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Why are conservative, high-control Christians in America so fixated on pornography? Why do they think it represents an apocalyptic menace, threating to destroy the institution of the family, the church, and society itself? What is it about the subculture of high-control religion that explains this perspective in a time when pornography use is more widespread and mainstream, and less taboo, then it has ever been? Listen in this week as Dan offers his thoughts on these issues.
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It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Delighted, as always, to be back with you, especially after a couple weeks.
Had some time off for the holidays and the new year, but I am back and glad to be so.
Want to thank everybody who's been reaching out with ideas, solicited a few episodes ago, still interested in this.
If you want to email me, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, or look in the Discord.
Two topics that I want to talk about coming up are questions you weren't allowed to ask in church.
And if you're into Christian apologetics or you've got an Uncle Ron in your life who comes at you with sort of arguments about the existence of God or something like that, and you've got questions or comments about something related to that, I want to know those things.
Put it in the subject header so that I know to take a look.
I've been collecting those.
I'm going to be trying to spin those out into some episodes in the future.
I want to thank everybody who listens, everybody who gives feedback, all of you with the ideas and comments and feedback on episodes, everybody who supports us by subscribing in all the different ways.
You know how much we appreciate it.
We cannot do it without you.
Really excited to start this new year, excited for chances to talk about some cool things, excited for new events in the future, excited to get to talk with all of you.
Having said that, I want to dive into today's episode.
We are still in this kind of series I've been calling We've Got to Talk About the Sex Stuff, looking at issues related to sexuality and gender within high-control American religion and conservative Christianity.
And if you've been following the series, you know we've talked about some of the most basic issues, specifically issues related to conceptions of male and female sexuality.
Spent a long time talking about the purpose of sex within high-control religion and why I think that the understanding they have is not convincing.
Today, I want to look at a topic that I think builds off of these foundations.
And another warning here, as with a lot of things in this particular series, probably not a topic that's appropriate for younger visitors.
Maybe not the kind of thing you want, you know, other people in the school drop-off line to hear when you open the door and let out your kid.
I don't know.
To each their own, but just fair warning.
The topic today is porn.
And specifically, not just porn or the consumption of pornography, but the fixation on porn within high-control religious circles.
And I want to note here, Samuel Perry, Sam Perry, a sociologist, friend of the show, has been on here, used his work a lot on Christian nationalism.
He also wrote a book called Addicted to Lust that looks at this issue of...
The sort of focus on pornography within conservative American Protestantism.
I just want to give a shout-out about his book because it does inform a lot of what I'm going to be saying today, and I just want folks to know that and invite you to go take a look if that's a topic that you're interested in.
And why are we talking about this?
We're talking about it because if you grew up within these religious circles, if you grew up being indoctrinated into purity culture, whether it went by that name or not, If you grew up listening to sermons about threats to the cis-hetero nuclear family, if you grew up listening to the teachings of James Dobson and Focus on the Family,
if you grew up with the general views of sexuality that we've been talking about in this series, you will have learned about one of the central threats to godly sexuality, a threat to the family, a threat to the social order itself, and that is pornography.
And I argued in an earlier episode, kind of the opening episode of this, that while conservative, high-control Christians often present themselves as presenting a culture that is opposed to or that counters the sex-obsessed secular culture, this Christian subculture is actually fixated on sex.
And within this broader subcultural framework, porn stands out as an issue of extraordinary fixation.
It is hard to overstate.
The perceived threat that porn represents to Christianity from within the subculture of high-control American religion.
And to just illustrate this, I'm going to read some statements that folks have made.
This is from Sam Perry's book.
He saved me the work and went and found these statements.
Josh McDowell, famous, very well-known evangelical thinker, said, I would personally say from all my knowledge now that pornography is probably the greatest threat to the cause of Christ in the history of the world.
It's that serious.
End quote.
I mean, let's think about that.
More of a threat than secular humanism?
