/the-ongoing-epidemic-of-pornography-in-the-church/).

More than 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites. The average visit lasts 6 minutes and 29 seconds.

There are around 42 million porn websites, which totals around 370 million pages of porn.

The porn industry’s annual revenue is more than the NFL, NBA and MLB combined. It is also more than the combined revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC.

47% of families in the United States reported that pornography is a problem in their home.

Pornography use increases the marital infidelity rate by more than 300%.

Eleven is the average age that a child is first exposed to porn, and 94% of children will see porn by the age of 14.

56% of American divorces involve one party having an “obsessive interest” in pornographic websites.

70% of Christian youth pastors report that they have had at least one teen come to them for help in dealing with pornography in the past 12 months.

68% of churchgoing men and more than 50% of pastors view porn on a regular basis. Of young Christian adults 18-24 years old, 76% actively search for porn.

59% of pastors said married men seek their help for porn use.

33% of women ages 25 and under search for porn at least once per month.

Only 13% of self-identified Christian women say they never watch porn — 87% of Christian women have watched porn.

55% of married men and 25% of married women say they watch porn at least once a month.

57% of pastors say porn addiction is the most damaging issue in their congregation. And 69% say porn has adversely impacted the church.

Only 7% of pastors say their church has a program to help people struggling with pornography.

A study titled, “Do People in Conservative States Really Watch More Porn? A Hierarchical Analysis,” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023120908472) by The Gospel Coalition’s Joe Carter, Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead, found that “state-level religious and political characteristics do not predict individual-level pornography consumption, and individual-level religiosity and political conservatism predict less recent pornography consumption.” They also found that “the amount of variation in individual-level pornography viewing due to state-level factors is quite small.” The Gospel Coalition’s Carter’s column titled “FactChecker: Do Christian Men Watch More Pornography?” (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/factchecker-do-christian-men-watch-more-pornography/)concluded that “there is no basis for the implication that Christian men in Bible Belt states view pornography more than non-Christian men in other areas of the United States.”

In a February 2022 interview with Kelsey Dallas of the Deseret News (https://www.deseret.com/2022/2/24/22947928/how-churches-can-help-people-struggling-with-pornography-porn-evangelical), Samuel Perry, author of “Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants,” pointed out that “whatever pornography’s negative impact on somebody’s life, it seems to be way worse if you’re a committed Christian. If you’re a conservative Protestant, pornography use is more strongly associated with relational unhappiness and personal unhappiness than if you’re not.”

In a 2016 article in The Journal of Treatment & Prevention titled “The Development and Deployment of the Idea of Pornography Addiction Within American Evangelicalism,” Jeremy N. Thomas, who studied more than fifty years worth of articles in the evangelical publication Christianity Today, found that “evangelicals have developed and deployed the idea of pornography addiction, and in doing so, have communicated messages about pornography that have made it more likely for evangelicals to perceive themselves as being addicted to pornography.” In his piece, Thomas looked at “the motivations behind these messages, and suggests that these messages may, in fact, tell us less about individual pornography users and more about those who are developing and deploying such messages.”

So what is the evangelical anti-porn movement all about? Rescuing parishioners from the scourge of unlimited access to porn? Making a financial calculation that while the pornography business is incredibly lucrative for the creators/sellers/distributors of porn, why not get in on the action? Thus, the birth of the porn-addiction industry where church-based anti-pornography tutorials exist side-by-side of so-called recovery coaches.

As the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Whitney Strub points out in his review of Kelsy Burke’s The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession, “The undeniable fact that antiporn conservatism is wholly aligned with the broader conservative movement against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights makes this an untenable equivalence, at least without serious qualification” (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/history-of-smut-on-kelsy-burkes-the-pornography-wars/).

Strub, the author Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right(2011) and Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression(2013), points to an even more ominous development: Stereotypes about the damages of pornography can lead to “Robert Aaron Long’s horrifying 2021 shooting spree of Atlanta massage parlors, which he undertook after seeking treatment for porn addiction at a Christian facility.

“Along similar lines, the convergence of movements like NoFap and No Nut November with the alt-right might appear to be a new formation of irony-driven 4Chan meme culture but might also represent the latest iteration of sexual self-control as a tool of fascist movements.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/26/2149368/-Evangelical-Christians-and-Pornography-A-Complicate-Relationship

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