Like many right-wing commentators, Josh Hawley argues that men’s use of pornography represents one of the most significant and pervasive social ills plaguing American society. What dangers does he believe pornography poses? And what does this fear of pornography reveal about the religious ideology expressed in his thought? What do his views reveal for us about American high-control religion? Check out this week’s episode to find out!
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 1000+ episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Subscribe to Teología Sin Vergüenza
Subscribe to American Exceptionalism
Donate to SWAJ: https://axismundi.supercast.com/donations/new
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Series is part of the podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, your host.
Pleased to be with you as always.
As always, I want to start by saying thank you for listening.
Thank you for contributing to all the ways you support us.
And certainly this series, more than anything else we do in Straight White American Jesus, is driven by you.
So thank you.
Please keep the ideas coming.
Feedback, thoughts, ideas for new episodes, new series, what have you.
Daniel Miller Swedge, Daniel Miller, SWAJ at gmail.com is the best way to reach me.
And as I've said the last few episodes, getting ready for a series after we can conclude our discussion of Josh Hawley's book on questions I couldn't ask in church or questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church, however we want to phrase that.
If you've got some, whatever they might be, email those to me.
Let me know.
I'm compiling those.
I want to hear, you know, the kinds of questions that were used basically to shut you down.
If you grew up in conservative churches, didn't have to be conservative churches, but oftentimes those are the ones that are sort of the focus of this, but I'm open to hearing any and all of them.
Please keep them coming.
And as I say, put that in the subject heading of your email, questions I couldn't ask in church or I wasn't allowed to ask in church or I wasn't supposed to ask in church.
And that'll help me find those.
I respond to as many emails, pardon me, as I can, but I know I don't get to enough and I don't want to miss those.
But that's where we're sort of headed.
I want to dive into this week's episode.
Again, just to orient ourselves, we are continuing our deep dive into Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley's book, Manhood.
We have been decoding it to better understand how those on the contemporary social and political and religious right understand manhood, masculinity, and their place in fixing what ails American society.
Because as Josh argues, I guess I'm on a first name basis with him.
As Josh Hawley argues, if we want to fix America, we just got to fix men.
And if you follow contemporary Christian nationalism, the kind of resurgent religion among, for example, Gen Z men and so forth, masculinity looms large, this notion that we need a country of men, that this is part of what Christianity provides and so forth.
And so we've been looking at Josh Hawley's book, not because he's Josh Hawley and not because he has anything that novel to say, he doesn't, but precisely because of that, because he gives us a window into this discourse and this ideology.
And we are in the first of his chapters examining the specific roles that men are called to play.
So we've seen that he has the first part of his book and he lays out this kind of overview of what masculinity is, what God intends it to be.
This is essentially a book structured around a theological claim that there's a divine vision of manhood that needs to be enacted.
And then in the second part of the book, he gets into the specific roles that men are called to play.
And chapter five is where he explores the first and most foundational of these, that of husband.
And we opened up that chapter in last week's episode.
So if you haven't had a chance to check it out, I'd invite you to do so.
Go back, take a listen, because this week, I want to address a topic in the chapter that I alluded to in last week's roundup.
If you listened to the roundup last week, you would have heard this.
Causation vs. Correlation00:14:34
It's a topic I've addressed before in different contexts, including some full-length episodes, and it is the issue of pornography.
And I promise, I promise, if you're like, Dan, I feel like we spent a lot of time talking about pornography.
I did a series called We Got to Talk About the Sex Stuff, and I talked about the sort of pornography fixation that people on the right have.
It's come up in other places as well.
I promise that I don't keep talking about this because I am in fact fixated on it or that it's really a way that I choose to pass my time.
It's not.
I'm following Holly's lead here.
I'm following where he leads, and he has a whole section in this book, in this chapter on pornography.
And of course, if you follow right-wing discourse at all, and discourses about masculinity at all, you will know that pornography looms large.
It's a theme that comes up all the time.
So he leads where so many other communicators and commentators on the right also lead, which is pornography.
