Why Create This Website?

I’ve found the odd small book on pornography from a Christian perspective but, to be honest, none that state the harder-to-discuss facts about the damage it does and the soul-searing pain it can cause.

I work on a daily basis with people whose lives have been blown into the air by pornography, with offenders and their families dealing with the fallout of where pornography use can lead. For several years I have worked with men who have offended sexually online, and heard voices time after time telling me that they wish they had never experienced pornography. I want to save people from turning to it again. I want to inform about what it does in the brain and, most of all, I want to teach people what I believe is a Biblical perspective on this. The God who made you wants you to live a life where sex is something revered, not something that the enemy can degrade.

There is a war being waged. The soldiers don’t actually know that they have been recruited by the enemy till they realise that they are running from one side to the other on the battleground of their own psyches. They received the call-up, thinking it would be exciting/an escape to be involved in standing for freedom of sexuality and media, or just using it to avoid other aspects of life, little knowing that they would one day be fighting for their freedom in a different way. Will you fight under the standard of Christ, or will the enemy continue to lure you with the mercenary wiles used in films, chatrooms and social media across the world?

The more people who understand the true damage that pornography is doing, the more we can save our children from lives where their relationships don’t work because of their expectations of themselves and others, and the more we can save them from the exploitation that is often the result of pornography addictions.

Given that, worldwide, the results of programmes designed to prevent offending or reoffending have mixed results (Gannoni et al, 2023), I thought that at least I could warn people who struggled with pornography use, since hundreds of men have told me that they wished someone had warned them before their use turned into offending.

Are You Sure We Should Be Discussing This In Church?

In church we talk about marriage. The ten commandments state adultery as a sin, and Christ talks of lust in Matthew – “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt 5:28).

Whilst there is no specific mention of pornography as we know it in the Bible, we can confidently infer whether it constitutes something that Christians (or anyone for that matter) should be involved with. As we journey together, I will detail how pornography involves many of the things that are mentioned again and again as going against God’s design – oppression of workers, degradation of women, the encouragement of lust outside marriage, adultery, false idols…

The subject of desire is of interest to God and the church, but should we really be talking about the kind of things that are really taboo, the things that you wouldn’t stand by the coffee machine at work and talk about? Yes, and here is why…

God is interested in us as whole beings and wherever there is something that threatens our integrity or our status as image-bearers, He deserves some input. As the people of God we cannot hide our eyes from these things. Pornography and online sex offending are in every community in the UK, so it should interest us, whether the relevant people are church members or the people down our road. In the same way that some churches provide assistance to drugs users and prisoners, so we should be looking at this, as it is a toxic epidemic.

Relevance the other way round

There is a different way to think about connecting the words 'relevant' and 'church', to talk not just about whether sex, pornography and even offending are relevant topics for church but to look at the concept of the relevance of church to the lives of the people who need to talk about such things. Why don't we go wider and think about the concept of church as relevant to people's lives in general. The UK hasn't been a Christian nation for a long time. It is secular and church is largely seen as a fairly pointless irrelevance. Talk to most people and they might see it as a quaint idea, or proclaim the impossible-to-back-up claim that "science has disproved God"...

Yet churches could be the places where people find themselves. Many times have I encountered men whose lives have fallen apart because of their pornography use and they come back to a faith that they had forgotten, or they start to believe in a being larger than themselves and things begin to fit together, to make sense.

My Hopes for You

The men for whom I facilitate programmes often wish that someone or some agency had been available to them when they were struggling with a use of pornography that felt beyond their control. Pornography can overtake the mind to the extent that people are led to dark places. I know that you are destined for better than that.

I hope to provide insights from my own experiences working with men who have privileged me with their honesty; a rationale for why pornography is ultimately no good for anyone involved; and some learnings about ways to break free.

Pornography is affecting relationships, livelihoods and futures, and creating victims. Too often, I talk with men whose pornography use began when, as children, they found someone else’s magazines, videos or DVDs. They bought fully into the concept that pornography was what all men did, and that there was no harm in it. By stopping using it yourself, you are breaking a cycle that you know is damaging. Tell me (if you could), when do you last engage with pornography and feel great about yourself afterwards?

Where the Road Could Lead

Home

I work with men who are struggling for understanding about how they came to be arrested for accessing child abuse images, or talking sexually to minors online. More often than not, they are not people who came to the internet originally hoping to engage in such behaviours, but the route of easy availability of sexual experiences, unimpeded by the barriers of self-understanding and wisdom, led them to this place.

Of course, there are men who have an attraction to minors, but my aim here is to look specifically at the role of pornography in its function along the route to offending.