I remember the first time I watched pornography. I was a young lad, maybe eleven or twelve, and my brain had no context for the images I saw. How did I acquire this lewd tape at such a young age? My church, of course. Well, that’s not true. It’s not completely true, at least. I was at church when I found it. The tape, though, wasn’t the property of my church, nor was it the property of anyone belonging to my church.
I found the tape while traversing the weeds behind our gym. We shared a fence with a trailer park, and as I tread through the tall grass, I stumbled on a pile of blank VCR tapes. That’s right, young folks. VCR tapes. Ask someone thirty-five or older to explain them to you. These tapes had no labels. No title. Nothing. My curiosity was peaked. So, I grabbed one. I was hoping for Ninja Turtles or Batman or something like that. I placed the tape in my car, and when we arrived home that night, I slid it the VCR.
It wasn’t Ninja Turtles.
Instead, I saw two naked people touching each other and doing other silly things (remember, I was twelve at the time). I wasn’t sure what I was watching or why two grown humans would touch each other’s privates like that. I didn’t know I was watching porn, in other words, so it never dawned on me to destroy the evidence. I casually turned off the TV, and went back to building Legos.
You know what happened next, right? Of course you do. You’re smart. My mom found the tape, and an awkward conversation ensued. I explained everything. How I found it in the weeds behind our church and how I hoped it was Ninja Turtles and how I didn’t know what I saw was bad. I’m not sure if my mom believed me, but everything I said was true.
Unfortunately, the seed was planted. Later in life, when I became stressed or depressed, I returned to porn. I became addicted to it, and the addiction almost cost me my job, my marriage, everything.
Did that incident with the tape in the weeds spark my addiction? I don’t know. Possibly. I do, however, believe the Bible when it says sins are generational. My DNA includes the addictive germ, passed down by my parents, who received it from theirs. And though germs begin dormant, the likelihood of them growing into addiction increases when you’re exposed at a young age.
Porn addiction is an epidemic. You don’t need to see statistics, do you? You’ve probably already seen them. Like the average age of first exposure is twelve. Or this: of the top ten most popular websites, four are porn.
I could go on and on, but this isn’t a post about porn addiction. This is about the reason porn is intertwined in our culture. Why we love it so. There are neurological and biological reasons, for sure. Any good therapist will tell you that. But I also believe there’s something deeper going on here.
Research shows porn changes our brains. It affects how we view intimacy. Porn negatively impacts lives and marriages, families and even careers. With all the negative side effects, why is it so normalized in our culture? I believe it was Desmond Tutu who said,
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
A PORNOGRAPHIC WORLDVIEW
I love that quote, and you should too. At some point, we have to stop pulling people out of the waters of porn addiction, and ask ourselves why so many people fall in.
I’m no sociologist or psychologist, though I wouldn’t mind being either in an alternate universe, but the problem isn’t porn. The problem is that we live in a pornographic culture that baits us into seeing people through a pornographic lens.
“What makes something pornographic,” says Richard Rohr, “is to take a part and pretend that’s the whole, and to idolize the part instead of the whole.”
In a pornographic culture, everything is a commodity. Everyone is an object, split apart from the inherent holiness and goodness given to them by God. We no longer see creation as something to tend, to steward, but as a means to our own end.
We no longer see people as humans, but as objects to help us meet our quarterly quota or support our political agenda or satisfy our physical desires. A pornographic culture values productivity, idolizes success. It sees little value in empathy and vulnerability. There’s no time to stop, to rest, to contemplate. A pornographic culture is enslaved to hurry. Busyness is a badge of honor.
THE GOAL OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH
The task for us, then, is to repent of our pornographic mindset, and begin to see creation as God sees it. We must begin to see people as men and women created in God’s image. And this includes the men and women on the streets as well as the ones at our borders, as well the gays and lesbians, those who are transgender and even those who hate us. Until we can see every human through the lens of Christ, we have no hope of healing in our land. We have no hope of bringing heaven to earth.
Wholeness, you see, is the goal of the Christian’s life. To become like Christ is to become whole. Everything we do, from reading the Bible to corporate worship to prayer, is towards this one goal. To become whole, which is the anti-thesis of the pornographic mindset.
What is wholeness?
Wholeness is the realization that your health and well-being is dependent upon the health and well-being of your neighbor.
Everything is connected. How you spend your money, your time, the decisions you make. It all matters. Not just for you. But for your neighbor as well.
Wholeness is working toward making your inner thoughts match your outer actions.
Another name for this is integrity. In a pornographic culture, truth is blurry. The lines between right and wrong erased. Personal comfort and maintaining the status quo matter more than telling the truth.
And the results? Well, look around. We’re fragmented, isolated. Relationally, in shambles. People are pawns for our political agenda, fodder for the capitalistic engine. And our physical well-being? Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Illness. All on the rise. As Martha Beck says, “Psychological suffering always comes from internal splits between what your encultured mind believes and what feels deeply true to you.”
There’s a field dedicated to the relationship between psychological stress (lies and deception) and illness. Psychoneuroimmunology. A mouthful, I know. Say that one fives fast. Studies have shown a relationship between lying and deception and adverse health effects. And the worse the deception, the greater effect on your health.
Wholeness, then, is not just about healing our culture. It’s about healing our bodies as well.
Wholeness is the ability to recognize your prejudices and biases and flaws. It’s accepting that you are inherently good, while also accepting that you are a collision of opposites, good and bad.
Walt Whitman, the great poet says it like this:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I love that. The pornographic mindset doesn’t love this, though. It won’t allow you to look at yourself honestly, to accept your flaws, to come to terms with reality, which is this: you contain both good and bad qualities.
The pornographic mindset blinds you to your flaws, or your shadow self, as Carl Jung defines it. In a culture where the pornographic mindset dominates, self-care is cousin to selfish and vulnerability akin to weakness, and people go around projecting their flaws onto their neighbor. Because that’s the only option when you can’t recognize your prejudices and biases. You blanket them onto your friends and family and coworkers.
HEALING MY PORNOGRAPHIC MINDSET
I don’t know if someone ever fully heals from addiction. That’s for the experts to decide. And while I do believe DNA contributed to my porn attachment, I’ve also know that the deeper issue was my pornographic mindset. For most of my life, I treated people as objects. I used them. Even when I was a pastor, people were attendance numbers. Fuel for my braggadocios ego. I cared more about how many people attended worship than how many people were hurting.
Even if you’re a Christian, you see, you’re not immune from the pornographic mindset. The church, in fact, often feeds it. Look around. The scandals. The rampant abuse. The victims outweigh the sand grains in the Sahara. The American church is, in many ways, a reflection of the pornographic mindset.
I really believe the key to healing our culture is to heal our pornographic mindset. To prioritize wholeness. To value human life more than personal comfort. To look honestly at our choices, and consider how those impact our neighbor. To refuse to turn a blind eye to immoral decisions, in our workplace, our churches, our families. To stop splitting things apart, severing them from their divine DNA, so we can use them for our own gain.
This is how we honor God. This is we reveal his glory to the world. This is how we bring heaven to earth.
Grace and peace, friends.