The pornographic church

1. In my observation, evangelical leaders who support the suspension of public worship during the pandemic use three arguments.

i) All things being equal, Christians have a duty to obey civil authorities. This prima facie civic duty can be overridden, but the pandemic is not one of the exceptions to the norm.

ii) It's permissible to temporarily suspend public worship to avoid gratuitous risk of infecting others with a life-threatening pathogen. 

iii) We're under obligation not to expose others to a life-threatening pathogen.

(ii)-(iii) are independent of (i). Some churches suspended public worship voluntarily.

2. One problem is that (ii) and (iii) are contradictory. (iii) is an argument from principle. It's intrinsically wrong to put others at gratuitous risk of contracting a potentially life-threatening pathogen. In this case, social events of a particular size. 

But if that's the argument, then the logic of the principle is open-ended. That demands an indefinite suspension of public worship. Christians are obligated to forgo church for the duration of the pandemic. The obligation is not that it's permissible to expose the public to the pathogen so long as you temporarily practice social distancing, then discontinue social distancing after a specified time regardless of whether the pandemic has subsided. 

So (iii) is an open-ended commitment that obviates (ii). The suspension of public worship will only be as temporary as the pandemic. 

3. Another complication is that if you subscribe to (i), then you ceded to civil authorities the determination of when it's safe to return to church. Civil authorities determine when it's no longer too risky.

4. A further complication is that if public worship remains in abeyance beyond a certain duration, churches will be permanently closed because they weren't taking in enough revenue to pay the overhead. 

5. So (ii) is based on luck. Maybe we'll get lucky and the pandemic will shortly subside. 

6. An additional problem is the precedent which (i) & (iii) establish. I'm no expert, but from what I've read, medical authorities have been warning for years that we may be on the bring of reentering the age of pandemics due to the increasing emergence of superbugs. Even if we develop a vaccine for COVID-19, it may evolve a resistant strain that outsmarts the vaccine. And there are other pathogens hovering in the wings. Other superbugs which may spawn pandemics.  

If pandemics become intermittent, have evangelical denominations acquiesced to a policy of the chronic, indefinite suspension of public worship for the duration of the pandemic du jour? To be determined by civil authorities? Maybe we'll get lucky. If not, what kind of paint thinner will they use to extricate themselves from the corner they painted themselves into?

7. On a related note, there's a striking parallel between virtual worship and virtual sex. Evangelicals condemn pornography and sexbots as an unacceptable substitute for real sex. Sex is supposed to be an essentially social dynamic between real people, face-to-face. A personal encounter. But that's what's missing in virtual worship, too.

Yet during the pandemic, evangelical critics of pornography and sexbots are using the electronic church as a substitute for public worship. This is justified on the grounds of minimizing the risk of disease transmission.

But why is risk-free worship obligatory while risk-free sex is prohibitory? Pornography and sexbots eliminate the risk of transmitting STDs, unplanned pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and the treacherous emotional entanglements of intimacy between real men and women. 

BTW, although I'm no expert, I don't think Christian marriage precludes the possibility of STDs. That's because many Christians are converts who had a sexual history before their conversion. So they can bring STDs into a marriage from a priori history of premarital sex and promiscuity. 

If the argument is that we have a duty not to risk infecting other people, why is virtual sex impermissible while virtual worship is permissible? Isn't a steady diet of electronic worship ecclesiastical pornography? There are exceptions, like the situation of shut-ins, but I'm not referring to special cases. 

7. Evangelicals need to develop a theology of risk. Humans constantly make risk-benefit assessments. As I recently noted:

i) Due to human mortality, men and women routinely assume calculated gratuitous risks. Playing many sports carries the risk of permanent injury, sometimes physical or mental incapacitation, or even death. Because they know that death is inevitable, they gamble the future on the present. 

ii) Having kids is risky. Your kid might die of cancer. Or your teenager might become a hopeless drug addict, die from an overdose or commit suicide? Or your child might be damned. Or your wife might have a miscarriage. Why take that risk if you don't have to?

iii) Childbearing used to be very hazardous for mothers. Many died in childbirth. Should wives before the advent of modern medical science refuse sex with their husband after child #3? 

iv) As I explained in my post on Jas 5:14-15, it was hazardous to elders to anoint the sick. Are the elders in Jas 5:14-15 foolish because they didn't practice social distancing? They exposed themselves to the sick through direct physical contact. They could infect the sick (in their already weakened condition) with their own diseases. And they could infect their families when they went back home after doing visitation ministry with the sick. 

iv) This is in part about freedom. Freedom to attend church or freedom to boycott church. The problem is when we create a society that revolves around hypochondriacs. 

Masturbation and prostate cancer

Typically progressives don't have a problem with pornography or masturbation. In fact, typically they encourage watching porn and masturbating.