More of a threat than materialism, philosophical materialism, or the theory of evolution?
More of a threat than, say, I don't know, the expansion of Islam?
More of a threat...
That's what they said.
Chuck Swindoll, another famous evangelical figure, said, Pornography is the greatest cancer in the church today.
Russell Moore, who wrote a blog called Christianity's Pornography Crisis, said this, Pornography is perhaps the most destructive moral crisis facing the church today.
It is difficult to overstate the extent of the issue.
Pornography is like a cancer that slowly destroys a person.
End quote.
And then finally, Heath Lambert, who worked for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, that's a body of the Southern Baptist Convention, said this, and this one's a bit longer, I think that pornography represents the greatest moral crisis in the history of the church.
There's that theme again.
End quote.
There you have it.
The statement, this kind of almost apocalyptic sense of the threat that pornography poses.
Now, if you didn't grow up within this Christian subculture, and for those of us who did, we hear these statements and you're like, yeah, of course, that's what people said.
That's what pornography is within that world.
If you didn't grow up within that Christian subculture, or if you're far enough removed from it, That language around porn will probably be baffling to you.
And the reason is because porn, and I know we can define it different ways.
We don't have time.
This episode is already going to be longer than most.
But however you define porn, it is everywhere.
It is so easily accessible.
It is not the generally taboo topic it once was.
And society has not collapsed.
Folks, I'm not here to endorse.
Watching or consuming pornography.
I'm not here to condemn consuming pornography.
I really don't care what your relation to pornography might be.
The simple fact of the matter is, it's more accessible and more available, and I would argue more inevitable to encounter now than at any time in American society, American social history, probably world history, I don't know.
But society hasn't collapsed.
The cis-heteronuclear family has not disappeared.
And what this shows us is that there's a huge cultural gulf that has opened up or widened further between the perspective within these conservative Christian circles and broader secular culture.
And what I'm interested in really is why that gulf opens up.
What is pornography within these Christian circles?
Why does it take on the significance that it does?
Now, I want to be clear that, of course, there are significant ethical concerns that arise with pornography.
There are issues of trafficking.
There are issues of consent.
There are issues of exploitation.
There are issues of objectification.
All kinds of issues like that, and we need to be aware of those.
Of course, parents and adults need to work to ensure that pornographic content isn't consumed by young minors.
Nobody's arguing for that.
that.
And you'll encounter this stuff within these Christian circles.
Sometimes you engage people, they'll be like, oh, so you don't think that there's anything wrong with this?
You don't mind your five-year-old getting on the internet?
Of course I do.
Of course, we need to recognize and we need to teach minors and other young people that depictions of pornography often aren't true to life in terms of the bodies on display, the acts, the reactions, that often it is in fact You know, an actor doing this, and it gets more complex with, like, amateur porn and couples who post things online and so forth, but we get the idea.
And there is significant correlation.
Social scientists have found this consistently between increased porn viewing and lower levels of marital satisfaction.
That's a fact, okay?
And again, the conservative opponents will come at you with that.
The issue is that there's a lot of disagreement about causation.
That is, do people...
Turn to pornography because of marital dissatisfaction, or they consume certain kinds of pornography because of traits or attitudes they have that are going to adversely affect their marriage, or does their marriage that was going along happily become adversely affected through porn?
I lean much more into the former of those two.
We're not going to settle that here.
I put all of those points out there simply to say that even if we recognize those points outside of those conservative religious circles, Porn is just not the threatening specter that it is within those circles.
And part of the reason I say this again is that consumption of pornography is really common, and especially among male-identified people.
There's data that there's been since the 1970s to the late 2000s, for example, there's a 20% increase in people viewing porn who report that they viewed porn over the past year.
The numbers have gone up.
I found an article in the Journal of Sex Research.
That found that 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women, and this was a huge age range, ages 18 to 73, reported consuming pornography within the past month.
Okay?
Numbers vary wildly.
