Tag: pornography

Being Human — Chapter Six — A world of (im)pure imagey-nations

This is an adaptation of the sixth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

How does this image make you feel? Is your stomach rumbling?

What about this one? Are you salivating just a little?

And what about this one — can you imagine sitting in this lounge room?

How about this kitchen? How does it make you feel about your house?

It’s interesting — isn’t it — the way images work in our minds to create desires.

I could have shown you images of beautiful people — but I’m trying to keep things PG and these pictures of food came from the #foodporn and #houseporn hashtags on Instagram.

It’s not just Instagram that stokes our desire for food or furniture — you can have your senses tantalised on MasterChef, or My Kitchen Rules — and you can cultivate dissatisfaction with your kitchen appliances on The Block.

The Block had extra drama in 2022, with a couple bailing after one episode; because it wasn’t on-brand for them — it didn’t mesh with their image; Elle Ferguson’s in the image business… she’s a world-famous Instagram influencer. Being an influencer is a desirable new career path; the ABC is even reporting on children becoming professional influencers — and how powerful these influencers are.

It’s a tricky life. Aussie academic, Nina Willment, says influencers live with the constant threat of not being seen; if they don’t keep making content they might be punished by the machine overlords — the algorithm.

“The threat of invisibility is a constant source of insecurity for influencers, who are under constant pressure to feed platforms with content. If they don’t, they may be ‘punished’ by the algorithm – having posts hidden or displayed lower down on search results.”

Nina Willment, The Dark Side of Content Creation

But it’s not just influencers who reduce themselves to images and perform for a machine-like audience; in the age of expressive individualism, Instagram’s on hand inviting you to express yourself with the tools they provide.

Image making is part of being human; it’s what God does, and it’s part of images made in the image of an image maker (Genesis 1:27).

The catch is, when we live as images in a world where we have cut ourselves off from God — where we’re “buffered” — we’re not sure what image it is we’re meant to be like, and so we often end up choosing other people… And often it’s not just our parents, in our visual culture it’s celebrities — or, increasingly, influencers.

Christopher Hedges wrote the book Empire of Illusion, about life in a world dominated by images that are produced to manipulate us and keep us playing along with the image makers; the celebrity-making machines, and he says when we turn to celebrities — or influencers — as idealised forms of ourselves, it ends up impacting us; instead of being fully real, or fully self-actualised, we’re never sure who we are.

“Celebrities are portrayed as idealized forms of ourselves. It is we, in perverse irony, who are never fully actualised, never fully real in a celebrity culture.”

Christopher Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Maybe we’re not buffered selves, but buffering — always trying to become who we are more fully, but never quite finished and ready to go.

With the sheer volume of evolving images how could we feel whole? We’re perpetually looking for the next image — whether that’s a meal, a house design, a holiday, a relationship, or some visionary version of ourselves.

In an article updating the argument in his book after Donald Trump’s election — Hedges says we’re worshippers of the electronic image — our modern-day idols shape our fantasies; our hearts and our lives. Even our interactions with others are shaped by all sorts of pixelated pictures, whether that’s through interacting on screens; or spending our time seeing people’s bodies in pixelated form.

“Electronic images are our modern-day idols. We worship the power and fame they impart. We yearn to become idolised celebrities. We measure our lives against the fantasies these images disseminate.”

Hedges, Worshipping the Electronic Image

Hedges reckons Donald Trump’s reality TV instincts made him a perfect politician for the digital image world — he’s mastered the cultivation of political images — we saw this in this image during a series of FBI raids.

Bizarrely Trump seems to be the embodiment of all the vices from Colossians (Colossians 3:5), but his image-making machine controls the Republicans, and about 80% of people who identify as evangelical Christians in the US — and we might feel a world away, but consider how much of the imagery in our culture and on our screens is pumped out from the US…

Trump’s image-making is catching — those following his playbook can look like images in a live action role playing game, or like they’re playing multiple characters at once.

This isn’t new; we’ve always been shaped by images — once it was stained glass windows, and paintings that told the story about an enchanted cosmos, what’s new is the medium; and it’s much cheaper to make a digital photo than a stained glass window; today our icons are the pictures flashing across our screens.

“In the Middle Ages, stained glass windows and vivid paintings of religious torment and salvation controlled and influenced social behavior. Today we are ruled by icons of gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from television, cinema, and computer screens.”

Hedges, Empire of Illusion

And it’s not just foodporn, obviously — porn itself is embedded in our culture and our imaginations — our image making. Both as an image maker and in the way its norms flow into the way human bodies are presented in advertising and entertainment.

Hedges is a lapsed Presbyterian minister who became an award-winning war correspondent — his book has a whole chapter on porn — and it’s like he’s covering a war; it has way too much information to be comfortable reading — he reckons porn both shapes and mirrors the violence, cruelty and degradation in our society the same way war can; and that porn is producing a loss of empathy by reducing human beings — and human bodies — to being commodities.

“The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy… It is about reducing other human beings to commodities, to objects.”

Hedges, Empire of Illusion

He suggests porn is part of a society that kills both the sacred and the human, replacing empathy and human desire — eros — and compassion with power, control, force and pain — and the idea that we are gods, and others will literally bend to our fantasies…

“It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion that we are gods… Porn is the glittering façade… of a culture seduced by death.”

Hedges, Empire of Illusion

And we’re seeing the costs of this society in our society — in our schools even — I read this news story about how young boys raised on porn are sexually assaulting their classmates in record numbers.

Melinda Tankard Reist from Collective Shout wrote about the impact of porn not just in assault, but in the expectations placed on teen girls in dating relationships a few years ago where she said the culture, for teens shaped by porn, is that sexual conquest and domination are untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy, and authentic human connection — that young people are learning cruelty and humiliation not intimacy and love — this is what happens when we’re just bodies ruled by desire, or see each other just as pixelated images in the flesh, where our desires have been shaped by dehumanising images.

“Sexual conquest and domination are untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy and authentic human connection. Young people are not learning about intimacy, friendship and love, but about cruelty and humiliation.”

