Church Issues

The Problem of Porn

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My recent post, Another Look at the Church’s Missing Men, has struck a major chord among those who are trying to understand why the church is less appealing than ever to men. In that light, I want to talk about another issue that primarily afflicts men. With apologies to C.S. Lewis for mangling one of his book titles, it’s The Problem of Porn.

Man looking at computer screenI like George Barna’s studies. I believe they hold the mirror up to the face of the American Church and help us to get a look at who we are, wrinkles and all. In the last few years, Barna has published disturbing info about the penetration of porn use into the ranks of born-again Christians. Barna’s site is filled with poll statistics concerning this (Barna Site-keyword search “porn” and Barna Site-keyword search “explicit”), so you can check out the figures for yourself.

One of the figures that I could no longer locate on the site (having been pulled for use in a new study—for purchase only) had about a third of born-again Christian men responding that they had viewed sexually explicit images. In truth, this is a figure I seriously question. Given that we live in what can only be classified as a pornographic culture, two-thirds of the men claiming they had no exposure to porn lied. I don’t believe I have ever met a man, Christian or not, who has not seen porn at some time in his life. It is virtually everywhere.

I talk with men who by all accounts others would consider to be pillars of their churches, yet the majority are struggling with staying away from porn. The Internet is largely responsible for this. No longer does one have to lurk around the racks of an adult bookstore or keep one’s head down when entering the “Adults Only” section of the local video rental store. All that is needed is a computer and a man can have whatever flavor of perversion he so desires right there in the cloister of his own home or office.

While hundreds of Christian websites decry the issue, this post is all about the “why” of porn use. It is conventional wisdom to classify porn as a “spiritual issue.” Anyone reading this now will agree that porn has a spiritual component that affects men negatively. Some will go so far as to equate porn with demonic forces. But for all the hew and cry about the rise of porn use by church-goers, very few people are asking why. And it is the why that is most important.

I believe this post will be controversial because it seeks cultural reasons behind porn use among men that are not being addressed by churches in this country. The sub-surface reasons are far more intractable than many are willing to admit and few will attempt to tackle them head-on. But I firmly believe if we are to put the porn genie back into its gaudy bottle, the Church must tackle these issues. They are not presented here in any order, primarily because they are hopelessly entangled—part of the issue of why so few are speaking to them.(For the purposes here, I only look at married men who use porn. I hope to address the problem from a single man’s perspective in the future.)

One of the primary contributors to the problem of porn is this: Our culture is on scheduling overload. Simply trying to get four couples together for a night out is a scheduling dilemma that falls into the mathematical problem of how a traveling salesman can hit fifty towns in the order that makes for the least travel. Your standard supercomputer would overheat trying to handle all the schedules of those four couples. This is attributable to four key factors:

  • Dual-income households—Dual-income households came into existence in large part due to the feminist movement of the 1960s. As women were told that they could have a life outside the home, they explored this option. Society ramped up to accept them into the workplace. Now forty years after the fact, our society is geared specifically for the dual-income family. Dual-income families are also better equipped to endure the chaos of the work world, better weathering downsizing, outsourcing and a number of other employment factors.
  • Preparing our children educationally for a “survival of the fittest” future global society—Parents, realizing the vagaries of the current work world, are obsessed with ensuring that their kids can compete in a global society of the future that is the essence of the survival of the fittest. Due to this, toddlers now are expected to speak multiple languages, play an instrument, participate in sports, and have their college diploma by sixteen. Parenting magazines are now featuring articles on burned-out six-year olds who can’t handle their schedules.
  • Business travel—Travel is an enormous issue. The better-paying jobs in almost every company require extensive travel. Some moms and dads are away from the home for half a month or more. Consulting firms are famous for their “four days away, three days at home” work weeks.
  • Church and schooling commitments—Churches are asking for more and more volunteerism or group commitments. It is not unusual for a Christian man or woman to be in three different church group meetings in a week. Likewise, parents are being asked to be more involved in their children’s schooling. With homeschooling being pushed as the only acceptable option by some Evangelical groups, parents are now asked to create full, daily lesson plans and to research the best school materials for their children.

The upshot of all this is that married men and women have no time for each other. When there is time, sleep becomes the recourse. Newsweek had a feature last year about couples who rarely have sex, and the problem in most cases was no available time for it. As I talk with Christian men who struggle with porn, there is an indisputable direct connection between a lack of sexual intimacy in their marriages and porn use. If the wife is tired—or even the husband—it is far easier for the man to get his sexual desires met by turning on the computer and surfing for porn. In short, many married couples in our churches simply aren’t having enough sex together.

