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“What's the Problem with Porn?”
Categories: M. W. Bassford, Meditations
In recent days, my daughter’s reading tastes have begun to shift from tween lit to young-adult fiction. Though I’m not sorry to say goodbye to the likes of Dork Diaries, this shift also awakens some unease in my wife and me. We know that YA fic has become increasingly racy in recent years, and in any event, it won’t be long before the advent of physical maturity exposes both of my children to the temptations of pornography.
To say the least, the struggle against porn has not gone well for God’s people over the past several decades. Few indeed are the Christian men these days who haven’t had problems with porn. Increasingly, though, smut salesmen have figured out how to peddle their wares to women too. Take, for instance, the hot new Netflix series Bridgerton, which is perhaps best described as pornography dressed up like Jane Austen. Men are hardly the target audience there!
In the face of this onslaught, the old standby argument of lust-is-a-sin-so-don’t-use-porn, though true, has proven inadequate. If we want to safeguard ourselves and our children from pornography, we have to arrive at a more profound understanding than that. Porn use isn’t merely a problem because it violates a thou-shalt-not. It’s a problem because it subverts and corrupts God’s intent for human sexuality.
We should pay much more attention than we do to the fact that in Ephesians 5:31-32, Paul by the Holy Spirit compares the one-flesh relationship between husband and wife to the relationship between Christ and the church. It’s commonplace for ministers performing a wedding to describe marriage as sacred, but most Christians, even married Christians, don’t want to contemplate the sacredness of marital intimacy.
Like all of God’s handiwork, it is nourishing, affirming, and life-giving (in many senses). As husband and wife grow spiritually and in their relationship with each other, their delight in coming together grows too. In the affection, understanding, and trust of the marriage bed, we expose ourselves completely, body, heart, and soul, and we rejoice to find ourselves known and loved regardless. This is perhaps the closest we can come on earth to experiencing what it is like to be seen and known and loved by God.
Godly sexuality is one of His most beautiful creations, so we should not be surprised that Satan hates it and yearns to destroy it. His malice is evident in unhappy marriages, in sexual immorality, and increasingly in enslavement to pornography. Like all that Satan does, these things are counterfeits of the original, having the appearance of God’s good work without its reality.
This is most obvious with porn. Immorality at least involves a one-flesh experience with somebody, but porn use doesn’t involve anybody. Pleasure is present, but intimacy is always, devastatingly, absent. Porn does not create, for it is sterile. It does not enrich, for it is empty. It does not unite, for it is lonely.
Pornography certainly existed 2000 years ago (witness the frescoes that have been unearthed in the brothels of Pompeii), but Paul never could have used it to illustrate the relationship between Christ and the church. That relationship is fundamentally selfless. Christ surrendered everything to His bride in death; she surrenders everything to Him in life. So too, God intends for husbands and wives to surrender everything to one another in the intimacy of marriage (of which sexual intimacy is both a part and an analog).
By contrast, porn is selfish. You have no thought for anyone else; it’s entirely about you. Thus, the porn user falls prey to the great paradox of selfishness. There is great joy in serving others, but there is no joy in serving the self. Instead, selfishness hollows us out like a worm in an apple.
There are no happy, contented, flourishing porn users. No one returns repeatedly to that first picture, that first video, finding it ever more fulfilling than it was the first time. Instead, the pleasures of porn swiftly begin to pall. What was once captivating quickly becomes boring, and so the porn user (or, by this time, more properly “porn addict”) begins a futile, frantic search to rediscover what they have lost.
Over time, they turn to depictions that are ever more shocking and extreme, but more and more, those things offer less and less. They learn that the hardness of heart caused by sin is most of all a problem for the sinner. Eventually, the greatest depravity that the Internet has to offer elicits scarcely a quiver, but still the addict continues, miserable but hoping desperately that what they find with the next swipe, the next mouse click, will help them feel something again.
Sadly, the addict becomes insensible not only to evil but also to good. In training themselves to focus on seeming rather than substance, they lose the ability to appreciate union with their spouse. In marriage, physical attraction is only the tip of the iceberg, but if all you care about is physical attraction, no flesh-and-blood spouse can compete with the airbrushed impossibility available online. Living waters flow from following God’s design in marriage, but the addict returns futilely to the broken cistern of pornography, hoping to find there what it never can offer.
Such a combination of misery and enslavement always has a diabolical origin, but anyone who truly wants to be free can conquer through Christ. The road out of porn addiction, as with any addiction, is long and difficult, but escape is possible.
It is far better for all of us, though, to learn to see the trap surrounding the bait before we take that first bite. We need wisdom to avoid the snare that Satan has laid, and we also need courage to teach others about it. Sex is nobody’s favorite topic in Bible class or at the dinner table, but the more we emphasize the joys of obedience and the dangers of sin, the more likely we are to evade temptation.
This article originally appeared in the March issue of Pressing On.