Melinda Tankard Reist

The culture we live in that commodifies people by turning them into images isn’t just happening in Instagram, or porn, it’s shaping dating — our relationships are increasingly mediated by digital images. One third of all new romantic relationships now begin online, it’s the most common way people get together.

And platforms like OkCupid — who promise dating for every single person — that’s clever — and who can even cater for niches like “people who like kissing while sitting in pie.”

Success on these sites requires cultivating an image that’ll make you attractive to others. And pictures create heaps more interaction than words; they have run studies.

David Brooks — who writes for the New York Timeswrote an article about online dating in 2003, celebrating how it was reintroducing a formal structure and ritual to dating, which he thought had been lost:

“Online dating puts structure back into courtship. For generations Americans had certain courtship rituals.”

David Brooks, Love: Internet Style, New York Times, 2003

He reckoned these platforms were all about love…

“But love is what this is all about. And the heart, even in this commercial age, finds a way.”

Brooks, 2003

In 2015 he wrote another piece — and he had changed his tune — he noticed something about the way these platforms worked — when we go to an online dating site on the same browser they use for their online shopping, we inevitably bring the same mindset — we shop for human beings. He says these platforms commodify people particularly by reducing people to a picture.

“People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who don’t… It’s just that they’re in a specific mental state. They’re shopping for human beings, commodifying people.”

David Brooks, ‘The Devotion Leap,’ New York Times, 2015

And this process is more or less the opposite of love.

“Online dating is fascinating because it is more or less the opposite of its object: love.”

Brooks, 2015

Things have become more complex since 2015 — dating sites like OkCupid have lost market share to apps focused on instant gratification and immediate availability; where even the rituals of the old web dating have been deconstructed with a swipe of the finger, and where image is everything.

Photography itself is interesting — it has rapidly evolved as part of everyday life since the mechanisation of camera production in the 70s; before then most people didn’t spend time taking photos; even then cameras had built-in limits — like film — but the jump from mechanical to digital means we now have a seemingly unlimited capacity to capture every moment — and then see everything on our screens.

Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay ‘On Photography‘ in the 70s where she was worried then that to capture and shoot images was an act of aggression — think of the words “capture” and “shoot.”

“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Photographers, she says, are “always imposing standards on their subjects,” and objectifying them.

She saw the need — once families had cameras — to capture every moment as an addictive aesthetic consumerism.

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”

Sontag, On Photography

She suggests industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies, and this bombardment of imagery becomes an irresistible form of mental pollution.

“Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

Sontag, On Photography

This was before the smartphone. Imagine how she would feel about the digital society…

Have you thought about it this way? The idea that images are polluting our brains, and shaping our desires, and reshaping our bodies — but we’re bombarded with images and these images shape our desires and produce reactions in our bodies; and we’re being discipled by our digital society — even by algorithms — to interact with images and present ourselves as images… and normally as images that keep making people more money, by stoking more desires and selling us the answer.

God made us as image bearers to see… to imagine… and to make images.

God made beauty.

He made fruit that was pleasing to the eye and good for food (Genesis 2:9); but this visualising — our capacity to imagine — either leads us to or away from God. “Pleasing to the eye” and “good for food” is how Eve sees the fruit she’s been told is not good to eat too (Genesis 3:6). Then this pattern of seeing and desiring and being led to destructive sin repeats — it’s the same story with the Nephilim (Genesis 3:6, 6:2), and with David and Bathsheba (Genesis 3:6, 2 Samuel 11:2-4).

This relationship between sin and desire is also caught up in idolatry — so the Ten Commandments include a command not to make graven images of God (Exodus 20:4-5); and Deuteronomy commands Israel to watch themselves carefully and to avoid making images of living things to worship them (Deuteronomy 4:15-18), because those images will profoundly shape our vision of God and our life in the world.

What do you think Moses would have said about Instagram?

It’s interesting, though, that Israel’s holy spaces — the tabernacle and temple — involve man-made images of trees and fruit (Exodus 25:36); Israel’s eyes and bodies are meant to participate in worship — and making beautiful images of things God made can be part of that — but you won’t find carved images of God; or of animals, or of men or women — images of images of God, because Israel weren’t to worship images; they’re to be images… as soon as we reduce God to an image, or make an image our god, we’re working with a false picture of God; a God who is an image of our making.

This tendency to turn images into gods is pretty ingrained — Ezekiel talks about idols being set up in our hearts; the seat of our desires and loves (Ezekiel 14:4-5)… That’s where images go… Isaiah re-tells an idol making session with someone cooking food over one half of a chunk of wood, then carving an image of a god with the other (Isaiah 44:15), and he says something those of us who live with our phones wedged into our hands with our eyes hunched over giving all our attention… “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?” (Isaiah 44:20).

Are not these images that bombard me, and keep me looking down, and that shape my desires — aren’t they built on the same lies; the same call to misplace our desire, that the serpent used with Eve… Won’t they leave me always dissatisfied? Humans have always been fixated by images.

The New Testament church lived in an image-saturated world — there were statues of the emperors and the Roman gods everywhere; temples on every hill and corner in a city — they also lived in an age of spectacle that upheld the imagery; the degradation of human bodies in blood sports and sexual immorality — and this presented a major challenge for the early church;

They were pretty serious about Jesus’ commands on lust and the heart, and the idea of your eyes causing you to stumble (Matthew 5:28-29), and about his teaching on the eyes and the heart being linked (Matthew 6:21-22). For them, even attending the Roman spectacles; these games, was seen not simply as renouncing your Christian faith, but as announcing you belonged to the ancient empire of illusion. They wanted to cultivate a way of seeing the world that helped them see God, and so live as his images.

Two Aussie theologians — Ben Myers and Scott Stephens — co-wrote a paper about disciplining our eyes in a visual culture; they reckon we also live in a society of spectacle and one of our great moral challenges is deciding what images to look at.

Christians today live in a society of the spectacle. Our lives are dominated to an unprecedented degree by images and by the moral act of looking at them.

Without minimising the damage that sexual imagery does to us; they suggest all imagery is essentially pornography.

“All images today are pornographic: they arouse—but without danger, obligation, or contamination.”

