The Problem of Porn

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 screen I 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

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.

Lord of the Bored?

No one is saying it, but someone has to: There are a lot of bored Christians out there.

What is American Evangelicalism's fascination with materialism and consumption? It's a cure for boredom. Why are the charismatics traveling like nomads in search of the next "spiritual" high? They're bored. Why are so many leaving their traditional churches in favor of postmodern or Emergent ones? They are looking for an escape from the boring.

The monster bestseller Wild at Heart by John Eldredge has at its very core the premise that Christian men are bored. Boredom leads to dissatisfaction and, eventually, the fruit of boredom, sin. On this he won't get any arguments from me, but is the solution to go hunt grizzlies with nothing more than a pointy stick? Is life simply about rescuing damsels in distress?

No, there is something more.

I think the "problem that dare not speak its name," the issue that so many Christians are struggling with, is a lack of connection to the Lord. Our churches are filled with people that simply are not experiencing the fullness of the Lord Jesus.

But why is this? What have we done to create a generation of disconnected and bored Christians?

The reasons are many, but five stand out:

1. Leadership. We like to think that everyone in America is an individual, but Jesus' assessment that we are like sheep has not skipped over this country. People still need good role models and leaders. But much of the leadership of churches today can't help people get to that next level of discipleship simply because they have never been there themselves. There has not been a true revival in America in almost a hundred years, and despite a few local revivals (that sadly stayed local), virtually no one pastoring a church today has seen a real revival. Subsequently, we don't know what one looks like, nor have we experienced the deep, abiding presence of Christ that falls on those who have been set aflame by revival. The people can't get there unless the leaders out there show us the map. Leaders, guide us!

2. Anti-supernaturalism. Some say that we are in a postmodern age, while others contend that modernism still reigns in the churches in America. Regardless, we still live in a largely secular world that has driven supernaturalism out of Western churches. If we do not believe that prayer can drive mountains into the sea, then we will absolutely never see that occur. What happened to our faith? Does anyone still believe that if we abide in Him and He in us, we can ask anything in His name and it will be done? I'm not talking Word of Faith craziness here, but simply taking the Lord at His word. What will the Lord do through us if we believe Him for the miraculous not just when miracles are needed, but at the core of our beliefs?

3. Love for the world. 1 John 2:15 has never changed:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

We can't get blood from a stone. If the world has calcified our hearts, then we need that heart of flesh restored in us, a heart that burns with love for Jesus—and Him as Lord over all we are. Yet why are so many Christians absolutely no different than the worldly? Sadly, this appeasement of culture by Christians and the culture's inevitable penetration of the churches in this country is being preached with greater intensity as a GOOD thing. How foolish! That Christians look and act no different from unbelievers is shameful. We are the aroma of Christ, not the foul stench of death! Instead, we have become like rats with electrodes wired to their brains, gratified by every push of the entertainment lever, a new wave of stimulation washing over our addled minds. How sad!

4. Higher criticism of the Bible. It's been more than a hundred years since German higher criticism washed up on the shores of America and crawled into our churches unannounced. The damage this has done to the authority of the Bible in the minds of the average person, Christian or not, is incalculable. When Christians don't believe the Bible speaks to every part of a man, nor that it is authoritative for learning and correction, what basis do we have for anything we say or do? How can the revealed truth of Scripture capture anyone's heart if even our church leaders don't truly believe it?

5. Time. We live in an age in which everything presses us for time. People are harried in an era labeled as The Age of Leisure. How then can we expect to reach that sacred place of standing before God on five minutes of prayer dashed off as we rush to work? In other times, people would be travailing on their knees for hours before the Throne of Grace, but does anyone reading this know anyone like that anymore? (Not only do I not know anyone like that, but far worse, I can't count myself as one of those people even though I once was.) But there is no instant discipleship. Those of us who seek it only find boredom when we fail to break through to God. Our lack of time committed to Christ can only lead us to lament our sorry states, questioning if God is even there.

And so we are bored. Bored with the Bible. Bored with our church meetings. Bored with the Lord. How that must break His heart! All eternity, the entirety of His own Self, ready to be revealed to those who press on, and yet so precious few do.

One thing I do know—those who press on to know the Lord are never bored. I pray that for all of us. Let us press on to know the Lord and put boredom behind us.