Chapter 2
A Christian Perspective on Pornography

This chapter reviews what the Bible has to say about pornography, along with personal anecdotes and research that speaks to the intersection between pornography and religiosity. Obviously computers weren’t around in Biblical times; however, there are several Biblical principles with clear ties to the use and making of pornography. Though the aim of this book is not to be a comprehensive exploration of scripture and pornography, in order to frame a context for the data shared in this book, a review of Biblical teaching about pornography is useful. Moreover, I will review first person anecdotes, scholarly interviews, and published studies connecting pornography and Christian teaching.

In the interviews I conducted for this book, I was struck by how frequently and passionately the research participants I spoke with – who came from many different religious and nonreligious traditions -- brought up their religious or spiritual beliefs. This chapter will offer you an unvarnished look into their perspectives and particularly how their faith informs them. I will also explore some of available research that speaks to the connection between pornography and spiritual beliefs, including research I recently completed.

Biblical Perspective

To explore what the Bible has to say about pornography, I interviewed Dr. Mark Hitchcock, an adjunct professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and author of 20 books including The End: A Complete Overview of Bible Prophecy and the End of Days.28 He noted passages in Genesis that showed God’s high regard for monogamous relationships between one man and one woman in marriage; those relationships are set apart as holy. Dr. Hitchcock stated,

“What pornography does is it tears away at the seams of the one flesh, monogamous, heterosexual relationship, because it brings another party into that … and anything that destroys that or tears away at that is harmful to the individuals, harmful to the family, and then, ultimately, to society.” He continued, “And then you get in the New Testament with Jesus teaching that if you look on a woman and lust after her you’ve committed adultery in your heart. Well, you can’t really look at pornography without that [lust] happening … and so, you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to understand that it is something that God forbids.”

Dr. Hitchcock also noted that in Paul’s New Testament letters, the topic of pornography comes up.

“It’s ‘pornea’ – it is just a broad term for sexual sins, sexual behavior, obviously prostitution; pornography comes from that, the word ‘prostitute.’ That is why I think Jesus says don’t divorce your wife except for pornea; he doesn’t say adultery! I think there are valid reasons to get divorced [besides] adultery. I think if a woman is married to a man who is addicted to pornography and he won’t quit, I mean, he won’t repent of it; that destroys a person, it eats away the fiber of their heart and their soul. So I think that God uses that broad term.”

Though viewing pornographic images is not a struggle for him, Dr. Hitchcock described a time when he was 10 years old and a friend showed him pornography.

“I had a friend of mine who had an older brother, and his brother’s room was next to his, and he would go in there one time and say, ‘Hey man, look at these magazines I found from my brother!’ Well, I looked at that stuff when I was a kid and it had a really bad effect on me. And I felt guilty about it; I didn’t know why. I mean, nobody ever told me anything about that and I didn’t tell my parents about it because I didn’t know what to think. I really think that had a bad effect on my life. I never had a problem with pornography after that; it wasn’t that that sunk me into some problem … I do think as a young person, I’ve thought about this a lot, that in some way that it did create in me a little bit, maybe an objectifying of women. I felt later it was something I had to deal with in life that I didn’t have the connection or compassion because we looked at that a decent amount [at age 10], my friend and I did, and then I realized this is not good, it is bad, it makes me feel bad.”

Students at Christian Colleges

Using a broad definition of pornography, that of viewing nudity or sexual images on the Internet, a Christian research team led by Dr. Michael Lastoria of Houghton College found in a nationwide survey of students who attend Christian colleges that pornography use is common. Among male students, 14% viewed pornography monthly, an additional 20% viewed it at least weekly, and 5% more viewed it at least daily. Only 14% never saw pornography. Women on these campuses were far different than the men. Only 3% viewed pornography monthly or more, 80% never saw it. The level of use by women at Christian colleges is far lower than women in the general public.29

When Dr. Lastoria analyzed the data on students at Christian colleges, he found that the more students reported that their life was influenced by their religious beliefs, the less they viewed pornography. This result is part of a pattern of findings we will explore throughout the remainder of this chapter – the more people view their religious beliefs as important to them, and important enough to act upon, the less they watch pornography. In Lastoria’s study, students who cognitively bought in to the mission and culture of their institution were more likely to have their behavior be consistent with that mission. A later study confirmed the finding that internalized religious beliefs go along with less pornography use.30 Related research shows that the more men at evangelical Christian colleges access Internet pornography, the more guilt they experience about their use. In addition, men attending these colleges who do not personally identify as evangelical, look at pornography more hours each week than evangelical men.31

How Deep is The Belief?

