Christians and other religious individuals are widely known for opposing pornography for all kinds of moral reasons. I happen to be one of them, so when I tell people I’m getting ready to publish a whole book about the ills of pornography, many people assume I’m primarily speaking to fellow Christians.
Now, of course, I hope my book is read by all kinds of people, but my aim in writing this is not to talk to religious people who already detest pornography, but to the culture at large that has no problem with it.
This is because pornography use is not just a religiously motivated moral issue.
There are a lot of people who have no religious affiliations at all who oppose pornography.
For instance, several years ago, the GQ magazine ran a thought-provoking article about why men should quit looking at porn. Editors of the magazine had stumbled upon a growing group on Reddit.com called NoFap, a online community of mostly men who were challenging each other to put away porn and masturbation for good. This online community began because members wanted to see how quitting porn and masturbation would improve their overall health and wellbeing. This group was started by largely irreligious people, not for moral reasons, but because they suspected all the porn in their life was getting in the way of good sex and real relationships.
And more than this, pornography is not just bad for people individually, it is also bad for society. When we live in a world where men and women are fed pornographic standards of sex, or where we make pornography a substitute for sex, we become more unhealthy as a culture.
If you want something to flourish, you need to use in accordance with its nature. You don’t plant tomatoes in a dark closet and feed them Coca-Cola and expect to have vibrant tomato plants. Similarly, don’t rip sex away from its obvious relational context, turn it into a commodity, and then expect our families and society to flourish. If we become a civilization that sells people, a civilization that takes something so central to who we are as persons—our sexuality—and we industrialize it, we cannot be happy people.
This is something I believe is supported not just by various scientific observations of neurologists and psychologists, but something seen over and over in the experiences of thousands of people, from the lonely teenage boy watching hours of hardcore material to the award-winning porn star getting ready for her 300th film, from the college professor who falsely thinks porn “empowers women” to the young woman who consumes hours of erotic stories and videos, from the married couples that use porn to spice things up in the bedroom, to the guy with his subscription to Maxim magazine.
Pornography falls woefully short of sex as we’re meant to experience it.
No, pornography is not merely the cause of so called religious prudes who are against sex. Standing against porn is about standing for the honor of the human person and standing for the goodness of sex.
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