There's some other data that Sam Perry cites where he says 60 to 70% of American men, ages 18 to 30, report viewing porn in the past year.
And he says, and he raises the question I had, that there were some grad students who came to him and said, who in the world are these 30% of men who say that they're not consuming pornography?
And the numbers are not significantly lower for Protestant men, for conservative Protestants.
There is also evidence that for some couples, incorporating erotic videos or pornography into their sex lives actually improves them, right?
What does all that mean?
I don't want to get caught up in the numbers.
I don't want to throw a bunch of numbers out.
It's hard to get firm numbers, partly because people, you know, tend not to be honest and whatever.
I think it just reflects the shifting attitudes and, again, the availability of this.
Those of us who are old enough can remember when you would go, like, in the video store and there was, like, the adults-only room in the back that had, like, all the dirty videos and stuff.
And, like, you know, you had to—anybody going in and out of there, everybody was going to see it or— You know, you had to have the friend who knew where his dad hid his porno mags and, like, would bring one to school or something like that.
Like, those days are gone.
Anybody can access porn.
In the privacy of their home, the click of a computer.
And there are also, you know, people criticize the male focus within most pornography.
There is pornography created specifically for women.
There's pornography created specifically for queer folk.
There is, as I say, amateur porn.
There is pornography that are real couples who have sex and post it.
And so it takes a wide variety of forms.
And for me, all of this is part of the caption, what I call the mainstreaming of pornography.
Okay?
Now, that's not the point.
You live in the world.
You know the world.
If you're listening to this and like you're an adult human, you have some sense of the role and ubiquity of pornography within our society.
Okay?
I don't want to fully assess that mainstreaming.
I'm not here to argue in favor of it or against it.
It's just a fact, and it's impossible to kind of put the genie back in the bottle, as it were.
I am assuming that whatever the real dangers of pornography might be, and again, I recognize that those exist, there is just no objective evidence that it poses the apocalyptic social threat that conservatives think that it does.
It's everywhere.
It's easily accessible.
It is increasingly mainstream.
It is decreasingly taboo.
And society is still here going along with it.
What I'm interested in is why that gulf in perception emerges.
Given that fact, why is this how pornography and this form of sexual expression is understood within high-control religion?
Sam Perry, again, he makes a good point.
It's a point that I've made in different words.
But what he really highlights is that the different perspective on pornography consumption, what it shows is it's not just the fact of consuming pornography.
The issue is broader social context, the meaning, the significance of this consumption.
That is, those social contexts that make us who we are.
How does pornography then resonate with us as those who view it?
What effects does viewing it have on us, and how are those effects shaped by those contexts?
And so the apocalyptic warnings about the danger of porneus, which seems so outlandish to a secular audience, they reflect core dimensions of the subculture of high-control Christianity.
Folks, you've listened to me enough, probably, you've heard enough of this, that if you understand...
The code of high-control Christianity, you understand its core convictions and teachings, this reaction to pornography is not surprising.
It is typical.
It is to be accepted.
One of the first things that we list is Perry calls it sexual exceptionalism.
We've been talking about this in previous episodes.
That is just the idea that sexual sins are presented within this subculture as representing the greatest threat to individual salvation and spiritual life.
You can read, there are several New Testament passages, lists of sins, and these conservative theologians and others will say, you note that these lists all begin with sexual immorality.
I was reading a piece the other day that said they place sexual sins ahead of even murder, right?
So sexual sins are sort of the worst, and this is what reflects in issues related to LGBTQ plus issues, not abstaining from premarital sex and so forth.
We've talked about that some.
It's part of why the Bible's admonitions against ill-defined sexual immorality that I've talked about before figure so prominent.
Sexual sins are like first and foremost, and pornography represents one of the paramount sexual sins.
Another interesting part of this is, within Christian parlance, the focus on individual's heart.
In other words...
It's the idea that within this kind of Christianity, sin or disobedience to God is not just about what one does.
