Porn addiction

I. Porn Addiction

Recently I’ve been asked about how Christians should deal with porn addiction. Since this is an issue of general interest and importance to the Christian community, I’ll do a post on the subject.

I don’t claim to be an expert on how to deal with the problem. I’m just offering my advice for what it’s worth. Commenters are welcome to improve on what I’ve said. However, I’m not interested in remarks by commenters who simply take offense at my even attempting a frank discussion of the issue. And I’m also not interested in commenters who can’t bring themselves to have a grown-up discussion of grown-up problems. Comments like that will be summarily deleted.

In preparing to write this, I Googled some Christian websites to see what they have to say on the subject. One or two of them said some of the things I’d say, but a number of them were less than generous about dispensing free advice. Instead, they want to sell their services.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Some porn addicts may need professional counseling. However, I also suspect that, in some cases, professional counseling, like so much psychotherapy, is an expensive, open-ended commitment which can drag on for months or years without solving the problem. It’s just someone to talk to while the meter is running.

This post is not addressed to professing believers who don’t think there’s anything wrong with pornography. There’s probably nothing I can say that would persuade them to the contrary, so I won’t even try. Instead, this post is addressed to Christians who recognize the problem, and want some guidance on how to deal with it.

This post is written from a male perspective because I have a firsthand knowledge of male psychology.

It’s well-known that porn addiction has become a problem in the church. That’s hardly surprising. In the age of DVDs and the Internet, it’s easier than ever to anonymously indulge in pornographic lust.

Is this a scandalous situation for the church? Yes and no. It’s scandalous in the sense that pornography is contrary to Christian ethics. However, Christian men are sinners, too. Christian men are wired the same way as other men. So this phenomenon doesn’t come as a shocking development—especially when many Christian men developed their addiction before they came to Christ.

Someone might object that it’s scandalous because Christians are held to a higher standard. Actually, we’re not. God holds everyone to the same moral standard. It’s just that Christians acknowledge the standard.

Someone might also object that it’s scandalous because it’s hypocritical. That’s true, but from God’s perspective, a hypocritical sinner is no worse than a shameless sinner. Suppose you’re a porn addict who doesn’t pretend to be a Christian. Well, that may absolve you of hypocrisy, but that doesn’t absolve you of sin.

So there’s no reason for the church to engage in ritual self-flagellation about the scandal of porn addiction in the church. Rather, the church has a special mission to address this sin, since the role of the church is to address sin generally.

Christians have the same problems as everyone else. The difference is that we have spiritual resources that unbelievers do not.

II. Secret Sins

One thing that makes porn addiction difficult for Christians to cope with is that, as a practical matter, it tends to be a very private sin since there’s a debilitating stigma that attaches to porn addiction. Take a pastor who’s addicted to porn. Who’s he supposed to turn to? If he tells his wife, she may divorce him. If he confesses his sin to his congregation or his ecclesiastical peers or superiors, he may lose his job.

So it poses a dilemma. It’s not a sin that we can easily conquer all by ourselves, but it doesn’t feel safe to share our problem with others. Especially those in authority, since the authority figures are the very people in a position to sanction us if we confess our secret sin. Kind of like turning yourself into the authorities. This isolation exacerbates the sense of being trapped in your addiction, with now way out. I’ll deal with this dilemma in section IV.

III. Wrong Turns

What are some misguided ways to deal with porn addiction?

1. Monasticism

Traditionally, one way to deal with various temptations, whether sexual or otherwise, was through the suppression of pleasure. Deny your desires.

While there’s a grain of truth to this, which I’ll come to later, as a general program this is counterproductive. When you deny your natural desires, including perfectly legitimate pleasures, you fuel temptation. You pour gasoline on temptation.

2. Quietism

A more recent way of dealing with temptation, which is popular in charismatic circles, is to expect a quick fix. If you just pray to God to take away your sinful desire, or receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, or have a faith-healer cast out the demon of lust, then you will be cured.