Myers and Stephens, ‘The Discipline of the Eyes: Reflections on Visual Culture, Ancient and Modern,’ in HTML of Cruciform Love: Towards a Theology of The Internet

We’re so conditioned to objectify and worship — that imagery in ads and in social media streams arouse us without the danger of embodied commitment; without creating obligation, or without the complications that come when we actually use our bodies. And the spectacle shapes us.

And I know that some of us are here and we’re struggling with lust; with addiction to porn, and I’m not wanting to minimise that by saying that most of us are struggling with image addiction, in a machine world where the algorithms are geared towards ruining us by making us consumers — I don’t want to minimise it, but maybe I want to reframe the conversations about porn so that you see it as part of a dehumanising world that has objectified and commodified everything and everyone, where we’re taught that a fulfilled life is one where we satisfy our every longing and desire and that we can do this just with imagery — and maybe I think the rest of us should be confronting our own addictions too…

It’s easy for us to look across the ocean and judge the image-driven life of American politics; but ours is the same. It’s easy for us to throw stones at churches built on image, where that goes wrong — like at Hillsong’s New York campus where the image cultivation machine was operating in overdrive. But what about in our church? How do we go about avoiding the worship of images — whether that’s online, or the way we express ourselves?

This is something I’ve been pretty aware of as someone who lives online in an image-soaked world — I’ve resisted selfies, I don’t post or scroll on Instagram, I do scroll Facebook, and find myself comparing and contrasting to all sorts of people — especially other pastors. The sin of comparison will kill you just like any other. One of the ways I compare myself is that I hate when churches post photos from within a church service, especially of preachers — in a way that just creates a sort of #churchporn. Where are you engaged in image-based comparison? What spectacles can’t you turn your eyes from? What online images are shaping your hearts?

We aren’t going to think our way out of idolatrous practices that shape our desires; our loves; our worship — we actually need a new way of life; a new sort of worship and a new image to pursue.

How do we become worshipping images, where images — even the pictures on the screen — help us worship God rather than conforming our imaginations?

This, I take it, is what Paul is teaching the Colossians to do in their own world of idolatrous spectacle; he starts his letter by introducing Jesus as the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15-16). Jesus is the one worthy of our worship, because in him and for him all things on heaven and earth were created; and because he has redeemed us and is reconciling us to God…

And then he calls his readers away from idolatry by calling us to lift our eyes; not focusing on the images we’re inclined to worship; but because we’ve been raised with Jesus and because he’s seated at the right hand of God in heaven, and that’s our future and what should be our desire; we should fix our hearts and minds on things above (Colossians 3:1-2); and this’ll mean cultivating a new way of looking at the world.

Because we’re called to take off the old self — with its practices (Colossians 3:9-10), that’s going to include practices of seeing, as we put on a new self with new practices of seeing and worshipping, so that we’re renewed in the image of its creator — which Paul says back in chapter 1 is not just the Father, but Jesus as well.

We’re to put to death what belongs to our earthly nature (Colossians 3:5-6) — a nature shaped by worshipping earthly stuff — seeing, desiring, and taking — by how we approach sex, lust, desire, and greed — which is idolatry — and I reckon Paul’s saying the stuff that belongs to our earthly nature is idolatry — these are paths to death; to God’s wrath. So kill them.

And take up new life — clothing ourselves with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience, and forgiveness — seeing others the way God sees them — and ourselves as God sees us — and over all this; love — the virtue that binds them all (Colossians 3:12-14).

When Paul talks about practices in the world — and with others — and these virtues — these practices have to include new ways of looking at the world, and at others — we can’t look at the world, and others, as objects to be consumed — lusted after — desired. That’s deadly idolatry. That’s what porn is; it cultivates death in you — your eyes, your heart, your body are all being aligned to death — but it’s also what any idolatrous image making and image-viewing does for us; instead we should be looking at others and at the things God made in order to learn compassion and kindness and humility — self-denial — gentleness and patience — these are the virtues opposite to pornworld and the age of instant gratification; and when we embrace these new patterns of looking it should transform our community so that we are images who look like Jesus in compelling and truly human ways.

The sort of practices we’re going to need are — like last week — ascetic — cultivating the discipline not to look; to self-deny — and aesthetic — cultivating an ability to look through the goodness and beauty of created things; and to use our desires and our eyes in ways that throw us towards the one in whom all things are made and reconciled.

But we need a third practice; too — one of keeping Jesus — keeping heavenly realities before our eyes, and shaping our hearts — so that as we say no to idolatry and yes to beauty our hearts are being governed by the image we worship; the image of God. This’ll be what stops us being buffered — closed off to God — and buffering — never fully human — we become fully human as we worship God who made us, and are renewed as his image bearers.

In terms of saying no — you might need to do an audit of your image viewing; being confronted with images in an age of spectacle is inevitable, but what can you do to not just turn your eyes, but keep your eyes looking where they should be. What apps do you need to delete? Delete them now. Just say no. What social media platforms or TV shows or games or magazines are cultivating your idolatry? Step back from them until you can step into them as an image bearer captivated by Jesus.

Job has that famous line about making a covenant with his eyes not to look at a woman lustfully (Job 31:1-2) — and there’s an app you might use to fight porn called Covenant Eyes, but if all imagery is pornographic — maybe we all need to make commitments not to look lustfully at sex, or violence, or food, or symbols of wealth, or whatever it is that turns our heart… and the word lustfully here is key; it doesn’t say don’t look at beautiful people or things God made; it’s about our hearts.

Ben Myers and Scott Stephens reckon we need to — in community — cultivate visual disciplines; periods of asceticism — where we put the screens down — as necessary parts of our spiritual life.

“Do Christian communities still believe it is possible to cultivate visual disciplines, and periods of visual asceticism, as necessary parts of the spiritual life? Do we recognize the moral value of providing havens from the dominance of the image, while also nourishing alternative traditions of perception?”

Myers and Stephens

They reckon this sort of discipline is necessary to give our eyes a break.

This is one of the reasons we do so little on social media and the web as a church — there are other reasons, like not wanting to put church forward as an “image” thing to be consumed — but you don’t need your screen. And we need to cultivate other ways of using our eyes; our perception as well.

