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Pornography

A church response is needed to stop the porn crisis

Parental controls are not enough

*****

Over the past several years, I have spoken in dozens of Christian communities to thousands of students and parents on the issue of digital porn addiction. Ten years ago, many parents thought the warnings about the digital porn threat were well-intentioned, but exaggerated. These days, most people are aware that porn use is swiftly becoming a norm in Christian communities. Not a single Christian high school I have spoken at did not have a significant number of students struggling with pornography.

Protecting your home doesn’t protect your kids

So, how do parents take steps to effectively porn-proof their homes? Many parents try to do just that. They install internet filters. They monitor the devices their children have or have access to. They use Covenant Eyes, Qustodio, or other accountability software. But time and again, frustrated parents tell me that their children have been exposed to explicit content anyways, because the parents of the friends their children hang out with do not take these precautions. Additionally, parents who actively monitor the internet access of their children by not giving them a smartphone face constant fights with their children if they are among the few who do not have one.

The reality is that if Christian communities are going to respond effectively to the crisis of porn addiction among the young, it will take a community response. Yes, it is essential that individual households ensure that internet access is both restricted and closely monitored. But this is clearly not enough.

In fact, secular governments are for the most part ahead of church leaders in recognizing this reality, which is why American state legislatures, the UK government, and other governments across Europe are grappling with the problem of how to keep pornography away from children. They recognize that this is a social problem requiring a robust collective solution, and Christian communities must recognize this, as well. Christian communities are, for the most part, lagging behind secular leaders in recognizing this problem and considering collective solutions.

This needs to be “all in”

In a recent essay in First Things titled “Parents Can’t Fight Porn Alone,” in which they make the case for government restrictions on digital pornography, Clare Morell and Brad Littlejohn explain why communities need to work together:

“Pornography’s addictive properties raise the stakes. Not only are children ill equipped to make rational choices about whether to consume a product, but their developing brains are more likely than adult brains to become hooked, with lifelong consequences. Adults may abuse alcohol, tobacco, and porn (indeed, for porn, there is no good “use,” but the law cannot suppress every vice), but they are less likely to become addicted if the first exposure occurs after age eighteen, when their brains are more fully developed. And the addictive qualities of porn make a mockery of parental controls: Once a child has encountered porn for the first time (perhaps through a friend, or on a parent’s device, or before the parents realized they needed to put controls on the child’s device), his or her brain will be programmed to hunt for it again and again, so that any and every loophole or glitch is an opening to ongoing porn consumption.

“Too often, portals to porn come in the form of friends. For many American children, the dark journey with pornography begins on the school bus, at recess, or even at youth group. Even when parents set up content-filtering regimes for their own families, they cannot control what other families in their communities are doing. With 95 percent of teens carrying around mini-computers in their pockets, it is all too easy for a peer with an unfiltered smartphone to expose another child to pornography. An Oxford Internet Institute study thus estimated that for a single child to be shielded from online pornography in any given year, at least seventeen households in his or her network (and possibly as many as seventy-seven) would need to be employing filters.”

Porn is looking for them

Re-read that for a moment: At least seventeen households in the network of a single child need to be monitoring and restricting internet usage in order to protect him or her from online porn for a single year. And as I emphasize in my presentations, it doesn’t matter whether your kids are looking for porn – if they’re online, porn is looking for them. As Morell and Littlejohn put it:

“Today, the average home has multiple internet-connected devices: smart TVs, laptops, iPads, gaming consoles, and smartphones for every member of the family, not to mention school-issued devices. Each of these ‘smart’ technologies may have hundreds of individual apps, many with their own in-app internet browsers, which means there may be thousands of points of entry to the internet in a single home. A minor using Snapchat, for instance, can reach Pornhub in just five clicks without ever leaving the app.

“The abundance of portals requires several different parental control solutions, few of which are intuitive or wholly reliable. Apple’s Screen Time filter, one of the best, requires seventeen steps to set up properly, has been known to stop working without warning, and even when fully functional can be hacked by tech-savvy teens. Better-designed third-party parental control apps are barred from accessing and regulating many of the most popular – and dangerous – apps, such as Discord, Snapchat, and TikTok. And if a parent, recognizing that no one solution is comprehensive, tries to install more than one external control app on the same device, the apps will often conflict with one another.

“Parents thus find themselves losing the arms race against Big Tech and Big Porn. This is dire, since children do not need to go looking for pornography; it finds them on social media. The porn industry has adopted the social media influencer model, with porn performers promoting their content on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, and Instagram, in order to entice users (many of them minors) to click through to their own sites.”

Unsurprisingly, many parents despair. Plenty of parents eventually give up, worn down by the begging and badgering of their children and the lack of community support for their decisions about smartphones and internet-capable devices. If all the other kids have them, they can’t be that bad, right? Porn has been around forever, and most people turned out okay, didn’t they? If we are taking this problem more seriously than our community leadership, we’re probably being paranoid or going overboard, aren’t we? It is far easier to cave, cover our eyes, and hope for the best – but this invariably has devastating consequences, many of which I detail in a comprehensive chapter in my recent book How We Got Here: A Guide to Our Anti-Christian Culture.