I’ve seen much that bears this out. I worked for several years as a computer technician. In that role I handled hundreds of notebook computers owned by road warriors, the men most likely to be heavy business travelers. Without fail, the notebook computers of the most frequent business travelers were loaded with porn, even when company policy made it a fireable offense. It was a proportional finding, too—the more a man traveled, the more likely it was to find porn on his computer. Since the highest salaried positions within many companies require extensive travel, it should be no surprise that porn use is highest among those with the biggest paychecks. A study done about five years ago came to that exact conclusion.

Since heavy traveling makes it difficult for husbands and wives to have a normal sex life, porn intrudes. Most hotels that cater to business travelers know this and have provided a variety of options to get porn into the traveler’s rooms. The porn industry itself would lose enormous amounts of money if the business traveler instead stayed at home.

But it is not simply business travel. The time-pressures that many couples endure beyond the issue of business travel are oppressive. When dual wage-earners must juggle their work schedules, the quality time they are supposed to have with their children, the children’s hyped-up schedules, and all the commitments their churches tell them they must fulfill in order to be good Christians, is it any wonder that when it is time for a bedroom romp, the romp gets tossed in order to squeeze in five or six hours of sleep?

But single wage-earner families are not exempt. Evangelicals place much pressure on families to conform to a “Focus on the Family” ideal nuclear family with mom at home schooling the kids and dad serving as the perfect Christian man (I’ve blogged about the requirements for being such an idyllic man here, here, and here.) And the ramped-up education issue for kids is shockingly high on the list of essentials for such families. Barna recently reported that for born-again Christians, it was more important that the kids get that hyped-up education than that they know Jesus. So the pressures in those other three areas highlighted above remain (and could be worse) for families that conform to the new Christian ideal.

All of these factors combine to bring us to the point where a Christian man comes home to his Christian wife and kids only to find them as run ragged as he is. He might give his wife a peck on the cheek sometime before they both hit the sack, but that’s as good as it gets. If the wife is burned out more than he is from driving kids all over the city to get their Chinese language and/or violin lessons in between soccer or baseball practice, then she hits the hay and he, wondering what happened to their newlywed sex life, hits the computer for the sexual outlet he’s just not getting.

The apostle Paul speaks to this issue very clearly. Beyond the fact that Internet pornography obviously did not exist in Paul’s day, sexual temptation has not changed all that much:

But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
—1 Corinthians 7:2-5 ESV

Is the Church speaking to this issue? I hear a lot of talk in the churches in this country about the issue of porn, but almost no one is getting to the root. I do not want to diminish the other factors that contribute to porn use among married Christian men, but these bedrock problems mentioned here are being ignored by the Church in America. The reason these issues are not being discussed by church leaders is simple: fixing them would require a massive overhaul of how we Christians work and live in today’s society. It would mean that we truly become counter-cultural in all aspects of our life, not just in our profession of faith in Jesus.

Christian couples who do have the time for each other, who are not pressured by frantic schedules, who are not trying to raise uber-children with IQs that hover near 200 (and the ability to throw a rising fastball 100 mph), who have possibly settled for a single wage or two part-time positions (all without travel—therefore potentially being lower paying), and who get eight hours of real sleep seem to be less prone to porn.

Now how are we in the Body of Christ going to make that a reality for every Christian man and his family?

Another Look at the Church’s Missing Men

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Dan is Missing!Last June, I blogged about the George Barna report that showed that the American Church’s face was largely female, with many men skipping church altogether. Since that time, another male-centric book has appeared on the market, David Morrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church. This tome joins the mania created by John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart in seeking to find out why men feel bored in the pews on Sunday. Morrow even has a website www.churchformen.com that delves deeper into the mystery of the church’s missing men.

Like John Eldredge before him, Morrow’s solution focuses on recovering lost masculinity. While Eldredge aims to recover a masculine “adventure,” Morrow looks at masculinizing the Church:

We have to give men opportunities to use their strengths and their gifts in the service of God instead of trying to squeeze them into roles that they feel are feminine or emasculating. We need to start valuing masculine traits such as aggression, boldness, and competitiveness and figuring out ways that we can integrate that into every area of church life.

But are these assertions the real reason behind the church’s missing men?

Having been a part of two churches with extensive ministries that were strongly male focused, I contend that Morrow’s response does not play out in reality. One of those churches had a popular sports ministry and brought sports illustrations into nearly every sermon. The pastor of the church served as chaplain to a number of professional sports teams and was a well-known author. Still, that church was about 60% women. Again, in the second church, wacky humor, Eldredge’s reliance on movies to pitch the Gospel, numerous men’s groups, and plenty of ministries that called on uniquely male gifts did not budge the number of men. They were still only 40% of the attendees.

So what is the problem?