Myers and Stephens remind us that we can see one another — the faces of living saints — as part of being shaped by images, but also suggest works of art might play a part. In Christian traditions other than ours; like the ones with stained glass storytelling; people’s imaginations were formed — catechised — using pictures; art.

“Do we offer catechesis in the use of holy images, whether these are works of art or the faces of living saints?”

Myers and Stephens

We Protestants tend not to have an aesthetic, or a sense of the place of art and beauty — both making and appreciating it — in our lives as a form of discipline or disciple making; art is a life-giving alternative to the death-taking imagery of porn and advertising…

And here’s where we might cultivate what Alan Noble calls an aesthetic life as a disruptive witness to the world — a life that values and even collects beauty because beautiful things — art, poems, flowers — create an allusionary sense that the world is enchanting, in a world of illusionary images, we need these allusionary images — images that allude to the beauty and character of God as creator.

“What makes a work of art, a poem, or a flower beautiful is the way it suggests more, the way it opens up possibilities, the way it alludes to other things in creation.”

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

He reckons this approach to aesthetics resists commodification — recognising beauty and the creatureliness or createdness of people and things reminds us of the creator; and reminds us we’re not just commodities where nothing matters — the world doesn’t just exist for our grasping; but is shot through with meaning that we’re meant to probe, as humans.

“Aesthetics reveals an irreducible universe — a universe that resists our attempts at totalizing and controlling it, that is always just out of grasp, that always offers us a little more meaning.”

Noble

This might even involve how we decorate our homes, and the food we serve on our tables — not just with images from Instagram; where people are trying to cultivate a sense of self through performance, but images that have a more artistic and allusionary quality that pull us towards the enchanted world; it might also involve practising noticing beauty in creation without taking photos at all, connecting with God’s world — and your body — and receiving beauty with thanksgiving.

Paul’s big solution to guide us as we do this is that we let the message of Christ dwell among us richly as we teach and admonish one another — with wisdom — contemplation of God’s world and how to live in it — through creativity; through poetry — through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit — songs we humans create as temples of the Spirit in response to setting our hearts on things above, and through engaging our voices and hearts as we sing to God — with gratitude in our hearts.

And his goal is that whatever we do — whatever images we make or see — as we live as renewed images — whatever we do we’re to do in the name of the Lord, giving thanks to God the Father through him. If you can’t do that when you encounter or create an image, then there’s a good chance it’s an idol (Colossians 3:15-17).

Raging against the machine (but elsewhere)

I haven’t stopped writing about technology and how it impacts modern life (and faith in modern life). Since last posting here I’ve written a couple of pieces for the Centre for Public Christianity.

The first was about machine generated pornography; it’s published on CPX’s website. In this piece I considered the way AI image producers chop up lots of bits of different images and mash them up into one ‘new’ image and pondering the ethical implications of doing that to images of humans produced by a degrading and increasingly violent and idolatrous industry. My take is that these platforms might be ‘more ethical’ in that you could draw on the existing pool of human misery and ‘body parts’ out there waiting to be recombobulated for human consumption; but they are potentially even more damaging and dehumanising to our imaginations and empathy and our sense of what it means to be human (plus those people whose body parts are mashed up in future image generation are unlikely to be paid).

I drew on the work of former war correspondent Chris Hedges, and his bracing book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, where he wrote:

Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy… In porn the woman is stripped of her human attributes and made to beg for abuse. She has no identity as a distinct human being. Her only worth is as a toy, a pleasure doll.

I’m not sure the machine is a way out of these death works, but a next step into them.


“It is the disease of corporate and imperial power. It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion that we are gods. Porn is the glittering façade, like the casinos and resorts in Las Vegas, like the rest of the fantasy that is America, of a culture seduced by death.”

I’m not sure the machine is a way out of these death works, but a next step into them.

I didn’t say as much as I might’ve liked about deepfakes, but AI generated deep fake pornography broke as a significant tech story a short time after this was published.

My follow up piece was one that took a philosophical thought experiment around the machine — a Paperclip Maximiser — a machine programmed, simply (and without limits) to make paperclips. The machine in this thought experiment eventually turns ever piece of matter in the universe into paperclips. It’s meant to remind us of the importance of human-established limits. I suggested poker machines are ‘profit maximising’ machines, and, with NSW Premier Dom Perottet’s “religious gut” becoming a bit of an election issue around gambling reform, I argued that religious guts are a good place to turn to find human limits for consuming machines. This piece ran at Eureka St.

I drew on the work of Natasha Dow Schüll, whose book Addiction By Design digs into the programmed intelligence of modern pokie machines; the way they now adapt to a user in order to become more addictive so that user will, in industry terms, “play to extinction.”

For pieces like this to be published in public facing media outlets that aren’t explicitly Christian you’ve got to thread a bit of a needle; so during the process we dropped off a thread in this piece about how the Old Testament prophets; who inform the religious gut of Jesus, and his followers, positioned idols as man-made death machines, just with less moving parts and bells and whistles; and how critiques of a Babylonian empire built on total domination and turning everything into Babylon, through the power of their military and religious machinery might help us think about profit maximising empires that create human misery in their wake.

I have some plans in the pipeline for a couple more pieces exploring the ‘machine’.

The worship wars (3): porn as deadly (idol) worship

“And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” — David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

worship-wars
Last week news broke that two 12 year old boys had sexually assaulted a six year old girl in a bathroom in their school. Twice.

Just contemplate that for a moment. This is awful.

Awful. There’d be societies in the ancient world wearing sackcloth and ashes over that sort of behaviour (and others where that sort of behaviour would be a clear symptom of a huge societal problem — there are a couple of stories with echoes of this in the Bible around the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and then later in Judges).

What gets us to this point? What is it that teaches children to behave this way? If people are worshippers who build cultures on shared objects of worship (one of the implications of the first two posts in this series), if the actions of people within those cultures reveal our gods; our ultimate stories; then what are we worshipping that produces these actions?

What are we teaching our children?

No parent sets out to tell their kids to act like this, and if the model of human habits being a product of our gods and loves, not just our rational thoughts is true, telling kids not to do this won’t actually stop them; they’ll be much more shaped by what we, as a society are doing and what we’re loving.

