“Well, ya got trouble, my friend, right here, I say, trouble right here in River City. … With a capital "P," … and that stands for porn!” with apologies to Meredith Willson’
The Music Man
One item on the evangelical Christian agenda that often gets shunted aside in favor of combatting abortion rights, same-sex marriage and transgender rights, re-defining religious freedom, and supporting Donald Trump’s Big Lie, is the fight against pornography. There is a movement aimed at what is seen as Christian’s penchant – mostly men but some women too -- for pornography. Regardless of whether this addiction is a product of an attack by Satan, a plot devised by communists in the 1950s, or just plain old twenty-four/seven Internet accessibility, according to many faith leaders, pornography has grabbed hold of Christians and is shaking up the evangelical Christian community.
“Porn is devouring Christians. It’s consuming them in secrecy and shame–and too many churches are doing nothing about it,” read the subhead ofa late-December post at the Church Executive website. The story’s headline read: “Fight Porn in Your Church.”
“Every week, after the last chorus and closing prayer, large numbers of churchgoers are heading home for a porn binge. People in the pews — men, women, children, young and old — are looking at porn. The statistics are staggering. A … Barna survey concluded that more than two-thirds of men and over one-third of women are viewing porn on a regular basis. Nearly half of Christian families say that porn is a problem in their home and over half of church staff admit to struggling with porn. And statistics also show that Sunday is the most common day for Christians to view porn,” Church Executive pointed out.
“Before the internet, portrayals of sex acts were the purview of adult magazines and movies,” Adam Gollner wrote in a recent Vanity Fair story focusing on the Pornhub’s empire, and a fire that destroyed the nearly completed mega-mansion of Feras Antoon, one of the co-owners of Pornhub. “Today, hard-core sex is instantly accessible on mobile devices, social media feeds, and VR headsets. This shift in carnal consumption has had far-reaching effects, transforming sexual norms, implicating underage viewers—and victims—and creating new forms of cyber-capitalist sex work.”
While “Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, which also runs YouPorn, Digital Playground, and numerous other masturbation-oriented brands. MindGeek racked up an estimated $500 million in net revenue in 2020 through ad sales, affiliate marketing, and premium subscriptions; its digital marketing network, TrafficJunky, gets 4.6 billion impressions per day,Gollner wrote (https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/01/xxx-files-who-torched-the-pornhub-palace#intcid=_vanity-fair-verso-hp-trending_64e19f0c-b43a-45ea-b32a-d7e63bc1fb2e_popular4-1).
While not nearly as lucrative, there is money to be made combatting porn. “Find freedom for $16.99 a month,” advertises Covenant Eyes (https://www.covenanteyes.com/). Covenant Eyes offers five distinct plans: “I want to overcome porn as a man”; “I want to overcome porn as a woman”; “I want to help a friend live porn-free”; “I want to help my spouse live porn-free”; and “I want to help my child live porn-free.”
For “a special discounted rate of $3675,” Covenant Eyes has created an introductory course titled “Pornography Education for Pastors and Ministry Leaders,” which “includes over seven hours of educational video taught by leading experts.
Vanity Fair’s Gollner pointed out that both the right and the left have waged a war against pornography for years. However, he noted, “Still, the most vehement anti-porn—and anti-Pornhub—voices are those on the fundamentalist fringe. During the lead-up to the torching of [Feras] Antoon’s mansion, extremists began doxing Pornhub employees and issuing violent threats online. Shepherding this movement was an outfit called Traffickinghub, an offshoot of the evangelical Christian organization Exodus Cry, which has well-documented anti-LGBTQ+ and antiabortion origins. Both groups have dedicated themselves to abolishing Pornhub, whipping their supporters into a punitive frenzy.”
According to Gollner, “Traffickinghub and Exodus Cry, to put it plainly, are abolitionist endeavors related to a Kansas City church called the International House of Prayer—a point Melissa Gira Grant explored in her 2020 New Republic investigation into the ‘Holy War on Pornhub.’ Grant methodically outlined connections between Mickelwait, Exodus Cry, and IHOP, exposing how the organizations downplayed their larger aims through a covert ‘strategy to reframe conservative ideas of sexual purity.’”
In a book titled, Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction, Gary Wilson wrote: “You have to be OK with the idea that you will never watch porn ever again in your life. If this idea gives you anxiety or makes you cringe, then you don’t have the ‘Porn is NOT an Option’ mindset yet.”
While evangelical Christians have recognized porn as a huge problem and have created all sorts of programs to combat it, it is only recently that violence (like the fire at the Pornhub CEO’s house), appears to be accelerating, including apparently encouraging violence against sex workers.