Desiring God ministries has a podcast called “Ask Pastor John,” in which John Piper fields difficult questions about life, ministry, and whatever. In the most recent episode he answers a query that has to be one of the most pressing question facing young women today: “Is my boyfriend’s porn a marriage deal-breaker?” Because of the internet, pornography has become pervasive and common among young men. It seems sometimes that there’s hardly anyone who hasn’t been hooked by it. So more and more women—even Christian women—must grapple with this question as they consider marrying.
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Raising children in a pervasive culture of pornography
Rod Dreher’s post on the inconsistencies of “Lifestyle Liberalism” is a must-read. It is hitting at some pretty fundamental issues, and it does so from a number of different angles. First, it’s wrestling with how to raise kids (especially sons) in an age in which pornography is so pervasive and available. Second, it exposes the moral listlessness of liberalism, which in the wake of the sexual revolution has destroyed all boundaries around sexual behavior. Third, it exposes the fact that there are so few institutions left standing today that will support parents in resisting the sexual lasciviousness of our culture.
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Heath Lambert on the Problem of Pornography
Heath Lambert has an outstanding article in the most recent issue of JBMW. The article is about the problem of pornography, and Lambert’s take on the whole issue is particularly practical and helpful. He opens with this: Pornography is the defining sexual sin of our day. In Christian circles adultery and homosexuality often capture more headlines, but I am persuaded that in terms of sheer numbers they cannot hold a candle to the devastation of pornography. Last year I counseled six people struggling with homosexuality and around eighteen caught in adultery and fornication. I don’t know exactly how many I helped who were locked in pornography, but the number is…
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Raquel Welch Says Pornography “Annihilates” Men
Raquel Welch recently sat for an interview with Men’s Health in which she commented that pornography is destroying men. I do not recommend the entire article, but I thought it remarkable and insightful that a secular former sex-symbol recognizes the dehumanizing effects of pornography: I think we’ve gotten to the point in our culture where we’re all sex addicts, literally. We have equated happiness in life with as many orgasms as you can possibly pack in, regardless of where it is that you deposit your love interest…
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The Central Lie of Pornography
Doug Wilson says that the central problem with pornography is its “didactic and catechetical” nature, which tends to teach men lies about women. He writes: Porn is a sex ed curriculum put together by liars and incompetents. The central wrong lesson (one easily believed by guys, because it flatters them) is that women have men’s brains encased in women’s bodies. Everybody in the whole world is hot to go. Then, when he gets married to a normal woman, and discovers that all the free sex he thought was going to be on tap . . . isn’t on tap, at least not like what he expected, and he thinks he…
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Russell Moore on the Temptation of Pornography
Russell Moore answers a question from a female reader about whether or not she should marry a man who is struggling with pornography. In his inimitable way, Moore explains why pornography seems to be such a widespread temptation among men. He writes: Pornography is a universal temptation precisely because it does exactly what the satanic powers wish to do. It lashes out at the Trinitarian nature of reality, a loving communion of persons, replacing it with a masturbatory Unitarianism. Read the rest here.
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A Helpful Definition of Pornography
Defining what constitutes pornography has always been a bit of a struggle. It was Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who once illustrated the difficulty by giving his own subjective definition: “I know it when I see it.” I just read today that Carl Trueman has found as good a definition as I have ever seen, and he got it from The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Here it is: 2354: Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to…
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Her Dad Was a Porn Addict
Michelle VanLoon has a gut-wrenching testimony of her father’s porn addiction. She shows that pornography not only destroys marriages, it also wreaks havoc on relationships between children and parents. She writes:
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The Social Costs of Pornography
Anthony Bradley has posted a summary of a little book titled, The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations. The book is a summary of a 2008 symposium sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute, and here are some of the findings highlighted by Bradley. 1. More people than ever before–children, adolescents, adults–are consuming pornography with powerful effects on them and on the entire society (p. 15).
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Pickett Speaks Out Against Internet Porn