This is awful. But it’s not the only story like it… and it’s not just kids…

Consider how far our society has progressed, such that the only service for children who perpetrate sexual assault on other children is oversubscribed; the expert in this story says two causes for this prevalence are the sexual abuse of children (who become perpetrators) and the availability of internet pornography.

Consider that the Washington Post published a piece recently that called pornography a “public health crisis” which pointed out that:

“Because so much porn is free and unfiltered on most digital devices, the average age of first viewing porn is estimated by some researchers to be 11. In the absence of a comprehensive sex-education curriculum in many schools, pornography has become de facto sex education for youth. And what are these children looking at? If you have in your mind’s eye a Playboy centerfold with a naked woman smiling in a cornfield, then think again. While “classy” lad mags like Playboy are dispensing with the soft-core nudes of yesteryear, free and widely available pornography is often violent, degrading and extreme.

In a content analysis of best-selling and most-rented porn films, researchers found that 88 percent of analyzed scenes contained physical aggression: generally spanking, gagging, choking or slapping. Verbal aggression occurred in 49 percent of the scenes, most often in the form of calling a woman “bitch” and “slut.” Men perpetrated 70 percent of the aggressive acts, while women were the targets 94 percent of the time.”

Consider this story from a parent recently that compared the ability to access the fantasy world of pornography to the mystical through-the-wardrobe land of Narnia, but showed the real world, habitual, fruits developed by the modern fantasy story.

Consider this ABC story by Collective Shout’s Melinda Tankard Reist about a published study Don’t Send Me That Pic featuring widespread interviews with Australia’s teenage girls, which (the story) features this quote:

Some girls suffer physical injury from porn-inspired sexual acts, including anal sex. The director of a domestic violence centre on the Gold Coast wrote to me a couple of years ago about the increase in porn-related injuries to girls aged 14 and up, from acts including torture:

“In the past few years we have had a huge increase in intimate partner rape of women from 14 to 80+. The biggest common denominator is consumption of porn by the offender. With offenders not able to differentiate between fantasy and reality, believing women are ‘up for it’ 24/7, ascribing to the myth that ‘no means yes and yes means anal’, oblivious to injuries caused and never ever considering consent. We have seen a huge increase in deprivation of liberty, physical injuries, torture, drugging, filming and sharing footage without consent.”

The Australian Psychological Society estimates that adolescent boys are responsible for around 20% of rapes of adult women and between 30% and 50% of all reported sexual assaults of children. Just last week , Emeritus Professor Freda Briggs argued that online pornography is turning children into copycat sexual predators – acting out on other children what they are seeing in porn.

Note the role ‘fantasy’ — the sort of story of desire, that shapes our imaginations, loves, and actions, plays in this quote. Ask yourself what god or gods we are worshipping as a culture that produces behaviour like this.

It’s horrid.

Pornography: worship gone wrong

This is worship gone wrong. Pornography is a form of worship — an evil counter-form of worship that is claiming the hearts and habits of men and women in our world, and destroying families, and individuals.

In Christian circles, for thousands of years, churches who have sought to raise little worshippers (such is our view of how the desires that centre our humanity operate) have catechised their children; believing that teaching a child how to worship is the key to teaching a child how to live. That, say, the golden rule, works best when you have in view the life and death of the one from whose lips it came, who also called us to love God with all our hearts, and love our neighbours as we love ourselves… then modelled that with a couple of pieces of timber and some horrid spikes on an awful hill outside Jerusalem.

Worship matters. Teaching our kids how to worship matters. And our society is teaching our kids how to worship.

It’s porn doing the teaching. If you want to know what’s catechising our kids… claiming their imaginations… shaping their desires… look no further than what is streaming into their eyes via their smart phones and internet connections. And it’s not just the kids. Is it.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story this week (you may have to google this phrase to get in behind the paywall) from a Jewish Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and Pamela Anderson (yes, that Pamela Anderson), calling for people to snap out of blindly pursuing satisfaction through pornography (more on their suggested solution later). It contained this observation about the current reality…

“Put another way, we are a guinea-pig generation for an experiment in mass debasement that few of us would have ever consented to, and whose full nefarious impact may not be known for years. How many families will suffer? How many marriages will implode? How many talented men will scrap their most important relationships and careers for a brief onanistic thrill? How many children will propel, warp-speed, into the dark side of adult sexuality by forced exposure to their fathers’ profanations?

The statistics already available are terrifying. According to data provided by the American Psychological Association, porn consumption rates are between 50% and 99% among men and 30% to 86% among women, with the former group often reporting less satisfactory intimate lives with their wives or girlfriends as a result of the consumption. By contrast, many female fans of pornography tend to prefer a less explicit variety, and report that it improves their sexual relationships.

We’re catechising them. Only it’s not the story of the Gospel that’s shaping them. It’s the story of cheap pornography; which leads us to view one another as meat puppets for our own personal sexual gratification.

Pornography is worship.

False worship. But worship.

The god of uninhibited sexual pleasure isn’t a new God — there’s plenty in the Old and New Testaments about sex and idolatry (and the idolatry of sex)… but if you’re looking for an enemy in the war for people’s worship — their loves — and looking for a demonstration of the truth that we are worshippers whose lives are profoundly shaped by our loves and habits, then pornography is it.

Pornography is worship.

Awful. Habit shaping, story changing, insidious, idolatrous, deadly, worship. And it is powerful. It offers a powerfully corrupt vision of the ‘good life’ that many buy into; that the good life is an orgasm brought about no matter the cost. The cheaper for you, and the more expensive for someone else the better. What an awful story to habitually participate yourself into believing.

It’s not old hymns or modern praise songs that are the enemy in the worship wars; it’s not whether we partake in the sacraments daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or at all, that we should be putting our energy into when it comes to deciding who and how we worship. It’s insidious gods like the idols behind porn — the worship of one’s own sexual gratification and the pursuit of an orgasm as though that’s our fundamental telos, be it by ourselves in darkness or shame; or in the relationships we destroy in the pursuit of the stories we see played out in pixels. Porn kills. It’s worship. And it so perfectly fits the paradigm described in the first two posts of this series. That we’re worshippers. And what we worship shapes us as we participate in the ‘liturgies’ of whatever ultimate love story we’re living in. Porn offers a terrible ultimate love story, and it’s terribly destructive.