And so that's part of why we're going to talk about it.
And I've mentioned the irony of this before.
There are a lot of topics and themes that those on the right accuse the rest of us of being fixated on.
They will tell us, if you don't agree with them, they will tell us that we are fixated on race, that we're obsessed with gender and sexuality, that we're obsessed with pronouns and that we are obsessed with pornography.
But they're the ones who never stop talking about these things.
They are the ones who talk about these things all the time.
They are the ones who are absolutely fixated on these things.
And I think it's worth noting that in this fixation and the very fact that they are fixated on these things, I think we see how they really view those of us who disagree with them, those of us who are not in their camp.
It's a kind of projection, in my view.
They are fixated on these things because for them, they all represent dangers to them.
They represent dangers to their identity.
I think most importantly, they represent dangers to their authority.
They represent views that challenge the high control religion that structures their world.
So in many ways, there's this internally generated threat that they have.
The very idea that, for example, you know, two men can meaningfully love each other or that gender might exist on a spectrum or that, I don't know, watching pornography may just be a thing that some people do and it's not the end of the world, or maybe it's just an expression of sexuality or what have you.
These things generate a kind of internally perceived threat for them.
And then they project that internal perception, that anxiety and fear that structures their lives and the way that they live and their vision of America.
They project that onto external actors, people like me, people like you, people like anybody who doesn't, again, exist in their camp.
And then they imbue us.
They imbue their political opponents or their social adversaries with the force of threatening enemies.
We are transformed into their enemies as they project or externalize their own anxieties and insecurities and cultural fears and so forth.
Okay.
So reflecting all of this, Holly brings up pornography in this chapter and we're going to talk about it.
And I'm not going to repeat everything that I've said about it before.
There's a lot more we could say than we're going to say in this episode.
And I think I've said most of it in the past.
Again, I invite you to go back, check out some of those episodes.
What I want to highlight here, what I think are some of the bigger issues that this specific fixation reveals within the mindset of high control religionists.
And here I'm not talking about issues necessarily about sexuality and embodiment and policing sexuality and so forth.
All those things are there and I've talked about those before, but some other things that I think are sort of the bigger, more significant dynamics that actually underpin the reason that they talk about this all the time.
So let's start by giving a little bit of the context here.
Why is Holly talking about pornography and why is he doing it here?
Well, we're on chapter five on men's roles as husband, and he turns to pornography in a section of that chapter called cheap sex.
And his line here, of course, the broader line is that men are failing to perform as husbands emotionally, sexually.
They're failing to even be husbands.
Fewer men are entering into marriage and so forth.
And he's identifying pornography as the cause for this.
And so his line here is that men, when they fail to embody their properly masculine virtues, they retreat from their responsibilities and instead they rely on false security.
They essentially, I think he would say, literally fail to kind of man up and face up to their responsibilities.
They retreat to something false, a false sense of security.
And in this context, he goes on to say, quote, one that is particularly rampantly popular with men today is pornography.
So pornography for him provides men with a false sense of security and that is undermining their role as men and as husbands.
And he points out in this chapter and in this section, he points out a number of real things.
He highlights a lot of real data points, such as data about pornography consumption among men, to a lesser extent among women, the fact that pornography is more readily available and accessible today than ever before, and so on.
So he cites a lot of data.
But then he does what the right-wing commentators on pornography usage always do.
And this is really key.
This is getting into one of the dynamics of these discussions that is completely common because what they will do is they will put out, again, real data points.
And you read a book like Holly's and it's got footnotes and you go look at him and he's like citing studies and polls and things like this.
You're like, oh, wow.
Okay.
They're talking about facts.
It's not just talking about the book of Genesis and Adam.
He's talking about some facts.
But here's what they do.
He finds in porn usage the cause of all sorts of social maladies.
He says it leads to sex addiction.
It destroys marriages.
It prevents men from dating.
It drives down marriage rates and so forth.