It's about what one believes.
It's about what one desires.
It's about why one does what they do.
It's not enough to simply do the right things.
We have to believe the right things, feel the right things, for the right reasons.
And we can think here of the passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus says that lusting in one's heart is the same as committing adultery.
That captures this idea.
Most of us should say, no, it's not.
I've thought about doing things and didn't do them, and there's a qualitative distinction between imagining doing something or thinking about it and actually doing it.
But within this kind of Christianity, one's heart is what matters, and pornography consumption reflects...
A misguided heart.
It is driven by lust and fundamental corruption.
It represents a sort of core commitment that moves us against God.
And I think tied in with this is the idea that pornography consumption seems to be willful and habitual.
You have to put some effort into it.
Pornography is more available than it ever was, but that one quote talks about the guy who goes down to his basement.
You plan for this, it's the sense that one is willfully succumbing to lust, that one is not fighting sin, one is giving into it.
And I think the final piece of this, in which core commitments of Christianity, of conservative Christianity rather, drive this, is the struggle against pornographic lust.
It takes place within the rigged game of salvation.
It is impossible, I've talked about this before, Within conservative theology, it is impossible for human beings not to sin.
We are fundamentally corrupted.
We are not free not to fall short of God's commands.
Yet we are held responsible when we do sin, so it's a rigged game.
The house wins all the time.
We will always be guilty.
We will always be worthy of condemnation.
We will never attain the command that we're called to attain.
And so I think the final piece here is there's also what I'm just going to call the fixation issue.
The incessant focus on pornography actually makes its use by parishioners more likely.
It's similar to the dynamics on the fixation with sex within purity culture teachings.
It's a rigged system, and the more that churches talk about it, and the bigger a deal they make it.
The more likely it is they're going to have parishioners who are going to check this out.
I mean, for example, that illustration of somebody retreating in the basement to spend two or three hours watching pornography?
Okay.
I'm just going to say I don't think I know anybody who has that kind of time.
But that's the kind of model that they're working with.
They create the fixation.
So what does all that mean?
It means that there are elements within, core elements within, the identity of conservative Christianity.
But when we understand that context, we realize, well, of course, pornography represents this kind of threat within that framework.
But this context, and this is the key, folks, this is what ensures that viewing pornography also has different effects for conservative Christians.
And this is the part that's hard for people to understand.
When somebody coming out of that context consumes pornographic content, the effect of that content on them is actually different than it is When somebody's coming out of a context that says, for example, you know what, this is just an expression of sexuality.
It's a normal and benign part of expressing sexual desire within certain parameters, blah, blah, blah.
It's just something people do as part of a well-rounded expression of their sexuality or something like this.
Those two radically different paradigms produce different effects in the people who consume it.
And that's the key.
These contextual dimensions...
The context of high-control conservative Christianity actually makes pornography more damaging for people who view it.
And I want to say that again.
This kind of Christian theology that preaches against pornography, that tells us how damaging it is, how apocalyptically dangerous it is, it becomes a self-fulfilling feedback loop.
It actually makes pornography more damaging to those who view it.
Why?
Because within that framework, sexual desire is never just sexual desire.
Sexual desire is always coded as either lust or appropriate when expressed solely in the context of a monogamous heterosexual marriage.
That's it.
Those are your only two options.
Everything but expression within a monogamous heterosexual marriage is lust.
Which means that pornography use is tantamount to adultery.
Which means that, following from that, there can be no openness or acceptance between partners around the issue.
There can be no legitimate use of pornography.
It can have no place at all.
And this isn't to say that non-Christian couples don't have to navigate issues around pornography.
They do, and not everybody is of the same opinion and so forth, but the stakes are simply not as high, and pornography use is just not coded in the same way.
So what happens when pornography can only be an expression of lust?
It can only be an expression of sexuality that departs from God's demand.
It's tantamount to committing adultery.
What is that going to do?