Building on the research mentioned above, I conducted a study along with my colleague Andrew Rizzo, looking at pornography use among students at a public university. We explored the relationships between two different kinds of approaches to religion. First, we looked at people with religious practices that were motivated out of self-centered motives (extrinsic). These include participating in religious activities to increase social standing or participating in prayer in order to be happy. Conversely, we looked at those with religious practices anchored in a desire to live out one’s faith, read the sacred texts of one’s religion, and a desire to have one’s beliefs and behavior match (intrinsic). We found that the more men were motivated to be religious because it could help their social standing, the more they also used pornography. The more men and women were motivated to be religious for selfless reasons, desiring to have ones beliefs and behavior match, the less they viewed pornography.32 An even more recent study has very similar findings; both men and women who are religious for selfless reasons are also less likely to use pornography.33

Struggles With Pornography

Christian men who I interviewed for this book often described an active struggle with their pornography use, at least at different times of their lives. Greg noted that his pornography use conflicted with his beliefs as a Christian.

“The person I tried to and said I tried to model my life after [Jesus] said that if you are looking at a woman with lust, it is like you are committing adultery with her. In my mind I’m already damaged goods, like wow, how many times have I done that! It was a dual life. On one side I’m the Christian school kid with all the answers who, like, leads worship, who knocks all the questions out of the park in youth group discussion, yet here I have cultivated this habit my whole life. I was depressed often and I think pornography is intimately involved with that somehow.”

Tommy noted how he would stop using pornography when he got more into his Catholic faith, yet would start using again when a spiritual high wore off. He said,

“I spoke at church camps, whenever I came back from them it was always, like, easy to keep away from it for a time period, because I felt renewed, every time it was a life changing experience. Like they had church everyday and like confession and a bunch of lessons and stuff and it became just apparent that I didn’t need that [pornography]. I didn’t want that and you go back home in the real world and you sink into society again. A few weeks later you just get back into it.” He continued, “I think as far as the negative side goes with it, like, Pope John Paul II had a quote, ‘Pornography is not bad because it shows too much, but that it shows too little of a person.’ I kinda thought about that and it is kinda true. Kinda looking at someone in a way that God doesn’t tell you to look at someone. And you are not looking at them for who they are but what they look like. But I don’t think it will ever, like, go away, because it is, like, human nature. I don’t think it is necessarily wrong to look at it and masturbate because you have that hormone, that desire to look at it.”

Clearly, there are ways in which Tommy’s faith helped him stay away from pornography; yet, he does not fully embrace a Biblical worldview, given his reasoning that it isn’t wrong to look at pornography because he has hormones.

Addiction

Much is said inside and outside Christian circles about whether pornography can be addictive. Most people and scholarly sources I came across argue that it can be and often is.34 In my interview with Dr. Hitchcock, he noted,

“I think some people are more prone to addictive behavior than other people are … if you don’t know who has that [an addictive personality] and the first time or first few times they look at it, it sets this thing off in your brain. Some people have that and they don’t know they have it until they are hooked. That is why you try to keep people away. I don’t think you could ever keep a young man away from seeing that now. I think it is impossible. Cause everyone has that curiosity at least one time just to look.”

Dr. Hitchcock continued,

“This has got the power to totally overtake someone’s life like cocaine or heroin. When you get into any sin you are opening up a bunch of potential consequences and you don’t really know what they are going to be. You could get addicted, it could really mess your wife up, it could mess you up, it could make you not desire your wife any more, it can diminish your sexual satisfaction with your wife, I mean and you don’t know maybe none of those things will happen or something will. This [pornography use] is not right, and when you do it, you will sense that it is not right. No one will have to tell you. You’ll know it is wrong when you are doing it cause you are going to sneak around when you do it. And if somebody walked in, you are not going to want [that person] to see you doing that, so you are going to know it is wrong. The first thing I tell people with anything like that is the reason you don’t want to do this is because it has a bad effect on your relationship with God and that is the most important thing in the world … And so, that is the real issue, it is going to stunt relationship with God and when your relationship with God is not what it should be, everything is going to be affected.”

This realization that using pornography affects one’s relationship with God is something that Ella, an African American woman in her 20s, began to understand after she started looking at pornography. She related,

“Moving closer to God, I realized that it [pornography] is not something to be played with. It is an addiction that can start so innocently and spin outward. It wasn’t something that I thought of as a God thing at first; I just felt it and then I realized how bad I felt and then when I would read the Bible or go to church and my pastor would talk about how he was addicted to porn. It just opened up this world. So, I was like, ‘Wow, just like alcoholism, just like being addicted to cocaine, it is a serious issue for a lot of people and you have to have God on your side to battle it.’”

Similarly, Bob, a Native American 21-year-old college student, noted that pornography affected his relationship with God. “Yes, I just know it is bad. Obviously these women are the daughters of God and you aren’t supposed to look at them that way, that is why I want to stop but I keep, like, going back.” When I asked Bob why he didn’t stop using pornography, he stated, “I think it is an addiction kind of. I kinda use it as a stress relief and that is why I go back.” I asked him if he found a better stress reliever would he be more likely to not use pornography. He said yes.

