Christians and porn: a practical theology

This is the fourth post in the ongoing series on Christians and pornography (most recent post here). We have been walking through Mark Driscoll’s book Porn-Again Christian and today we are looking at chapter 4, “a practical theology of pornographic lust”.

At the beginning of Genesis, says Driscoll, God gave Adam an amazing gift in Eve.

God made Eve to be with the man as a lover, helper, and friend. … Eve may or may not have been beautiful, but to Adam she was glorious because she was all he had ever known. Practically, he had no standard of beauty to compare his bride to–she was his only standard of beauty.

This incredible gift was made even more incredible because Adam was not constantly breaking his neck to check out some other woman walking down the street.

Every urge and desire that we have is something that God created us with. They have been tainted and altered, but in their pure form they are good (because God created everything good). Thus the desire present in lust (the desire to experience a deep connection with another human being) is a good desire, though it is heightened to an extreme degree and directed at the wrong people.

God’s design in marriage is that a man should lust after his wife, and a woman after her husband. As Driscoll puts it;

This means that if a man has a tall, skinny red-headed wife then that is sexy for him, and if his neighbour has a short, curvy brunette wife then that is sexy for him. Pornographic lust exists to elicit coveting and dissatisfaction that no woman can satisy because she cannot be tall and short, endowed and waifish, black and white, young and old, like the harem laid out in pornography.

When we continue to fill our minds with images of people that we are not supposed to think about in that manner, then our own lives become less and less satisfying. When we begin to fantasise that there were someone else who would come to bed, we are in deep trouble.

Sex is a gift given to us to help us deepen our communion with one another. It is something that is designed to physically cement a spiritual connection between two people. However, when one, or both, of the partners are not present in the moment because they are thinking about the latest picture they saw, or the latest erotic story they read, the connection is broken.

If a man fills his mind with images of other women’s breasts, he will never be satisfied with his wife’s and thereby diminish her confidence and marriage.

The same is true for women. It make not take as direct a form for you, but if you continually fill your head with images of buff men with six pack abs picking you up, carrying you off, and ravishing you, then how can you be satisfied with the man whom you have chosen to spend your life with? Perhaps women are more attracted to erotic stories than men are, but they have the same damaging impact; they cause dissatisfaction with the marriage, and the marriage bed.

The worst case I am aware of personally is a guy who had to have magazine pictures of other women on the pillow next to his wife’s head when they had sex because he had so conditioned his body to be aroused by porn that he was no longer aroused by his wife. You do not want to be that guy, and you do not want your wife to be that woman.

A while ago someone asked a group of teenage guys who were thinking about this issue whether porn would have the same attraction if it was our sister who was performing.

All of them immediately had an intensely negative reaction to this idea.

The presenter then challenged them all to see that every single one of those women was someone’s sister, or daughter, or even mother.

If God’s men did view woman as sisters, they would see the naked girls they lust after as beautiful sisters in need of dignity and grieve as if their little sister suddenly became a stripper.

So, how are we going to be proactive in keeping one another accountable?

Do you have someone you can go to, a pastor, a spiritual counsellor, a trusted friend, and tell them when you are struggling? How can we bear one another’s burdens in this?

Some ideas are installing the free x3 watch software (though I have had some technical issues with the free version). There also seems to be a movement in male accountability groups using the metaphor of Fight Clubs.

Do you have any ideas which may help us through this?

(remember that this series is involved in a book give-away, so any comments you make, or cross-posts give you an entry into the giveaway)

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