Of course it's going to make you feel guilt and shame.
And guilt and shame are emotions within high-control religion that cannot be questioned.
They cannot be interrogated.
There is no space to ask the question, should I feel guilty about this?
Am I actually doing something bad?
Should I feel shame about this?
They can't be interrogated.
Why?
Because responses like guilt and shame, emotions like guilt and shame, they can't be understood as the learned responses that they are.
They can't be understood as the culturally coded responses that they are.
Emotions are learned.
Emotions are cultural practices.
They are not just natural, intuitive individual expressions of psychology or whatever.
But within high-control religion, they are not just emotions.
They are evidence of God's disapproval.
Those feelings of shame and guilt, they are God acting on us through the Holy Spirit, condemning us for what we do.
And that creates all the problematic dynamics of Christian shame spirals.
The shame we feel is God's judgment for our disobedient actions, but they're actions that we're destined by God to take because we're sinful and fallen.
Even though this God supposedly loves and accepts us, he's also going to judge us and punish us and threaten us and make us feel shame and guilt for doing these things.
And within my view, these are very understandable and natural expressions of sexuality, which means they're going to happen and you have the shame spiral and the shame loop going on.
So what does that mean?
It means that pornography actually has more pernicious effects within conservative religious contexts.
This is why...
I don't sit around talking with people about porn use, but people will be like, yeah, occasionally I watch porn, or, you know, yeah, when I was a guy in my 20s and, you know, single and whatever, I watched a lot more than I do now.
You know, it's just a thing that people do sometimes versus, say, my clients who've been traumatized by pornography because they cannot break out of the feelings of shame and guilt, whether they're engaging and watching pornography now or they can't relate.
To sexual partners now because they used to view pornography and they think that they have like sullied themselves and already committed adultery and can never be pure again or whatever.
This is the point, folks.
Those effects are real.
The context of high-control religion brings about the damaging effects of pornography that it supposedly warns against.
And I think that that is a key element of understanding.
The porn fixation within these contexts.
Last point I want to make here, and I got to go quick.
I said this episode was going to be long and it's going long.
The other piece of this is the really, really significant gender dimension that comes in with all of this.
And this relates directly to the conceptions of a kind of essential male and female sexuality.
Pornography usage within conservative high-control religion Is understood as a properly male sin.
It is a sin that it is natural for men to commit.
And here's what I mean by this, okay?
Among all populations, Christian or non-Christian, male-identified people are more likely to consume pornography.
I'm not going to get into arguments about why that is.
That's just a fact, okay?
But within the framework of high-control conservative Christianity, the reason for this...
Is that male sexuality is just fundamentally different than female sexuality, and it reflects the nature of male sexuality.
And people, if you're listening to this series, I invite you to go back, if you haven't, and listen to the episode about male sexuality.
And you can recall that in that episode, I argued that male sexuality, and it's kind of natural, unredeemed state, men by nature, their sexuality is overwhelming, it is insatiable, and it is predatory.
What does that mean?
It means that men, again, and they're sort of non-Christian people, unsaved people, men's sexuality is by nature lustful.
Men are by nature lustful.
Male sexuality has to be redeemed and redirected.
It has to be moved away from a lustful expression and redirected into things like marriage and family and work and so forth.
Well, within that framework, pornography usage, it's sinful.
It's a violation of the family.
It's a violation of purity and all of that.
It's sinful in that it represents men expressing their natural, unredeemed sexual nature.
It goes against God's plans.
But when men consume pornography, they are acting according to their sexual nature.
They are giving in to the lust that naturally drives them.
So it makes sense.
That this is the sin into which they would fall.
And if you read some of the literature and accounts of people that participate in, say, accountability groups or men sharing groups or people that talk about their struggles in the Christian life, they'll talk about men being very frank with each other and confessing sins about pornography and so forth.
There's a space for this because there's a sort of sympathy toward men who are fighting against this lustful desire and so forth.