Herein lies part of a potential strategy for people who want to stop using pornography. One should figure out why they are using it and develop a healthy habit to replace it. Of course, it isn’t good to replace one addiction with another. Yet, one of the best pieces of advice I heard in the interviews I conducted with scholars was from Dr. Hitchcock. He noted that a vibrant spiritual life – reading the Bible, spending time with God’s people, practicing the spiritual disciplines – is the best way to prevent, and come out of, an addiction.

A Swat Team and a Jail Cell

For some men, it takes serious consequences to give up pornography. For Joe, it took a six-month jail sentence. Joe is nearly 70 years old, is a member of a Mainline Protestant denomination, and was arrested for possession and distribution of child pornography. I share most of his story in a later chapter. When I interviewed Joe, he described years of downloading and then sharing pictures of girls through his computer. Obviously, and he admits, this is a more serious matter than looking at adult pornography. The consequences of Joe’s actions caught up with him. He described his first night in jail.

“Man, that night, I just laid there, just what in the world has happened to me, good God I thought I was a Christian, God why have you forsaken me? [He laughed nervously]. Then I realized it wasn’t God who had forsaken me; I had forsaken God. I was almost arrogant about that, [thinking before I was arrested that] ‘God loves me so much that he don’t care what I been doing.’ Well, he showed me how much he cared. But I’m really glad that He did care enough for me; that He give me that chance to redeem myself.” He continued, “When they first arrested me [by storming his house in the middle of the night, guns drawn], I was in jail only 3 or 4 days. I was so devastated when they put me in there, those guys [police] were telling me that I was going to get at least 10 years, and my wife was wanting to hire an attorney for me. And I had already decided that I wasn’t going to do 10 years in jail. I’m old, 10 years is a life sentence, I just figured I was going to die in jail anyway. I decided to kill myself.”

Joe didn’t kill himself. He stopped all viewing of pornography. He spent several months in jail. He told me that getting caught was

“probably the best thing that ever happened to me because being free of this pornography is like finding Jesus all over again … I had never completely turned my life over to Him, I always felt like I was holding back some. I guarantee when I was sitting in that jailhouse that night I turned it over to Him. I don’t have that feeling that I’m holding back on Him anymore. I used to think that, ‘Man, it would be great if I could just completely turn my life over to Christ’ but I didn’t feel like I had ever really done that. Like I said, I prayed the prayer and thought I was saved, but I don’t think I really was.”

Indeed, his use of child pornography is something most people would agree was not only illegal, but morally abhorrent. In time, he came to agree with this perception. Interestingly, part of his coming to understand that what he was doing was wrong involved a change in his religious perspective, from being more selfish to selfless. He described a moment in jail when he was hitting rock bottom. He was very sick and was unable to receive treatment, staying in an overcrowded jail cell with people who wanted to hurt him. He cried out,

“I was praying ‘Lord I am doing everything I know to get out of this, there is nobody in this jail who prays any more or who is trying harder to be who you want them to be than I am!’ But he told me, ‘Joe, this is just a sample of what I went through for you.’”

This marked a turning point for Joe, realizing the grace of God, and deciding to follow him for more intrinsic rather than extrinsic reasons.

Overcoming Addiction and Other Problematic Use

I asked Joe what might have stopped him from looking at pornography before he was arrested. He said,

“I don’t know what would have reached me. One of my big fears was that [my wife] was going to tell the preacher that I was looking at pornography. I’m tempted to tell wives to tell the preacher if their husbands are looking at pornography. I also have a support group and I ask the guys to hold me accountable, and that is a great thing to have is someone to hold you accountable. That is one way you keep from reoffending.”

Greg, a man who identifies as Christian and has been addicted to pornography for at least 10 years, noted how talking with other Christians was helpful to him in his ongoing recovery.

“I had a friend who shared my religious beliefs, who confessed to me that he had struggled with sexual issues like that [pornography] and he had overcome them and he was a different person. I was very interested and I kept asking him about it and he told me he was involved in this Christian counseling program ministry called Pure Life Ministries in Kentucky, this ‘overcomers at home’ thing. I was broken at that point where I saw how helpless I was and for the first time I was willing to do what it took to actually follow Christ and get free of this. So, I enrolled in that program, they were having me read the Bible every day and they were having me pray for other people every day instead of myself. I’d pray for other people, friends, family, anyone else. The idea is that addicts and people like that are pretty self-absorbed. Praying for others helps you be not self-absorbed. There is a spiritual element to that too.”