I alluded to this earlier in my post “Advertising Ashes.” The main reason that men are not in church is that they simply are not seeing the Holy Spirit move in power. At the risk of alienating the many women who read Cerulean Sanctum, I want to make a bold point: even if the Holy Spirit were not present in a supernatural way in our churches, I still believe women would still show up on Sundays. The Church has no problem attracting women because women are naturally drawn to the community and relationships that a church provides. However, this attractor does not work for many men. Men need a profound experience of God in order to get them to sit up and take notice. If the Holy Spirit doesn’t fall on them in power, then the positives a church can provide outside of the supernatural make little difference. A church can hypermasculinize itself to death and still not break that three women to every two men ratio if the Spirit is barely discernible on Sundays. Men have a better built-in B.S. detector than women do and function more out of the rationale of “prove it to me.” Without the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit in our gatherings, we have little to combat a set of crossed arms and a raised eyebrow.

The second problem is also one I have mentioned in the past, the issue of a man’s career. You almost never hear any sermons about jobs. Most churches have nothing in place to help the unemployed within their ranks. And the Church in America no longer speaks to the business world on issues of cut-throat downsizing, outsourcing, discrimination against older employees, and the relentless expectation that employees put in longer hours at work. In short, the Church in this country has almost nothing to say about the one thing men spend more hours doing than anything else in their lives. That silence speaks volumes to men.

In an e-mail I received from David Morrow in response to this, he wrote that as many women work today as men, yet despite their jobs and greater limitations on their time, women still make it to church. To this, I have a few counters:

  • Our society still defines men by their jobs. Introduce a man to a group and the first question he’s asked is, “So what do you do for a living?” This emphasis on work is taken to extremes because the gold standard espoused in Evangelicalism is that the husband is the sole breadwinner while the wife stays at home with the kids. A man without a job has no place in society’s eyes, but a place is still available to women who do not work.
  • A caste system still exists for men. Men are categorized by their work and valued accordingly. The doctor and the mechanic are not viewed as having the same worth, even within many churches. Again, this system does not plague women to the same extent. The man making minimum wage is perceived in a far worse light than the woman who works for the same pay. No one ridicules women in traditionally male jobs, but a man who performs what has traditionally been a female job is usually held up for scorn—particularly by other men.
  • Women marry with an eye to financial security, but this is not the case for men. Therefore, the onus is always on the man to bring in money. To meet this need, the man is usually the one striving to succeed in his career. Our society continues to reinforce this for men, while placing less burden on women to reach the pinnacle of success in their field.

A woman’s job and a man’s job, therefore, are not the same. To treat them as such is to ignore cultural mandates that simmer beneath everything a man does in his life. If the Church in America cannot grasp this, then we should not wonder why men see the Church as having little to say about how they define themselves using the cultural constructs placed on them in our society. With this paucity of wisdom about the key role a man plays for eight to ten hours a day, why should men abide church at all?

I believe that the reason the message of Eldredge and Morrow resonates with many men is that those men can’t put a finger on what they are truly missing. If you’ve never tasted champagne, why would you miss it? In this way, if our church gatherings are not filled with the Holy Spirit and our churches are not speaking to the one thing we still use to define a man, then the loss of both cannot be fully appreciated by the man who feels empty after the church service is over. All he knows is “Well, that wasn’t it.” So he goes off to hunt bear with a pointy stick or to climb mountains like Eldredge says. And while that might captivate him for a while, it does not fill the vacuum in his soul. His expectation then becomes that of simply muddling through the day. He can’t even look forward to the gold watch at retirement because the company he works for now fires (or forces into an early retirement with subsequently diminished benefits) everyone over fifty before the watch can be attained. At sixty-five and with his funds cut short, the job as a greeter at WalMart never looked so good.

We as the Body of Christ have got to do better than this or we may someday look around our churches and see no men at all.

Recovering Christianity’s Balance

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A couple weeks back, I asked the question, "Is Christianity Broken?" Today, I want to revisit this issue, probably the most popular post to Cerulean Sanctum thus far.

Golden balanceAs a Christian for close to thirty years, I've seen a lot of movements within the Church in America rise and fall. In the 1960s, I witnessed the Protestant appropriation of Vatican II ideals, the rediscovery of the charismata by mainline churches, and the first flowering of contemporary worship music. The 1970s brought the Jesus People, the growth of Evangelicalism as a dominant political force, and the rise of the Third Wave churches. The 1980s gave us the beginnings of the Church Growth movement and the ascendancy of seeker-sensitivity. The 1990s have proven to be a backlash time, with every aspect of the faith being questioned and reconsidered, finding charismatics adrift within fads, the "Emerging Church" attempting a shaky counter-reformation, and—sadly—greater concessions to the spirit of the age within American Evangelicalism.

Now in the new millennium, with so many opportunities to stake a claim for the next thousand years, I would offer an old direction. To the question of "Is Christianity broken?" I can only say, No. What we are instead as American Christians is horribly out of balance. We have become a church of fads, running after what appears to work, but all the while ignoring the tools, wisdom, and gifts Christ purchased for us through His blood two thousand years ago.