The war for your worship  involves your heart, your imagination, and your habits: porn attempts to claim all three

So far in this little series I’ve argued that we are, by nature, worshipping beings; that we bear the image of the object of our worship, and that seeing the worship wars as a civil war — a conflict within the church about how we gather (and the style of music we sing), profoundly misunderstands the real enemy and what’s really at stake in the war that’s raging for who and how all people worship. In this post I’ll explore what I think the major strength of James K.A Smith’s work in his three recent books on this stuff is for those wanting to engage in the worship war and fight on the good side, not the evil side, in the next I’ll make some suggestions about where I think Smith’s answer to his diagnosis goes somewhere I wouldn’t (especially because of a slight difference in what I think ‘worship’ is, and how it relates to Sunday gatherings of Christians).

Smith suggests that as worshipping creatures we are liturgical creatures; and by this he means we’re actually more shaped by our practices than we realise. Our actions aren’t just things that flow out of our beliefs and loves, but shape them. Liturgy, our habits, have the capacity to both form and deform us; to make us more like Jesus, or make us more like our idols.

Porn is worship; and it deforms us. It takes us away from being the people we were made to be, and from worshipping the God we were made to worship. We see this because it leads to destruction; not love.

This insight has a nice little overlap with the discipline of media ecology and a famous maxim about media practices and tools: “we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us”… Introduce a new piece of technology to an environment, a technology that changes our habits, and not only will we potentially do more with that tool, it will change the way we do things and so change us. Think about someone whose job is to get rid of a concrete slab. A sledgehammer is effective and gives you big arm muscles, a jackhammer is effective and gives you a tough stomach, a remote controlled piece of high powered digging machinery is super effective and you only have to use your thumbs. Holediggers over the ages look very different. We’re shaped by our habits. Now picture the hole digging thing as ‘communicating information’ and think about the changes from pen and ink, to typewriter, to printing press, to internet… This isn’t just true of hole digging and communication — our lives and identities, our loves, who we are and the stories we tell ourselves are profoundly shaped by our habits. What we do doesn’t just reflect who we are; it shapes who we are. We cultivate the type of person we want to become based on our image of the good human life, which is based, in turn, upon the stories we tell ourselves. As Smith puts it:

Liturgies work affectively and aesthetically—they grab hold of our guts through the power of image, story, and metaphor. That’s why the most powerful liturgies are attuned to our embodiment; they speak to our senses; they get under our skin. The way to the heart is through the body, you could say.

“Liturgy,” as I’m using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we’re for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation. — James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love

Porn makes for terrible, deadly, effective liturgy. It is powerfully wired to do exactly what Smith says liturgy does; but with horrible and destructive results. It tells a terrible story about our bodies, our sexuality, our relationships, our telos, and our humanity. The stakes are high.  This is about who you are. And who we are as a society. That’s why it’s legitimate for us to draw causal links between our practices, the virtues they demonstrate to our kids, and the way our kids then behave. If kids are sexually assaulting other kids in the playground there’s something very wrong with how we adults are conscripting their imaginations, their love and their worship. We’re losing the war, as a culture and as the church. Here’s perhaps the tightest summary about the way Smith calls us to observe and participate in the world (and to understand ourselves as participants).

If you are what you love, and your ultimate loves are formed and aimed by your immersion in practices and cultural rituals, then such practices fundamentally shape who you are. At stake here is your very identity, your fundamental allegiances, your core convictions and passions that center both your self-understanding and your way of life. In other words, this contest of cultural practices is a competition for your heart—the center of the human person designed for God, as Augustine reminded us. More precisely, at stake in the formation of your loves is your religious and spiritual identity, which is manifested not only in what you think or what you believe but in what you do—and what those practices do to you…

We become what we worship because what we worship is what we love. As we’ve seen, it’s not a question of whether you worship but what you worship—which is why John Calvin refers to the human heart as an “idol factory.” We can’t not worship because we can’t not love something as ultimate…

Our idolatries, then, are more liturgical than theological. Our most alluring idols are less intellectual inventions and more affective projections—they are the fruit of disordered wants, not just misunderstanding or ignorance. Instead of being on guard for false teachings and analyzing culture in order to sift out the distorting messages, we need to recognize that there are rival liturgies everywhere. — You Are What You Love, James K.A Smith

When we believe the story porn tells us, and reinforce it by our addicted, habitual, practices, it kills us. It rewires our brains, literally, it corrupts our imaginations and so damages our relationships (and the imagination and relationships of our children), it changes our understanding of the purpose of our existence as we’re captured and addicted (chemically) to a particular sort of stimulus that functions on the law of diminishing returns so that we always want more, more twisted, more extreme, and in capturing us like this it does what David Foster Wallace, and the writers of the Old Testament, and Paul in Romans 1, and so God, warn us it will do, as an idol, it eats us alive. Till we’re a shell of the image we were meant to be. And we die.

In Romans 1, Paul says this sort of thing is exactly what we should expect when we replace worshipping the God who made us with the gods we make from good things he made. You worship sex, and pursue orgasm with every fiber of your being via whatever object necessary — including porn — and it’s going to end up messing you up. And messing up your view of other people; whether you love them or use them. What is pornography if not the desires of our hearts being captured by images made (by the power of airbrushing, cosmetic surgery, and photoshop) to look like a mortal human being

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. — Romans 1:22-25

The end result of this false worship isn’t just the messy consequences now — which Paul says God gives us (perhaps to teach us a lesson) — but death. False worship all leads to one place. It leads to destructive and deadly relationships with each other (note the testimony of girls in our schools and those awful news stories), and it leads to death. Only that doesn’t stop us, such is the lure of our idols and the power of liturgy, even bad liturgy, to claim our hearts and imaginations. Paul specifically mentions both the desires of our hearts and our depraved minds in this description of the human condition.

“Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” — Romans 1:32

How do we fix this? How do you ‘fight the new drug’ as one anti-porn platform calls us to do, if we’re natural born worshippers?