And he goes on to say that instead of being the brave, masculine men they're called to be, quote, nothing could be more timid or weak, more sterile than a man alone staring at porn on his phone.
End quote.
Holly apparently thinks that those who consume porn somehow view it as manly to do so.
I've never had a conversation with anybody where, I don't know, I guess I don't have very many conversations with people where like, I'm a real man or, you know, something like that.
But if I did, I've never had a conversation where somebody identifies their manliness or their masculinity with viewing porn.
I don't think I've ever had that discussion, but he links it that way.
And so he's trying to turn the tables and suggest that men who consume porn are actually less manly.
Okay, whatever.
The more interesting and spurious element of his reflections are the social evils that he attributes to pornography.
And this is that point that I'm making where I say this is what they do is it's not just, here's real data points about porn usage.
But then he goes on to say, here are all the things that it causes.
And here's why that matters.
He makes the classic mistake.
And it is super prevalent among people on the right.
It's a very popular move, meaning that lots of people do it.
It's not just sort of elites and so forth, but I think it is often intentional.
He makes the mistake of conflating correlation and causation.
That's a little wonky, a little social science-y.
A correlation is just where, you know, where one phenomenon happens, it tends to be correlated with or to occur with another.
Okay.
If one thing is present, it's likely that another thing is present.
It's a different claim to say that phenomenon A is the cause of phenomenon B.
It's not just they're present, but the one causes the other.
He conflates those two things.
So he highlights a number of real correlations that sociologists and sexologists and psychologists and others have identified with pornography use.
He cites real data that does highlight correlations, but he moves from there to attributing the cause of those social and relational phenomena to pornography usage, which is not in that literature.
The social scientists are usually very careful to say these things occur together, but we don't know the direction of causation.
If there is a direction of causation, in other words, we don't know which comes first.
Indeed, we don't know if these two things are even related in a causal relationship, or there could be some third or fourth or fifth fact or other variables that explain both of these phenomena.
And if you're in the habit of reading social science, you'll know that social scientists do this way all the time.
They're very careful on this point.
Holly is not careful on this point.
He attributes causation to pornography usage.
And so here's a prime example.
This is something he says.
This is from page 75 of his book.
He says, the data shows that men who view porn regularly are less satisfied with their dating partners and less satisfied with their sexual relationships.
Indeed, it shows they are less satisfied with life in general.
End quote.
True.
I've seen some of that same data.
I looked at his footnote, his endnote.
I've read studies and so forth.
Yeah, the data does say that.
It does say that people who, like the more pornography somebody tends to view, it tends to correlate with lower levels of satisfaction in their sexual relationships or their romantic partners or whatever.
But here's the issue.
The data doesn't show which of those comes first.
In other words, the question is, do men whose relationships are not going well or whose sex lives are not fulfilling or who are experiencing mental health or social challenges like depression or chronic loneliness that make us so they don't go out and enter into relationships, do they experience those things because they consume pornography?
That's Holly's claim.
These things are caused by the usage of pornography or do they view pornography because they're experiencing these things?
In other words, if a guy's marriage is not going well, does he tend to gravitate more toward pornography?
If somebody's sexual relationships are not as fulfilling, do they tend to gravitate more to pornography?
If they're already studying from, or excuse me, suffering from, say, depression or chronic loneliness or social anxiety, do they tend to stay in their dwelling more and as a sexual outlet look to pornography versus going out and meeting people and dating and so forth?
Those are the harder questions, and the data hasn't settled that.
So Holly takes it for granted that pornography is the cause, but the data he cites doesn't make that claim.
And I highlight this because it's not unique to pornography.
You'll see this all the time on the right.
The conflation of correlation, these things happen at the same time, to the notion that one causes the other when the data just doesn't support it.
There's also another point here.
There's no way to empirically verify that like, you know, if you could wave a magic wand and all of these men just stopped watching pornography, does it mean that all that would change?
Would they suddenly have better, more fulfilling marriage relationships?
Would they have better, more fulfilling sexual relationships?