I asked Dr. Hitchcock what he recommends to people who want to either avoid or stop using pornography. He said,

“I would also tell young people, too, when it comes to sins of the flesh, there is the world, the flesh, and the devil. And the Bible tells us how to deal with each of those kinds of sin. With sins of the flesh, the Bible is consistent always in what it says – flee! Flee youthful lust, flee sexual immorality. You know, Joseph fleeing. It is never stand and fight. When it comes to Satanic opposition it says, having done everything stand, stand firm, stand against the wiles of the devil, it is always hold your ground, stand. When it comes to the sins of the flesh, it never says stand. It says run! You turn that computer on, I’m going to look at this, now I’m going to stand. Well no you are not, man, you’re going down; you have to flee!”

If someone is addicted, Dr. Hitchcock suggests,

“if I had someone come in who was addicted to pornography, I would meet with them first a bit. I think the ultimate answer to that is a vibrant spiritual life, because if you have a vibrant spiritual life that is what is going to allow you to overcome [the addiction]. Just gritting your teeth and trying harder if you are in the clutches of that [won’t work], you have got to fill that with something else. You have got to want to be pure, ‘I want to live the way God wants me to live so I am going to do the spiritual disciplines of reading the Bible and prayer and spending time with my wife and all these different things.’ And then asking God as you are growing spiritually for that desire to diminish and for Him to give you the strength to flee from it.”

Paul, a college student who follows Jesus, mentioned that his pornography addiction had a huge effect on his relationship with God.

“At first I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyways and masturbation came along with that and then after being constantly convicted by God, Himself, and Him pursuing me on a constant basis through it, I got to a point where I was just, I was so captivated by porn and I wanted to get away from it. I couldn’t myself; I had come to a point where I just felt like I didn’t have any control over myself. I would know taking the phone into the bathroom that I would be looking at porn and masturbating and I didn’t want to, but I did and afterward I would just feel worse. I would know that this is affecting my relationship with God, this is affecting future relationships with women that I’m going to have, but I did it anyways. So, I came to a point where I started talking to my Dad about it and reading through books by a man named Joshua Harris called ‘Sex is not the problem, Lust is.’ But through Dad holding me accountable, putting passwords on my iTouch and iPhone, getting different browsers like X3watch, and stuff like that to hold me accountable was huge. Also, after coming to a point where I realized I really have to give up this habitual sin to Christ, it talks about it in Philippians 10 of how strongholds and thresholds that have a hold of you, you have to give up to Christ completely. At first I didn’t really understand, so how in the world am I supposed to put this on someone else? But through learning more and more about my relationship with Jesus and God and growing and learning about who Jesus is and what His purpose on this earth is, and all kind of spiritual growth, it became easier to just let go of it. I still struggle with lust and pornography and it is a daily battle but I know that I’m not in it alone. I’ve got my accountability partners and I’ve got Jesus Christ and again just going back to my growth and relationship with Him has helped because instead of spending so much time looking at porn. It took years to get where I am at now. Just like daily devotionals and quiet times and times in prayer and when I would be tempted, of course, just to call on Him. A big thing for me is Bible verse memorization. It is a big avenue for me because when I am tempted or feel like I have the urges to find some way to look at porn, or like that lustful or lusting after someone, I start to, like, recite verses that I memorized. That would get my mind off it and that has been a huge escape for me. Coming out of it has helped my relationship grow over the long haul and I understand that I will have consequences, even though I am forgiven. But I do know that … I am forgiven and Jesus Christ loves me no matter what and I can go from there.” Paul has gone two years without looking at pornography.

Greg had similar thoughts on fighting an addiction.

“I’d say accountability is one of the main weapons for me; faith is the main weapon. My true self is resurrected in Christ. I see now Christ wins. The old me doesn’t win, pornography doesn’t win, which gives me hope in the fight against addiction and in life in general.”

I asked Dr. Hitchcock what advice he gives to parents about protecting their children from pornography. He mentioned what he did in his own family.

“I’ve talked to my wife about that stuff … I think [it] is important for husbands to help educate their wives about it. There is also a relational element to this, for people who are married, where the husband and wife really need to work together. If you are married, you are one, and it really is a problem for both of you. And the husband needs to educate his wife about it and he needs to help educate the wife about their sons. I just told [my wife] about it, be observant if they are in … [their] room a lot on their computer, or whatever, just know that they may not be looking at a video game.”

Concluding Thought

From the research and viewpoints gathered for this chapter, several themes come up. First, people who are more devout tend to use pornography less. In fact, research on adolescents shows that the more religious they are, the less intentional and accidental exposure they have to pornography.35 Second, connecting with a faith community and living out one’s faith can be helpful in overcoming problematic use of pornography. Finally, when people do sink more deeply into pornography, many describe that as an experience that harms their religious or spiritual side.