Hence when men struggling with these encourage one another to abstain from watching porn and masturbation (e.g. No Nut November, NoFap), progressives are triggered. Others may be triggered as well, but progressives especially.

One argument progressives bring up is that if men don't watch porn and masturbate, then they'll have an increased risk of prostate cancer:

1. At the risk of stating the obvious, porn and masturbation are separable. One could masturbate without watching porn.

2. However, even on progressive terms, it's not really about masturbation but ejaculation. A man can be happily married and engaging in regular sex with his wife. He should be routinely ejaculating in a marriage with regular sex.

3. By contrast, one big reason men encourage one another to abstain from watching porn and masturbating is because these men realize it's causing them to lose control over their lives. They've become losers. Coomers. So these struggling guys want to turn away from watching porn and masturbating. They want to regain control over their lives. They want to seek a real woman with whom to have a relationship with and hopefully marry. Are progressives against men seeking long-term romantic relationships with women? Are progressives against couples getting married?

4. As far as the medical science behind the idea that frequent masturbation lowers the risk for prostate cancer, see UpToDate:

   An association between ejaculatory frequency and a lower risk of prostate cancer has been suggested in two case-control studies:

   • In a study which compared men under the age of 70 who had prostate cancer with age-matched controls, men who had five or more ejaculations per week while in their 20s (but not their 30s or 40s) had a significantly lower risk of prostate cancer (odds ratio 0.66) than those who had fewer ejaculations [148].

   • A report from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study compared men who developed prostate cancer (n = 3839) with controls of a similar age group who had similar ejaculatory frequency but no prostate cancer [149]. On multivariable analysis, the incidence of prostate cancer was significantly reduced for men having more than 21 ejaculations per month compared with those with 4 to 7 ejaculations per month between ages 20 and 29 years (HR 0.81, 95% CI 0.72-0.92). The HR for those reporting more than 21 versus 4 to 7 ejaculations per month between ages 40 and 49 years was 0.78 (95% CI 0.69-0.89).

   The validity of this relationship has been called into question because of the lack of association of prostate cancer with ejaculation frequency in older men and the fact that other studies have failed to show a protective effect from being married or having more sexual partners [150]. Moreover, the problem of recall bias also casts doubt on the interpretation of studies that use this methodology.

Struggling With Pornography And Assurance Of Salvation

I just posted this on Facebook. Anybody who wants to add comments here can do so, or you can post on my Facebook page.

Here's something I recently wrote to a Christian struggling with pornography and assurance of salvation. I'm posting it with his permission, and I hope it will be helpful to other people. If anybody wants to add to what I've said below, you can do that in the comments section of this thread if you want. It could be helpful to this individual and others looking on if those of you who have anything to add will do so. Here's what I wrote:

Beach preaching

1. There's been an explosion of Christian material on pornography. But from what I've read, there's a lack of clarity in how the issued is delineated. Many of the stock arguments are weak arguments. In fairness, people can sometimes instinctively sense that something is wrong, even though they don't have a readymade arguments at their fingertips. But some sifting is in order. If you use bad arguments, there are people who can see through bad arguments, and that's counterproductive.

Admittedly, I haven't done in-depth study of the issue. It doesn't interest me that much. And there's such a plethora of material on the subject in Christian circles that it's hard to know where to start to derive a representative sample of the arguments. 

Pornographic imagination

Many evangelical pastors and parachurch organizations refer to the perils of porn addiction. The unexamined assumption is that porn is primarily a masculine vice. However, Jordan Peterson has discussed the neglected fact that many women are avid consumers of pornography. Peterson differentiates between visual pornography, which appeals to men, and literary pornography, which appeals to women. Men are attracted to direct imagery whereas women are attracted to graphic verbal descriptions or tales of seduction. For instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xJqWXKyhlc

A pornographic imagination isn't distinctive to men. Both men and women are susceptible. The difference is the medium. 

"Locker room banter"

I've seen two different reactions to Trump's "locker room banter"

Some male commentators say Trump isn't representative of how men talk to other men about women.

Other male commentators say Trump is representative of how men talk to other men about women.

I think some male commentators are speaking defensively.

A problem with the claim is that I doubt we can generalize. Obviously there are men who talk that way and then there are men who don't. Age can also be a factor. 

An older relative once told me something her husband related to her when he was in the service, during WWII. He said there were two kinds of men in his unit: men who wrote letters to their girlfriends back home every day. Then there were men who spoke in the crudest terms about women.

Implication being: some of the men were devoted to a particular woman. That's what they were hoping to come back to after the war. The other men were horndogs. 