Three ways to change your worship (and maybe kick the porn habit)

1. The Pamela Anderson solution – worship yourself in different ways (bad)

The Anderson/Boteach story in the Wall Street Journal that I quoted way back at the top does a great job of highlighting the insidious, pervasive, and perverted impact that pornography is having on the lives of individuals, families, and thus our culture. But it offers a terrible and ultimately doomed solution — especially if we are worshippers and what we worship determines our fate. It’s no good just replacing one form of worship of self with another — say, the worship of our sexual pleasure, freedom, and the liturgy of pursuing orgasm, with the worship of our healthy self-autonomy, discipline, and the liturgy of pursuing self-mastery. As the narrator (or Tyler Durden) in the movie Fight Club so eloquently put it: “self improvement is masturbation”…

Here’s the Anderson/Boteach solution:

“The ubiquity of porn is an outgrowth of the sexual revolution that began a half-century ago and which, with gender rights and freedoms now having been established, has arguably run its course. Now is the time for an epochal shift in our private and public lives. Call it a “sensual revolution.”

The sensual revolution would replace pornography with eroticism—the alloying of sex with love, of physicality with personality, of the body’s mechanics with imagination, of orgasmic release with binding relationships. In an age where public disapproval is no longer an obstacle to personal disgrace, we must turn instead to the appeal of self-interest.

Simply put, we must educate ourselves and our children to understand that porn is for losers—a boring, wasteful and dead-end outlet for people too lazy to reap the ample rewards of healthy sexuality.”

If everything in this series so far is legit, or close to being right, this will not work. This is a call to do what is actually best for yourself by educating yourself about harm.

It does not replace the story that gets us to where we are. It relies on the understanding of the human being as a brain on a stick who will think themselves to better solutions. Thinking alone won’t combat the sort of chemical addiction our brains develop to release-via-orgasm attached to the fantasy world of pornography. We need better worship; including better liturgy; built on better loves; and the love at the centre of this solution is the same love that gets us to porn. The love of self, and the love of sex. It’s just the 2.0 version of the same idol. But it does seem better, so if you’re going to do anything and you don’t buy the whole Christian thing but have read this far… this is a start. And the second way might work too…

2. The David Foster Wallace/Fight The New Drug solution — worship others in sacrificial ways (better, but still theologically deadly)

David Foster Wallace’s response to observing that everybody worships and to noticing the destructive ‘eat you alive’ power of worshipping the wrong stuff, was to call us to question our default self-seeking settings. To change the story by paying attention to the world outside ourselves and leaving the isolation of ruling our “tiny skull-sized kingdoms” where we think of ourselves “alone at the centre of all creation” in order to participate more fully in reality; a shared, corporate, reality filled with other people who matter. His sort of observation is what drives the sort of altruistic response to the pornofication of our world that we see championed by organisations like Fight the New Drug and Collective Shout, where you don’t have to be a Christian to sign up; you just have to recognise the harm that a self-centred view of the world — self-worship — creates.

This way of fighting in the worship wars against pornography is a call to worship a less destructive, but perhaps no more transcendent/out of this world god. It still leaves you with a ‘created thing’ as a God, just not yourself. And it provides you with a new story, and perhaps a new set of liturgies based not just on self-discipline but self-sacrifice, and discipline oriented towards not harming others in your habits.

Here’s perhaps my favourite part of This Is Water; paired with the Gospel story of the self-giving king who connects us to the infinite thing we’ve lost, the call to petty little self-sacrifices is incredibly powerful, and oh so close to being a brilliant liturgical framework. Practice this self-sacrifice until it’s your new default.

But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. — David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

This sort of approach — this fight against the default — is to take up the other half of the Fight Club narrator’s mantra: “self-improvement is masturbation, self-destruction is real change“— it’s to die to yourself and your desires in order to give some sort of life to others. So Fight the New Drug provides a tool kit for doing just this — tools for embracing self-discipline, a change of habits, and a new story (and a new hashtag, because #pornkillslove). It wants you to get the facts but it also wants you to think about your loves and your habits so that you can fight and thus destroy that part of you that leaves you consuming other people. It’s a good, albeit, imperfect solution reflecting a reasonable understanding of how people work — but if habits aren’t tied coherently to our ultimate loves, they aren’t shaping us in any particularly identity shifting way, they aren’t liturgy in the sense described above, and if our ultimate love is still a ‘created thing’ then we’re in just as much trouble according to Romans 1.

While we’re on Fight Club and ‘created things’, if you’ll indulge a tangent… Fight Club shares the same understanding of the idolatrous human condition — our life as worshippers — as Wallace and Smith and these three posts. In the scene where the narrator’s apartment is disintegrating before his eyes, the things that consumed his desires go up in smoke; demonstrating to him that their value wasn’t (and isn’t) actually ultimate. He makes these observations about the stuff and the meaning we instill in our stuff… and he shows that our idolatrous consumption isn’t just tied to sex and porn. There are other narratives where we’ve created a liturgy for ourselves; whether its the porn habit, or the IKEA accumulation habit…

Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well they were splinters, now. My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now. And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue. We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you. — Fight Club, Narrator

Self-improvement via self-discipline even if it’s self-sacrifice for the sake of others will only get you so far because it’s still the worship of a created thing; of images made to look like mortal human beings. It won’t answer that gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing; it won’t really meet the need we’re grasping for because our telos as humans involves us looking for the right thing to worship, because it’s not the right thing to worship (even if it involves right habits of worship). It doesn’t ultimately change our story or our loves so that our ultimate love is not something that should be loved after first loving the Lord your God with all your heart. We’re definitely called to love our neighbour as we love ourselves and that should change our approach to pornography, but the first bit Jesus says is the most important bit.

Pornography is worship. Deadly worship. But worshipping ourselves (loving ourselves ultimately) or others (loving our neighbours ultimately) isn’t actually less deadly (though it might be less damaging to people around you). If you really don’t buy the God stuff then just go immerse yourself in This Is Water on repeat for a few hours and then habitually look for myriad petty little ways to serve others with your life. It’ll change the world.