Would men who are not dating or entering into the dating pool or seeking marriage, would they go out and do that?
That sounds implausible to me.
Holly implies that that's exactly what would happen.
I think it's implausible.
I think there's no empirical way that we could possibly demonstrate that that's true.
Okay.
So I highlight this because it's one of the most persistent ways in which those on the right misconstrue and misuse empirical data.
And it's not unique to pornography.
That's what I say.
I'm focusing on this topic because he brings it up, but it comes up in topic after topic after topic after topic.
They will conflate these.
And if you are engaging with people or reading what they're saying or talking to Uncle Ron or whatever, it's worth paying attention and listening for that assumption that one thing causes another when we don't know that or the relationship may even be the opposite of what they suppose.
Okay.
So wonky social science-y point.
They conflate causation and correlation.
Okay.
But why?
What's going on there?
Why do they do that?
And this is the reason that I ask this.
Let's say that I was sitting here with Josh Hawley or whomever, and I don't know, I explain the difference between correlation and causation, and I explain what the data says.
And I go to some of the same sources that Josh Hawley cites and I look at it and say, well, right here in the further question section or, you know, further issue, you know, issues requiring further investigation, they say that we don't know which of these causes which and whatever.
Do you think that Josh Hawley is going to say, oh, God, my bad.
I jumped to an assumption there.
I assume that there was a relation of causation here.
I can see now that it was only a relationship of correlation.
No, he's not going to do that.
And I've had these kinds of discussions, not with Josh Hawley, but with other people.
No, he's going to double down.
They always do.
They double down on it.
Say, well, it's obvious that it's this, or they just appeal to obviousness or something like that.
And what they're going to do is they're going to end up simply denying scientific or empirical findings that they don't like.
And this is where you get that phenomenon.
Again, this is part of why I think it's important to decode this, where on one hand, somebody like Josh Hawley or JD Vance or whomever will cite studies when it feels like they can cherry pick things that fit their narrative.
But then they'll turn around and they'll accuse those same scientists or even entire fields of being woke or being ideologically driven or being leftists or being cultural Marxists or whatever.
When the data doesn't fit their narrative, they will dismiss the data as illegitimate.
And when they can cherry-pick data that does fit their narrative, suddenly it's okay.
So the levels of denial are really, really prevalent here.
And this is why when you have these discussions, so often you come armed with facts and they're just not enough.
It doesn't matter how many facts you give, it doesn't sway them.
And that's the further question, like, okay, why?
Why the extreme denial?
I get this question from people all the time.
I get it from students.
I explore it in my classes.
Why don't the facts seem to matter?
And I say all the time that it's not about facts.
The facts are there.
The facts are readily available.
So why don't they seem to matter?
Why don't they seem to like change the conversation?
I think there are a lot of reasons for that.
I think there are reasons related to identity.
I think there are reasons related to sort of cultural anxiety.
On an individual psychological level, there's just basic denial and defensiveness.
Why Facts Fail00:05:46
We don't like to admit that we are wrong.
It's not something that we as humans like to do.
So we get defensive and we deny counter evidence and so forth.
Okay.
But I also think that there's a distinctly theological reason for this.
And I think it's relevant not just for understanding what they're going to say about pornography, but it has much broader implications for everything from, again, the denial of gender fluidity and a gender spectrum, anti-vaccine, climate science denial and so forth.
And so here's how it works.
Here's the dynamic that I think is at work very implicitly in Hawley.
But if we're trying to decode him and figure out why it is that he uses data the way he does, here's what I think it is.
Okay.
On the one hand, high control religionists will insist that God is a kind of absolute authority and that what God commands or prohibits, right, is morally required because God commands or prohibits it.
In other words, most of them hold what we would call a divine command theory of ethics or morality when it comes to certainly things that the Christians would define as sin.
In other words, it's right because God says it's right or it's wrong because God says it's wrong.
Okay.
That's on the one hand.