Like monasticism, this is also counterproductive. It sets up a false expectation. And many men have left the faith because they tried the Pentecostal shortcuts, and the “solutions” didn’t solve the problem. So they became disillusioned.

BTW, I’m not commenting on charismatic theology in general, or its more respectable and responsible exponents (e.g. Craig Keener, Gordon Fee).

Rather, I’m talking about the pop version of charismatic theology peddled by Televangelists.

IV. Coping With Porn Addiction

So how should a Christian who struggles with porn addiction try to wean himself of that obsessive-compulsive disorder?

1. Never Despair!

Some professing believers give up the fight because they see so little progress. I’m not talking about porn addiction in particular. Just generally, there are professing believers who become so discouraged in their battle with some temptation or another that they eventually leave the faith altogether.

Here I’d introduce my cardinal rule: never despair, never give up!

Why do I say that? Because despair is futile, and futility is futile.

If you stay in the game, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

If you throw in the towel, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

If you turn your back on the Christian faith and die in unbelief, you will go to hell. So what good did that do you?

No matter how often you face a spiritual setback, the alternative to perseverance is guaranteed to be a losing proposition.

So even if it feels like one step forward and two steps back, that’s far better than taking the expressway to hell. The only way you’re sure to fail is to drop out of the race before the finish line.

2. Moderation

i) We sometimes create artificial problems for ourselves by imposing artificial standards or unrealistic expectations on ourselves. It’s futile to overcome a natural desire. You can channel a natural desire, but you can’t suppress it.

ii) In men, the visual sense is a dominant feature of sexual attraction and arousal. There are some practical reasons for this. Round hips and breast development signal sexual maturity in a woman. That’s why men find these features appealing. It’s a way of distinguishing a potential mate from a prepubescent girl. We want men to be able to draw that distinction!

To some extent it also distinguishes a woman in her childbearing years from a woman who is past her childbearing years. That, too, is practical.

iii) At an imaginative level, the visual sense also has a tactical component. What it would feel like to run your hand down those smooth, soft contours.

iv) There are other features that men find physically appealing in women that are not as easy to explain on a purely functional basis, viz. a certain complexion, or eye color, or hair texture, or full lips, or high cheekbones, or long, shapely legs, or dulcet voice.

Here the appeal is purely aesthetic, albeit distinctively feminine, and figures in the more generally mysterious question of why we find anything beautiful. Why we find certain colors and symmetries appealing. To some extent there is no ultimate explanation for this. It’s just the way we were made.

v) But it also goes to the fact that a woman is more than woman. A woman is an ideal. A woman represents the Church. And God has programmed men idealize women because a woman is emblematic of something even greater than herself. Woman as metaphor.

At one level, there’s a ridiculous quality to a lot of love poetry. The sonnets of Shakespeare and Donne. It’s so out of proportion to the actual object. But there’s a reason for that. A theological reason. A reason that God has encoded in the male psyche. Subliminal theology.

I assume that’s why we traditionally dress the bride as if she’s a queen. For, theologically speaking, every woman is a queen—as a token of the Church she represents. The Bride of Christ.

Evolutionary psychology is unable to explain this. Only Christian theology can explain it.

vi) This isn’t limited to women. There’s a symbolic dimension to the natural world in general. That’s why the Bible uses so many natural objects to illustrate spiritual truths.

vii) Should a teenage boy enjoy looking at Jeri Ryan in a cat suit? This strikes me as a fairly innocent pleasure. The boy is forming a feminine ideal. That’s a necessary stage in his maturation.

The problem occurs when a man is unable to reconcile his ideal with reality. The ideal should prepare him for marriage. But he needs to distinguish woman qua woman from woman qua metaphor.

A woman points to something beyond herself. But you don’t marry the metaphor, you marry the woman. You need to value the woman qua woman.

To take a comparison I‘ve used before, human fathers symbolize God. That’s why dad is a godlike figure to a young son. But a son needs to outgrow that aspect of filial devotion. If he can’t transfer that aspect of filial devotion from his father to God, he will remain in a state of arrested development.