Trump's sexual ethics are just what you'd expect from men without Christian restraint or sanctity. And, traditionally, the Christian faith has been a moderating influence on the general culture, even among unbelievers. 

But, of course, the culture is under assault from secularists. So men are reverting. And not just men. 

BTW, I'm not suggesting that Christian men are immune. In a culture where pornography is just a mouse-click away, I daresay precious few men, inside or outside the church, are untainted. 

Private Depravity

Here's something I saw linked by Tim Challies yesterday. It's about pornography use among teenagers and how ignorant parents often are about it. Here are some lines that stood out to me:

"32% of boys and 18% of girls have seen bestiality online. 39% of boys and 23% of girls have seen sexual bondage online. 83% of boys and 57% of girls have seen group sex online."

I realize that watching bestiality videos doesn't prove that a person is attracted to sex with animals, but watching such videos is something that should be avoided, for many reasons, even if sexual attraction to animals isn't involved. For one thing, watching such videos lowers people's opposition to bestiality, even if they don't practice it or desire to practice it themselves. Popularizing bestiality videos is part of the pathway to popularizing mainstream acceptance of bestiality. The same mindset that leads people to become increasingly accepting of fornication, pornography, homosexuality, and other sexual perversions can lead them in a lot of other directions as well.

How long will it be before political leaders and other figures in our culture start having sex scandals involving animals rather than humans? How much longer, after that, will it take for the people who criticize them to be accused of being judgmental, mean-spirited, prudes, etc.? And take a guess at which political party will lead the way.

In a society in which people openly build up a national debt of almost twenty trillion dollars, celebrate same-sex marriage, have tens of millions of abortions, engage in sexual practices leading to more than one hundred million infections of sexually transmitted diseases, etc., imagine how much worse they are in the more private parts of their lives. And not all of that will remain private. It will get pushed out into the larger society more and more.

Stop Exaggerating The Temptation To Pornography

The more secular a society becomes, the more likely it is to become more trivial and more vulgar as well. That's the fruit of secularism.

Yesterday, Tim Challies linked a BreakPoint story about recent Barna research on pornography use. You can find a summary of the study's findings here. Among other statistics, a majority of married men say that they view pornography at least once a month. The numbers are broken down into age groups, and there's sometimes a significant difference from one age group to another. But in almost all of the age groups of both men and women, less than 10% say they never view pornography. Given that "never" is ambiguous, since it could allow for past pornography viewing among people who haven't been viewing it more recently, the percentage who have never viewed pornography at any point in their lives probably is even smaller than the percentage who selected the "never" answer.

Support For Same-Sex Marriage Associated With Support For Other Forms Of Sexual Immorality

Andrew Walker has a good post at National Review about how professing Christians who support same-sex marriage also have anti-Biblical views on other sexual issues. Take a look at the chart in his post. Notice how radically immoral "Gay and Lesbian non-Christians" are. That's not the focus of Walker's post, but it deserves some attention. Even the professing Christian homosexuals have remarkably high levels of support for other forms of sexual immorality. Contrast those study results to the image of homosexuals portrayed by the media, Hollywood, etc.

Hope for Carl Trueman: “When chess beats lingerie models”

Carl Trueman has recently lamented the rise of pornography in our culture, but perhaps we’ve reached a moment of common grace in which the vacuous nature of it is admitted not to be able to satisfy the deeper intellectual needs of male audiences around the world.

It appears as if the current World Chess Championship (between champion Viswanathan Anand of India and Magnus Carlsen of Norway) is garnering higher viewership on the GQ site than is a photo spread featuring Victoria’s Secret models.

Fully 700,000 viewers tuned in when NRK started up its live broadcasts during the weekend, reported media website Kampanje. Even though the games going on in Chennai, India begin mid-morning in Norway (10:30am local time), NRK is claiming strong viewership in a country of just 5 million people….

India has seen massive coverage itself in all media outlets as expected, but going beyond the plain game summaries….

Still, the story that stood out far beyond any other, was reported by GQ Magazine. GQ is a specialized magazine for men’s fashion and style, and recently published a massive photoshoot of 100 models in Victoria Secrets lingerie….

That it was massively popular is no surprise, but what was a surprise, as tweeted by GQ itself, was that this story was losing out to another story posted the same day. You guessed it: the world chess championship….

I am glad to see that a real confessional Presbyterian has finally joined the discussion at First Things. Perhaps that is an admission that their Friday regular is not a real Protestant? That, too, would be a common grace.

The Children Parents Are Raising

Tim Challies just linked to a couple of pages that tell us a lot about our culture. Here's an infographic about Millennials, "American teens and twenty-somethings currently making the passage into adulthood". Here are some statistics on pornography and teenagers.

Obamanation: mainstreaming kiddy porn

"DAG Nominee David Ogden and Knox v. United States"