I cannot escape this passage:

Then if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or 'There he is!' do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand. So, if they say to you, 'Look, he is in the wilderness,' do not go out. If they say, 'Look, he is in the inner rooms,' do not believe it.
—Matthew 24:23-26

Now certainly, this is an eschatological reference, but I want to focus on the mindset behind it. When we go rushing around trying to get on board with the latest "appearance of the Lord," we swing like a pendulum. There is a tendency for us to accommodate to the wisdom of our times, too, picking up whatever business or pop-psychology trend is hot, fusing it to our new Christian fad. But for those of us who have been around a while—and have kept our eyes open and our discernment intact—all this is not coordinated movement, but spasmodic lurching from one soon-to-be-abandoned methodology to another.

Today it is the "Emerging Church" or the "Purpose-Driven Life" and so on. The future will bring some new trends. But what about yesterday's hot new ministry or devotional style? Do we even remember what it was? Or are we too busy reacting to the fallout of it as we swing on the pendulum to the other extreme, far, far away from what we so eagerly endorsed just a couple years ago?

To the world, this means one thing: "The Church has no eternal focus; we can find no answers within it."

In our attempts to read the times and accommodate to them, we have lost our balance. We continue, also, to stake out positions that only exist at the extremes on issues, rather than considering the holy middle.

Lately, I have been involved in several discussions on topics relevant to the Christian walk. Those discussions show out out of balance we are:

  • On the topic of prayer, I have talked with others about focused times of prayer and about "practicing the presence" of God all day. Supporters have gravitated to the extremes, favoring only one or the other. But isn't the truth of our prayer life centered in the balance between those two?
  • On the topic of the Holy Spirit, I have encountered cessationists and "charismaniacs," but isn't it true that the Holy Spirit still works today and that He does not contradict the Word of God? Aren't both the cessationists and the charismaniacs stuck at the extreme swings of the pendulum?
  • On the topic of Calvinism and Arminianism, like I wrote in a previous post (On the Brink of a Quantum Singularity with Calvin and Arminius), are those two positions possibly at the extremes and not in the center of where the Lord would have us be?
  • On the topic of the social gospel versus the moral gospel, is this not a false dichotomy to be making? Isn't the true Gospel a complete whole that encompasses both? (Wrongly Dividing the Gospel)
  • On the topic of the nature of Christ, isn't our Lord both a Lover who draws us to Him and a Warrior who will slay His enemies with the sword of His mouth? Isn't He both the Lamb of God AND the Lion of Judah? Why are we so often given to exalting one side of the Lord's person over the other, clubbing those people on the other pole with our "enlightened" view?
  • On the topic of the Christian's duty to the environment, must we divide into camps that either support radical groups like Earth First! or who ascribe to a pillage-the-Earth mentality based off a mangled reading of the Creation account? Is there no wise middle ground that we can support?
  • On the topic of the Bible, why must we dwell at the extremes: one that practically elevates the Bible above the person of the Lord Himself and one that shuns the Bible in favor of just hanging out with Jesus relationally? Where is the balance?
  • On the topic of the role of the Church, aren't we supposed to make disciples AND stand in the gap within our society?

No one said this kind of discernment—or the natural walking out of the results—would be easy. But isn't that why the Holy Spirit was given, to guide us into all truth?

Our failure to achieve balance in our Christian worldview has only confused the lost, the very ones who need to hear a right and balanced message from the Lord. If the Church in North America is to be all that the Lord desires us to be we have got to work for balance and show more discipline in standing against the fads of our day.

This is not to say that we compromise. In most cases, there truly is no compromise needed. We have simply spent too much time at one end of the pendulum swing to know the difference, though. It may seem uncomfortable to leave those extremes, but in truth we have done so quite a bit in just the last thirty years as we react to changes in worldly wisdom; this should not be unknown to us. Our problem is our inability to stop our momentum as we swing from one side to the reactionary other.

Cultural relevance does not trump eternal significance, and this is where we most suffer. We must be more discerning, testing the spirits—especially the spirit of the age—to see if it is of God or not. Nor should we be afraid to ask the hard questions and to administer the test at all. Examining an extreme position does not naturally lead to error if we are examining it against the Word and by the Spirit. Such an examination may reveal our own extremism and allow us to come to the truth of the center.

In closing, I offer three points that will align us:

  1. We must be prepared to look out of step with culture and culturally compromised churches. Balance is never fashionable.
  2. We must never forget our history. As Goethe once noted, "He who cannot draw upon three thousand years is living hand to mouth." Historical perspective compels balance.
  3. We must always ask, "What is eternally significant?" The answer to that question will bring us into balance.

Think about this. I believe the issue of balance is the single most important issue facing the Church today.

Blessings!