3. Change what you worship via the ‘expulsive power of a new affection’ (good)

Smith’s understanding of the human being as a worshipping being isn’t new. It’s not revolutionary. It’s the understanding put forward by the Old Testament, the New Testament, the inter-testamental literature, the early church, Augustine, the Reformers, and the Puritans. It’s not a revolution. It’s our buy-in to the enlightenment-modernist-cartesian concept of the person as only or primarily a ‘thinking thing’ that makes it seem ground breaking. But if all these people are right then you don’t think your way out of a terrible and destructive pattern of deadly idolatry; or even simply act your way out of it using accountability software, tracking, or even self-flagellation… you worship your way out.

You don’t combat wrong worship by fixating on the thing you’re trying to stop being consumed by, or by fixating on some other idol instead.

We combat wrong worship with right worship.

The real worship war is against porn and other idols. You fight porn, and other idols, with Jesus. By worshipping Jesus. By taking on the challenge from Jesus to first “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and all your mind” (Luke 10:27). God is after all the bits of you that porn claims. Your heart. Your imagination. Your habits. Your very self.

This fight will involve the habits, certainly, a new liturgy to combat and replace the old one. It’ll involve us being those who participate in true worship where we ‘offer ourselves as a living sacrifice’ tied to a renewing of the mind away from the patterns of this world (Romans 12:1-3, ultimately this is only possible by the power of the Holy Spirit, at least according to Romans 8). The next post in this series will consider some alternative liturgies, or an alternative framework for understanding liturgy to both the liturgies of idolatry and the solutions put forward by Smith.

But first it involves a new story, a new understanding of our telos and identity, that we’re being conformed into the image of Jesus, and a new love that fires our imagination and desires and occupies our worship such that the idols we’re at war with fall into disrepair and fade away into disuse like so many ancient temples. In our world there are temples that have been torn down by conquerers who hold rival religious beliefs — like ISIS is doing in Syria — and temples that have simply been abandoned because not only did nobody see their value any more, the gods the temples housed have been replaced by new loves in the hearts of the people who built them. That’s what we have to do to fight porn — to fight in the worship wars — love Jesus more, and believe he offers something better than a finite number of orgasms in response to a real human person magically (cursedly) reduced to some flesh coloured pixels on a screen.

We need what the 19th century Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers called the expulsive power of a new affection” — a love that pushes all other loves out of God’s rightful place as the object of our worship. It’s not enough just to show that our worldly idol-emperors — like pornography — have no clothes (see what I did there)m we also have to replace them with something plausibly better and truer and more satisfying.

“And it is the same in the great world. We shall never be able to arrest any of its leading pursuits, by a naked demonstration of their vanity. It is quite in vain to think of stopping one of these pursuits in any way else, but by stimulating to another. In attempting to bring a worldly man intent and busied with the prosecution of his objects to a dead stand, we have not merely to encounter the charm which he annexes to these objects – but we have to encounter the pleasure which he feels in the very prosecution of them. It is not enough, then, that we dissipate the charm, by a moral, and eloquent, and affecting exposure of its illusiveness. We must address to the eye of his mind another object, with a charm powerful enough to dispossess the first of its influences, and to engage him in some other prosecution as full of interest, and hope, and congenial activity, as the former…

To obliterate all our present affections by simply expunging them, and so as to leave the seat of them unoccupied, would be to destroy the old character, and to substitute no new character in its place… The love of God and the love of the world, are two affections, not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity – and that so irreconcilable, that they cannot dwell together in the same bosom. We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it; and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart is not so constituted; and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection, is by the expulsive power of a new one. ” — Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection

For Chalmers that new affection is best if it is the God revealed in the Gospel. The one who made, rules, and will judge the world. The one who gives life to dead people by laying down his life as the ultimate act of love.

Jesus is better than porn. It sounds twee, but that’s a better answer than Wallace or Anderson and the Rabbi offer because it involves a better and more fulfilling type of worship and we are worshipping beings. Porn is a terrible liturgy because sexual pleasure is a terrible, finite, god and your pursuit of it will leave you disappointed and ultimately eat you alive.

Jesus is better than porn and more satisfying, even, than sensuality. It’s time our practices, and the lives of our community, reflected that in such a way that the lives of children (and adults) both inside and outside our communities are better for it.

Enough is enough. Don’t just kick your porn habit; get a Jesus habit. In the next post I’ll ponder how we might do just that.

Snippet // William Struthers on intimate friendship as the answer to the pornography epidemic

I am reading, and loving, Ed Shaw’s The Plausibility Problem: The Church and Same-Sex Attraction, it’s rapidly becoming the best book I’ve read on the issue and I’ll no doubt review it more fully soon. In one chapter he addresses our tendency in the modern west to conflate intimacy with sexual intercourse — suggesting that the reason people want to, for example, read the relationship between David and Jonathan in the Bible as sexualised has more to do with our assumptions about intimacy than anything the text itself suggests. He’s got this great little aside in the chapter, featuring a quote from William Struthers’ book Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (which I’ve just bought, but have not read). For context, Shaw frames the below quote by saying: “Christian psychologist William Struthers sees this sort of godly male intimacy as the main answer to the current epidemic of pornography addiction among male church members”

The myths of masculinity in our culture have isolated men from each other and impaired their ability to honor and bless one another. Too many men have too few intimate friends. Their friendships run only as deep as the things they do together. By finding male friends to go deeper with, the need for intimacy can be met in nonsexual ways with these male friends. When this happens the intensity of the need for intimacy is not funnelled through sexual intercourse with a woman; it can be shared across many relationships. Sexual intimacy may be experienced with one woman, but intimacy can be experienced with others as well. Not all intimacy is genital, so do not feel restricted in your relationships with your brothers in Christ.

I think together Shaw and Struthers have nailed one of the things the church gets wrong in our approach to those who are same sex attracted, and explained why we are where we are when it comes to an unhealthy approach to sex, and relationships between men and women in the church too. I like that part of the solution for both (but not the complete solution) is better relationships between men and men. By the by, you can check out the stuff our church thinks we (the church) get wrong in our approach to same sex attraction (gay marriage), and also what we get wrong when it comes to male-female relationships (feminism). This is the book I wish I’d read before working on these talks.