Of course, a married man can still appreciate the beauty of a beautiful woman. But he needs to keep that in check—unless it’s his own spouse.

viii) When counseling young men, we need to avoid alarmist rhetoric. It’s like those old cautionary shows about Reefer Madness and “this is your brain on drugs.”

It’s true that if a teenage boy dabbles in pornography, he may end up being the next Ted Bundy. But that’s extremely rare. Most boys who dabble in pornography don’t become the next Ted Bundy. It’s fine to mention that danger, but if we overemphasize the worse-case scenario, we lose credibility.

We need to make our case by using more modestly prudential arguments. Pornography can do a lot of harm short of turning you into a serial killer. For one thing, it brutalizes woman involved in the sex trade. For another, it nurses an unobtainable and often twisted ideal which an ordinary woman cannot fulfill and should not fulfill.

Pinup girls are unobtainable women, and even if they were obtainable, many of them are so vain and jaded that they would make terrible wives.

ix) Having said that, I’d hasten to add that the danger of romanticizing the opposite sex cuts both ways. There are men who have reason to be dissatisfied with their marriage. For there are women who hold men to impossible standards. And there are women who don’t know what it means to be a woman. Their own preconceptions of masculinity and femininity are drawn from the pop culture. From all that’s decadent and depraved. There’s a need for renewal on both sides of the coin.

x) On a related issue, I can’t help noticing that a many women invest a lot of money in their appearance (e.g. clothes, hairdo, make-up, jewelry), yet have no idea of what’s attractive to a man. I’m not talking about woman who don’t care about their appearance. I’m talking about women who are very conscious of their appearance, who want to be physically attractive to the opposite sex, but it doesn’t occur to them to consult the opposite sex about what is attractive to the opposite sex.

Instead, they simply imitate other women, imitate modern movie stars and TV stars and pop vocalists and anorexic fashion models in teenybopper magazines or Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues.

It’s really rather odd, when you think about it. They want to attract a man, but they don’t ask what a man finds attractive. They simply dress according to the latest fashion statement. And keep in mind that many fashion designers are queer, so they lack any real appreciation for the feminine form. Instead, they prefer androgynous young women who look like adolescent boys.

For the moment I’m not saying if a woman should dress to attract a man. That’s up to her. Rather, I’m making the point if that you are going to go to all that time and expense, it wouldn’t hurt to find out what kind of make-up and hairdo and attire the average man likes in a woman. To take one example, you’ll never see a poster of a scrawny, bony girl inside a boy’s locker.

If you want an example of what normal men find physically appealing in women, look at some of the movie stars from the 30s and 40s.

To take another example, I notice that some women wear high-heels with a pants suit. But wearing a pair of pants defeats the purpose of wearing high-heels. If you’re going to don a pair of stilettos, wear a skirt. That’s the point.

A lot of contemporary young women also don’t seem to realize that, in many cases, less is more and more is less. Unless you have a figure like Cher or J-Lo or Marlene Dietrich or Sophia Loren, maximum exposure is not all that appealing. And even beautiful women appreciate the value of good tailoring to improve on Mother Nature.

Once again, I’m not suggesting that a woman should be a clotheshorse, like Alexis in Dynasty. And we also live in a time when too many women dress too provocatively. There’s a happy mean between dressing like an Amish milkmaid and dressing like a streetwalker.

xi) On a related note, some women try hard to look pretty when they’re dating, but let themselves go after marriage. In that event, it’s not surprising if this makes a husband more observant of the competition.

Of course, that cuts both ways. One can also see out of shape men married to shapely women. And one can also see couples in which neither spouse is concerned with how he or she looks. That’s fine, because it’s by mutual agreement.

In general, though, it wouldn’t hurt most couples to resemble the individual at the altar—when they tied the knot. You don’t have to look like Tyra Banks. Just look like the woman he married, and vice versa. A husband and wife shouldn’t forget how to be a bride and groom. What they woke up to on their honeymoon.

