The Licentious Spirit of this Age

From the May/June 2011 issue of Touchstone, now online (homepage, archives).

Arousing Ourselves to Death

Porn Is Ravaging Our Churches
by Russell D. Moore

The couple will typically tell me first about how stressful their lives are. Maybe he’s lost his job. Perhaps she’s working two. Maybe their children are rowdy or the house is chaotic. But usually, if we talk long enough about their fracturing marriage, there is a sense that something else is afoot. The couple will tell me about how their sex life is near extinction. The man, she’ll tell me, is an emotional wraith, dead to intimacy with his wife. The woman will be frustrated, with what seems to him to be a wild mixture of rage and humiliation. They just don’t know what’s wrong, but they know a Christian marriage isn’t supposed to feel like this.

It’s at this point that I interrupt the discussion, look at the man, and ask, “So how long has the porn been going on?” The couple will look at each other, and then look at me, with a kind of fearful incredulity that communicates the question, “How do you know?” For a few minutes, they seek to reorient themselves to this exposure, wondering, I suppose, if I’m an Old Testament prophet or a New Age psychic. But I’m not either. One doesn’t have to be to sense the spirit of this age. In our time, pornography is the destroying angel of (especially male) Eros, and it’s time the Church faced the horror of this truth.

continue reading . . .

In this issue Dr. Moore also addresses another aspect of this sexual sin that affects our families and churches: Christian Courtship & the Awkward Question of Sexual History.

Comments

[Neil Gussman]

Excellent phrase, "porn has been weaponized" although since the invention of photography, it has always had devastating effect. I am nearly 60. I first saw porn on playing cards when I was 11. I can still see one of those images. It haunts me five decades later. When I deployed to Iraq in 2009, we had lecture after lecture on adultery and how the Army would enforce the rule against it. Yet at the end of the lectures, the officer harranguing us would say that, although porn was banned, he knew we all had it and we should use it rather than getting involved with a fellow soldier. One good thing about the rule was I did not have to look at it. Anyone looking at porn was required to keep it out of sight of roommates. I am old enough that my roommates made quiet jokes about me being too old for porn.

[Robert]

'It’s at this point that I interrupt the discussion, look at the man, and ask, “So how long has the porn been going on?”'

And I suppose she's just hanging around waiting to be assumed into heaven then. Oh, sweet presumption.

Like our feminist generations need any more permission-to-be-conceited heaped upon them.

Porn is a problem but not the only one. As for 'it’s time the Church faced the horror of this truth', Dr Moore must be living in a different Church from me. Porn seems the only area of needed reform that gets talked about in Catholic circles. One would think the faults of my buddies' wives must be figments of their imaginations and that married men should simply ready themselves for a life of idolatry.

[Clifford Simon]

To Robert's question,

What kind of behavior in a wife do you call "faults"? It's hard to tell what the correct response to that behavior would be, when all we've been told is that they are feminist, or self-idolatrous.

[Bob Srigley]

Robert's screed seems to have gone off the rails a bit, but not without some degree of resonance. The sins of women are often more subtle, but not less destructive. Feminism has metastasized in our culture to the extent that its extrication would seem almost impossible. I would hope that Russel Moore's wisdom in counseling would be taylored to specific couples in such a way that exposure is not automatic upon the first discernment.

[Kamilla]

As to the question of whether the feminist cancer can still be excised from our culture - well, I'm doubtful that it can even be excise from our churches and seminaries - something I've recently covered on my blog with regard to my own alma mater, Denver Seminary. In their case, it's not simply being captured by religious feminism, but supporting secular, pagan feminism with occult connections.

[Michael Bauman (not Dr.)]

The upside down, inside out anthropology of feminism is anti-Christian and leads to paganism, paganism in this day and age means the occult.

Jesus Christ set women free from being chatel as He recognizes women as fully persons co-equal with men as long as we are in communion with Him (an icon of the Holy Trinity) No other faith or philosophy offers such a dynamic, healing and powerful vision of men and women together.

Mostly, we haven't gotten it as we should have but that only means we need to delve more deeply into the Church rather than rejecting Christ because we haven't followed Him as we should.

[Thomas]

I cannot recommend too highly Celebrate Recovery for the treatment of various addictions, including pornography. Men, if you're caught up in this sin, join a CR group today. You won't be sorry.

[David Gray]

The feminist cancer, thankfully, can be excised from individual women.

[Will S.]

Why might a Christian man who is married, struggle with pornography? Why might he feel drawn to it? While condemning his obviously sinful actions, might we consider what might account for his course of action? Might we seek to understand?

If we recognize that pornography is a perversion of God-given sexual desires, which in and of themselves are not wrong within the marital context, but indeed a gift, might we enquire as to what might cause one who is married, to seek the false and wrong, rather than the true and right?

Moore reminds us that a husband's body is his wife's. But he doesn't remind us the Scriptural and logical corollary, mentioned right next to that passage, that a wife's body is her husband's. Why? If a couple's sex life is "near extinction", with the husband known to be using porn, might it be fruitful to also further enquire into whether there was sexual dissatisfaction on the part of the husband, PRIOR to his descent into porn usage? Hmmm.

Why does Moore use feminist-sounding language, saying we must "empower women" in our churches to deal with their porn-using husbands? Have women been, hitherto now, "disempowered" in some way, in this regard? Have women not been able to complain to their elders about problems in their marriages?

Why assume that this is solely the man's problem, that he is solely at fault, solely responsible?

Unless and until the Church deals with these matters, they'll never be able to effectively counter the problem of pornography usage by Church members, in any meaningful way. It'll just remain a conundrum, and we will continue our downward spiraling descent. And the clueless will continue to only see part of the problem.