On the other hand, and certainly at the popular level, maybe not at the level of theology professors or Christian philosophers, but certainly at the level of lots of pastors, absolutely at the level of lots of people who sit in a church pew on a Sunday hearing the teachings of those pastors, they recognize that that makes God arbitrary and authoritarian.
Why does God command this?
Because God commands it.
They're not any more comfortable with that idea than you are.
It makes God arbitrary and authoritative.
And so what they tend to do is they tend to say that God commands something not just to command it, but because he has a good reason for doing it, that there's a reason or a rationale behind that.
And that reason is typically that it is for our benefit.
So it'll be that God commands this not just because he's authoritarian, but because he's like a parent, maybe a really strict parent, but like a parent.
He has reasons for commanding what he commands or prohibiting what he prohibits.
So when God commands or prohibits something, it is because it is dangerous or bad for us.
So, for example, we apply it to pornography.
The reason why God doesn't like porn is that porn is bad for us.
It is dangerous for us.
So the logic here is really clear.
Somebody like Hawley is not going to be content just to say that God says pornography is bad, so it's bad.
No, he's going to say, God says it's bad because it is negative for us.
It is dangerous for us.
It has negative consequences.
God is looking out for us.
So when somebody like Hawley or any other high control religionist pretends to study the effects of pornography consumption, he's looking for those negative consequences.
They're not like a social scientist who is just looking at the phenomenon to learn more about it or see what it does.
He's looking for specific negative consequences.
There's a strong, we could call it confirmation bias.
He wants to, needs to find negative consequences because that's what justifies God telling us not to consume pornography.
So for them, for somebody like Hawley or another high control religionist like him, if they can't find negative consequences, that's a threat to their theology.
Because what that means is if you go and you look at the empirical findings and it turns out that it's a mixed bag, maybe it's not clear that there even are negative consequences.
Or yeah, maybe there can be negative consequences, but not all the time.
That calls into question the legitimacy of God condemning it.
Worse is when the empirical findings contradict a divine command.
That's what I would argue with gender fluidity and so forth.
They'll insist God says there's two genders and so forth.
Everything we know about psychology and biology and psychosocial development stuff tells us at this point that's not the case.
So now they're confronted with the possibility that God is commanding or prohibiting something that isn't really bad or isn't inherently good or is even prohibiting something or condemning something that might be inherently good.
That maybe God insisting that there are only two genders actually harms lots of people who don't experience gender as being on a binary.
That's a threat.
It's a theological threat.
So empirical findings, they threaten the goodness of God, essentially, because if God is now commanding something that is not beneficial for us or prohibiting something that isn't a danger to us, we're calling the goodness of God into question.
And so what's the defensive reaction there on the part of the high control religionist?
It is not to rethink or reconsider their vision of God.
It's not to question God.
It is to deny the scientific or empirical findings.
It is to harden in that denial.
So the end result is that they will find negative consequences or they will simply deny all evidence to the contrary so as to defend their God and more specifically their own ideological understanding about their goodness and righteousness.
So when somebody like Holly goes to, well, let's look at the effects of pornography, you know ahead of time what they're going to find because they can't allow that there could be neutral effects or I don't know, in some cases, positive effects.
Day's Denial00:10:09
This is the same again on other topics.
That's why this is important for us to look at.
The pornography issue is like a window into the reasoning of these right-wing religionists more broadly.
So Holly's fixation with and his really spurious reasoning about pornography, it reflects a pattern in high-control religious thinking that is deep and pervasive.
And that pattern plays out over and over and over on issue after issue after issue.
Again, we could talk about climate denial.
We could talk about anti-vaccine.
We could talk about anti-LGBTQ policies and understandings and so forth.
Okay.
I talk about that all day.
I have talked about that four days on end.
But I want to move on here because there's another piece of this chapter I want us to think about.
It's also not enough for Holly simply to be critical about the use of pornography.
He also has to use pornography consumption to further demonize his opponents.
And this is a theme we've seen throughout the book.
We're going to keep seeing it.
I want you to listen to what he says.
I'm reading from his book now.
He says this.