We should try to be whatever our spouse saw in us at the outset. That’s why our spouse chose to marry us. What drew the one to the other. That, of course, goes beyond appearances, but if appearance was a factor, it should not be neglected or taken for granted.

3. Starvation

If you have an addiction, you need to starve it rather than feed it. That should be obvious. And that’s the grain of truth in monasticism.

Of course, it isn’t sufficient to starve your addiction. There’s no one thing that will sanctify your desires. We need to do several things at once.

4. Substitute Pleasures

i) Beyond starving an addiction, we need to change our diet. Substitute licit pleasures for illicit pleasures. By itself, starvation makes you hungrier, not less so. So you need something to fill that empty stomach.

Do something sexy with your spouse, like take up pair skating or Latin ballroom dancing. Not only is that good exercise, but it’s very romantic. Generates a lot of heat—in more ways than one!

ii) I think that one reason some marriages fail is that couples often put a lot more effort into attracting a mate than keeping a mate. Once they’ve tied the knot, they feel as if they now have their spouse safely in their corner. So it’s easy to become complacent and neglectful.

I think it would be a good idea for more couples to keep dating after they’re married. To keep doing the things they did with each other when they were trying to attract a mate. (This has reference to Christian dating, where premarital sex is not an option.)

iii) On a more general note, if you’re unhappy, you’re more susceptible to temptation. The temptation may be symptomatic of a general unease. Dissatisfaction about your life in general. Itchy and restless.

Not that we can expect to be happy all the time. Life has its dry spells.

iv) A sense of humor is also a great preservative in a relationship. If you don’t have one, work on it.

5. Accountability Relationships

i) As many 12-step programs have discovered, knowing someone who shares your struggle can make it easier for you to resist temptation. If you’re a porn addict who’s trying to kick the habit, it’s helpful to have a few others friends who are trying to kick the habit, too—friends you can turn to at any time, day or night, if the urge becomes overwhelming. Friends you can call anytime. Friends you can see anytime. Go over to their house.

Because you’re both in the same boat, there’s less danger that they will betray your confidence. If their secret is safe with you, then your secret is safe with them.

There is one potential downside to this. If your friend goes off the wagon, he may try to drag you down with him. So sometimes you may need to keep your distance.

ii) This also goes to a general issue: our society fosters the silly notion that your spouse can supply all of your emotional needs. That’s romantic nonsense.

It’s important to maintain some other relationships, with parents, siblings, and old friends. Temptation is more likely to strike when we’re alone or lonely.

6. Besetting Sins

To struggle with sin is a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s a sign of life. Spiritual vitality.

I once read a writer say that what makes a man a saint is not his virtues, but his vices. What he meant is that what makes a man a saint is how he copes with his weaknesses.

7. Means of Grace

By the means of grace I mean things like the Bible, Christian fellowship, prayer, Christian music, and other suchlike.

Some readers may wonder why it took me so long to get around to the spiritual stuff. That’s because a lot of Christian writers jump right into the spiritual stuff. They begin and end with that, to the neglect of other considerations.

But we need to remember that this is God’s world. God’s handiwork. It’s not as if natural goods are unspiritual.

As we struggle with sin, it’s useful to read about the struggles of those who’ve gone before us. To read about the heroes of the faith in the OT. To read Christian biographies.

It’s also edifying to read the Psalms, with their emotional candor, turmoil, and deliverance. Two good devotional commentaries on select Psalms are:

Alex Motyer, Treasures of the King: Psalms from the Life of David

O. Palmer Robertson, Psalms in Congregational Celebration

8. Diary

If I were a younger man, I’d try to keep a diary. The providence of God is often a subtle, evolving thing. The emerging pattern can only be discerned in retrospect. If more Christians kept diaries, which they reviewed from time to time, I suspect that more Christians would be more aware of God’s oblique guidance in their lives. Of how he blessed them by providing various opportunities and delivering them in various ways.