The story is completely different for women.
Women's sexual nature on the understanding of high-control, conservative American Christianity, women's sexual nature is much more relational.
It is not insatiable.
It is not overwhelming.
What does all that mean?
It means that within Christian conservative teachings about pornography and relationships and etc., Women are presented as more relational.
Men are always presented as more visual.
I grew up with this, like, women are about emotions and touch and care, and men are more visual by nature, and so of course it makes sense that men will consume pornography.
Women are more relational.
I argued in the episode on essential female sexuality within high-control religion that women are understood as sort of, by nature, essentially virtuous, right?
So the nature of women's sexuality.
Even in its unredeemed state, is such that it should not be drawn to pornography.
Women should not, even in their sinful, unredeemed state, they shouldn't be into porn.
So when women do consume pornography, they're not only sinning against God, they're not only giving in to their unredeemed nature, they are violating their nature as women.
They are violating their gender by essentially expressing masculine sexuality.
So within these high-control contexts, the shame, the stigma, the guilt that attend porn usage are even more pronounced for women.
And many people have noted this.
Women have noted this.
Clergy have noticed this.
Former clergy have talked to this.
I have clients that will talk about this.
There is often no place within the church to seek help or support or redemption for women.
There's a sense in which women who consume porn are made to feel as if they have not only sinned but are beyond.
Redemption.
So the high-control religion makes the effects of porn use that much worse for women.
A lot of stuff here.
We need to wrap this up.
There's a lot of stuff here.
There's more that we could say.
We want to wind it down.
Here are the big takeaways.
Try to draw these threads together.
Okay?
Big takeaways for me.
And I should say, I've had people reach out.
The reason we're talking about this, people are like, why the fixation on pornography?
Why every time I talk to my conservative Christian brother-in-law do I have to hear about his issues with watching porn?
I don't want to hear this.
Here are the big takeaways for me that help explain this.
High-control Christians in their opposition to pornography, again, they are absolutely fixated on it.
The dude whose brother-in-law won't stop talking to him about porn use is fixated on this thing he opposes.
It is a much bigger presence in the lives of many conservative Christians, even in opposition to it, than it is in the lives of many people outside that context who consume it.
And the second big takeaway that I've been trying to make here is that the subculture of high-control religion, it creates this self-fulfilling cycle when it comes to the dangers of pornography.
The meaning and significance that they assign to it, that Christian leaders assign to it, the pastors assign to it, the parents assign to it, the meaning and significance they assign to it, the understandings of gender and sexuality that are written into the code of high-control religion and its understandings of gender and sexuality, the understandings of guilt and shame as representing God's disapproval.
They are an experience of the Holy Spirit telling us that God is disapproving of what we're doing.
What do those things do?
They all bring about the negative consequences they predict.
And then what you have is the result that the effects of high-control religion are then picked up and carried forward as evidence for the truth of the teachings of that high-control religion.
So you create a subculture in an ideological context in which porn use is virtually guaranteed to destroy marriages.
For example.
And then when marriages fall apart around porn use, this becomes validation for the system that brought about the outcome to start with.
And as always, that is going to bring up issues of social control and those who moderate and mediate for us and tell us what we have to desire, who we have to be, what kinds of bodies we should have, all of those kinds of things that I talk about all the time.
High-control religion in America is fixated on pornography.
Views it as a tremendous threat.
The irony is that the elements of high-control religion themselves are what render pornography the threat that they name it, and that in turn perpetuates the cycle of shame and guilt around this issue.
I hope that makes sense.
I know, again, if you grew up in this context, I think this will make sense to you.
If you're not familiar with this, and I've had people that reach out and say, I just don't understand why conservative Christians are so fixated on this, I hope that makes some sense.
Let me know.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSwaj at gmail.com.
Give me your feedback.
I would love to hear what you think, not just about this episode, about other episodes.
Always taking ideas for upcoming episodes.
And as always, thank you so much for your support.
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