This is on page 74 over to 75.
He says, interestingly, staring at porn is one of the few male-dominated activities of which the present-day Epicureans gladly approve.
Again, present-day Epicureans, he's got another fixation on Epicureanism, this ancient Greek philosophy.
So everybody, he disagrees with what he calls it the modern day Epicureans.
So he says they can approve of this.
He says, they are happy for men to look at porn all the day long.
He literally says that all the day long.
It's the same guy that talked about King Arthur and his knights and their daring do, right?
They look at porn all the day long.
They defend porn vehemently, religiously, and mock anyone who suggests that men should do something else with their time.
Hmm.
They're happy for men to look at porn all the day long.
They defend porn vehemently, religiously, and they mock anyone who suggests that men should do something else with their time.
That's his claim.
The first time I read those sentences, like, what?
Like, I've been reading Holly for a while now, and I still was sort of blown away by the ridiculousness of those sentences.
And I think there's a lot going on there, and I think it shows us an awful lot, again, not just about Josh Hawley, but about the discourse and the community he's part of.
So first, let me say this.
As one of the present-day Epicureans, we can talk about that term.
It's a ridiculous term, but certainly whomever he thinks exists as a present-day Epicurean, I fit.
I'm one of his target people that he's critical of there.
I am someone who, if I'm a present-day Epicurean, most of my social circles are full of present-day Epicureans.
Like most people, I spend most of my time, you know, hanging out with people who are like-minded.
A lot of my professional circles are populated with such present-day Epicureans.
The point is this.
I'm a present-day Epicurean, as he would define it.
Most of the people in my social world are.
Many of the people in my professional world are.
And I can say this honestly, that not only do I not think this, I don't think anything that he just said.
I have never articulated a view like that.
I've never, when somebody, if I don't know, if somebody came along and said, you know what, I feel like I've been spending a lot of my time like watching pornography and maybe I should find a better use for my Saturday afternoon.
I would not mock them.
I would not be like, oh, that's what you, yo, no, no, no, you shouldn't go do that.
Go exercise more.
No, no, no, no.
You need to watch porn.
I would never say that.
It's ridiculous.
If somebody said, I don't know, how should I spend my time?
I don't feel like I'm being as productive in life as I might or fulfilled or something.
I would never be like, well, you know what you need more of is pornography.
I just, I wouldn't.
Not because I don't inherently, I don't think pornography is inherently positive or negative, I don't think.
But it's not something I'm going to go direct somebody to go do.
So I've never articulated a view like that.
But more importantly, maybe I have never heard it from anyone else in any context ever.
I have never heard anybody say something like this.
I don't think I've ever, I say, I say, I don't think I've got it in my notes.
I don't think I've ever, I'm pretty positive.
I have never, ever heard someone suggest that, no, men should not stop viewing porn or encourage them that, you know, if they're like, I think I'm going to watch porn last pick.
Nope, nope, you need to stick with it.
You need to stick with the porn.
I've never experienced that.
And I invite you, if you're listening, I invite you to think about whether or not that is a conversation you have ever heard or been a part of in your life.
I suspect that the answer is no.
And then going further, and I've been thinking about this as I read this chapter, I was thinking about today's episode, and it relates to this issue of being fixated on pornography by the right.
I don't know that I've ever had any serious and certainly no sustained conversation about pornography at all with any adults in my life who are not high control religionists.
In other words, not only am I like not an advocate of pornography as he presents it, but my view is I think most people, if you were to take all the high control religion folks and like move them to the side and ask most people how many conversations you ever actually had about pornography use, it's not something that people sit around talking to their friends about or their coworkers or whatever.
It's just not.
In other words, not only do I not condemn people for not watching porn, porn just isn't something that I or anybody I know spend significant time thinking about or talking about, despite what Holly presents here.
So like to describe this view as a caricature, it's an insult to caricatures.
Holly presents a vision of those who disagree with his political and social views that is so out of touch with any basis in reality, it's laughable.
