Almost randomly opening the Bible will show that every part of history has had a sinful relationship with sexuality. The fact that our current age has problems with sexuality isn’t new, but the ease and availability is like never before in history. Just one of the major porn sites, name intentionally not included, reported that in 2018, it had 33.5 billion website visits. This site has over a million hours of porn that has been uploaded to it. This is just one of the millions of porn sites. Research compiled by Tim Wildsmith says that: 94% of children will see porn by age 14, The porn industry’s annual revenue is more than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined, 56% of American divorces involve one party having an “obsessive interest” in pornographic websites, 76% of young Christian adults 18-24 years old actively search for porn, and only 13% of Christian women say they never watch pornography.²⁰ Additional statistics say that pornographic websites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined and that about one-third of all web downloads in the U.S. are porn-related.²¹ This addiction has led to new challenges. This has led to our 20-25 year old male population now being the largest buyer group for Viagra and Erectile Dysfunction medication.²² Pornography has made it nearly impossible for many men when they do enter a marriage setting to be able to have sex. As we have seen, pornography is both massive and devastating. We would be blind if we did not think it was a problem in our community too. It is shaping us and our youth. While it leads men to more aggressive behavior with 88% of pornography showing violence towards women, it leads women to have more depression due to not looking like the porn actresses or having a willingness to engage in that same behavior.²³

Our culture claims, with even public school sex education classes agreeing, that pornography is not that bad. As the above statistics show, most have encountered pornography and it has not been for the better. Just because a habit is popular, does not make it good or healthy. This is even without us talking about the nature of pronography and how this massive industry relies on sex slavery. At this point, stopping pornography through legality is not going to work, nor is fully believing that we completely avoid it. It is too pervasive. We can place buffers between us and our children to avoid accidentally coming across pornography. That makes the searching of pornography intentional and not as accidental. There are plenty of apps and programs that can help with this. The issue of pornography is dealt with by acknowledging the pandemic that it is, by parents and youth realizing the sin that it is, and by placing and barriers at home to prevent coming across it.

This problem of pornography is not old. It has been a major problem for less than two decades. It is revolutionary in that it makes the search for sex not at a public brothel, but a 30 second search secretly in a bedroom. This problem is only encouraged when we ignore it. I have heard several talks about this problem, but every speaker always mentions how the church needs to step in to solve this problem. For those who can, they need to model living a healthy life. For those who are addicted, they need to seek help and help others out of the problem. These are not fun conversations, but this is a real and devastating issue in our community.

“We don’t get holier by being quieter about our sin.”

-Ricky Chellete