Or it would be laughable if it didn't show us something really important, because this is one of those things you say, this is so far away from reality, so detached from anybody's real experience, we've got to ask, like, why?
What is he talking about?
Why is he making these claims?
And this is the point.
I think it reflects and reinforces a theme that is absolutely central to those who are on that political and cultural and religious right.
And it's this.
Their ideas and claims are so weak and so contrived and so detached from empirical reality and so based in insecurity and fear that they have to bolster those ideas by actively demonizing anybody who doesn't share them.
He has to create this caricature because he is hoping that his readers will see that like, oh my gosh, that's what they think?
Whoa.
I guess, I guess what Holly's saying makes a lot of sense.
I mean, if that's our choice, either the people who say that men should spend all their time watching porn or whatever Holly says, it makes his views sound less reasonable, excuse me, more reasonable.
It makes them sound less extreme.
It masks the fact that he is a right-wing extremist ideologue who is trying to cast a certain vision of society.
It's a caricature of their opponents as uncaring and evil and morally calloused that is intended to make their extreme views appear reasonable and mainstream.
And for millions of Americans, it works.
So one of the reasons why I say when people ask me and they say, well, if facts don't matter, if facts aren't the things that are going to undo this, if they're not what's going to counter this, what do we do?
And one of the things I say is it has to come through personal encounter.
Those people have to meet those of us present day Epicureans who are also just regular people who love our kids and care about our kids and want what's best for them and society and so forth.
Broader issue, broader topic.
We've got to wind this down because there's a lot more that we could say about this topic.
And again, I've said a lot of it elsewhere, but we could just keep going, going through this.
I invite you to go back, listen to some of those other episodes.
But here, I really wanted to highlight these two points.
I wanted to look at what he says about pornography.
Again, to highlight what it tells us more broadly about how high control religionists understand God and why their religious ideology so often renders them immune to factual arguments.
It's a topic I've spent a lot of time thinking about.
Everybody's had personal conversations with friends, family members, colleagues, people that they meet, whatever about these things.
And they'll say, it just doesn't matter what facts you give them.
It's like you're speaking a different language.
This is why.
I wanted to look at that.
And I also wanted to see what his discussion shows us about how he views anyone who disagrees with him.
The kinds of monsters and morally calloused and reprobate people he presents us as being.
We could say more about those points.
We could say more about other things, but there's one final point I wanted to make in this discussion.
And this is another reason that we see a pattern over and over and over again, is he talks about pornography the way he does finally, because it allows him to reduce so many social problems in a radically simplified way.
There are real issues with the epidemic of male loneliness.
There can be real concerns about, I don't know, people entering into long-term caring relationships or not and so forth.
Those are all real things to talk about, but they're complex and they're hard.
And what Josh Hawley does is he finds a simple solution.
He radically simplifies a complex social reality.
He says, yep, that's just porn, just pornography.
And if we could just magically do away with the pornography, all these other things would be fixed.
We talk about this all the time.
Radically Simplifying Complexity00:01:09
It's one of the draws.
It's one of the points of appeal of high control religion is that it offers simple answers to complex social realities.
That's on full display in his discussion here as well.
As always, as I say, there's more that we could say.
We're going to say some more about chapter five next week.
We're not going to exhaust everything.
If you've got other thoughts, other points of input, please let me know.
Daniel Miller Swedge, DanielMiller, S-W-A-J at gmail.com.
I'd love to hear those.
If you're a subscriber and can join us for our live supplemental events, would love to have you join those.
Throw some of those questions in the chat.
We spend some time talking about those.
We are going to occasionally be doing what we're calling office hours, where kind of over a lunch hour will be available in the Discord for anybody who might want to join us.
Maybe you want to come and talk about this or other topics, things related to that, just invite you to do so.
Finally, again, thank you for supporting us in all the ways that you do.
We produce a lot of content, are trying to expand that, trying to do new things.
You are the ones who allow us to do that, whether you're a subscriber, whether you're a one-time giver, whether you're just somebody who listens and tells others about us.