A growing problem

If we are to protect our children from being exposed to explicit content and developing porn addictions – and again, I emphasize that this is a significant and growing problem in every Christian community I have visited – we will need to work together. Christian communities should treat pornography addiction with the same level of seriousness we would apply to a wave of addiction to other drugs. Pornography is more insidious because its effects, at first, are less visible – but they are no less destructive. They rewire and fundamentally transform the mind, alter our ability to relate to the opposite sex, and profoundly poison our ability to have healthy relationships.

Thus, community leaders should address the pornography crisis head on. Yes, parents should ensure that every internet-capable device is locked down and monitored. But we must also work with other parents and ensure that the networks we are a part of are pulling in the same direction. (As the American psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax put it in a presentation I attended recently, it is the task of parents to find out if the household their child is visiting has unrestricted internet access.)

Christian schools should develop and enforce rigid policies on smartphone use at school and, ideally, cultivate a community with a collective standard that recognizes the dangers of giving teenagers smartphones to begin with. We are all in this together, and we cannot protect our children from pornography if other parents are not willing to do the same.

Time to catch up

Again, secular experts are ahead of most Christian communities on this issue. Intellectuals such as Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness) are driving a new consensus: Giving a child (and that very much includes teenagers) a smartphone (or device with unfiltered internet access) is one of the most damaging decisions a parent can make. Morell and Littlejohn are right: Parents cannot do this alone. But they shouldn’t have to, either. Christian communities are lagging behind secular governments and experts on this issue. It is time we caught up.

This is reprinted with permission from TheBridgehead.ca where it was first published under the title “Parental controls are not enough: A community response is needed to stop the porn crisis” and where Jonathon Van Maren blogs and also hosts a regular podcast.



News

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Some Christians might love to have a more definitive answer than this article provides, but it does offer a biblical perspective worth considering.

Why nobody has friends anymore

"The Survey Center on American Life reports that that in 1990, almost 70% of men had five or more close friends. By 2021, just 40% reported having that many."

Christian apologetics on Rogan

Last year Canadian Christian apologist Wes Huff dismantled a former Joe Rogan guest, Billy Carson, who then threatened legal action. That kerfuffle got Joe Rogan's attention, and then, suddenly, a Christian apologist was invited onto the world's most popular skeptical podcast.

The way a fly flies is fly!

The speed at which a fly flaps is so fast it has been hard to investigate what it is really up to. But now, as we're starting to get in-depth looks for the first time, evolutionists are awestruck at how intricate and amazing a fly's flight mechanism really is.

Springtails do their own stunts

They jump the equivalent of 6 stories, exploding upward 150 times faster than the blink of an eye!

 


Today's Devotional

February 6 - The appealing candidate

“Now Esther was winning favor in the eyes of all who saw her.” - Esther 2:15 

Scripture reading: Esther 2:5-18

In our passage, peace replaces unrest, a better bride fills the previous queen’s spot, a nobody becomes somebody, one humbled has been exalted, and the feast of Esther has begun.

By God’s providence, the last has become first so God can >

Today's Manna Podcast

Manna Podcast banner: Manna Daily Scripture Meditations and open Bible with jar logo

Today you will be with me

Serving #745 of Manna, prepared by Steven Swets, is called "Today you will be with me".



















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News

Canadians retiring in record numbers

Statistics Canada recently reported that Canadians have retired in huge numbers over the past twelve months: 306,000 citizens retired from full-time work from September to August of 2022. That’s 70,000 more than the corresponding period ending August 2021. The increase is particularly marked among those ages 55 to 64: 155,000 in the past twelve months, versus just over 100,000 the year earlier, and that’s 10,000 more than those aged 65 or older. Among all the G7 countries, Canada has the largest percentage of its citizens actively working, but with one in five workers over the age of 55, and many of these retiring, the nation’s workforce may be shrinking. As Reuters’ Julie Gordon put it, “More than a year after the Great Resignation took hold in the United States, Canada is grappling with its own greyer version: The Great Retirement.” As has been discussed in the days since her death, Queen Elizabeth II set quite a different example: for over 70 years, well past what we would call “retirement age,” she performed her duties as monarch without public complaint. In fact, just two days before her passing, she was able to officially appoint Liz Truss as her Prime Minister for the nation of England Christians must have this different perspective on work and retirement. While what we do on a daily basis may change as we age, the Lord requires that, as members of His church, each of us “use (our) gifts readily and cheerfully for the benefit and well-being of the other members” (Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 55). What a joy it is when the “silver-haired” among us share their wisdom and experience with those who are younger, and continue to be actively involved “doing good to all men, especially those of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10)....

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Assorted

How important is "nothing"?

My Grandmother found me in the pantry of her house and demanded, “What are you doing?” My quick response was nothing. “Oh, you must have been doing something," she said. "No, I wasn’t. I was doing nothing,” I declared. And so goes the process of getting caught with my hand in the cookie jar. “Nothing” is so easy to say and usually doesn’t mean “Nothing.” I’ve met with multiple Christian leaders heading into retirement. When I ask them what they are going to do next, I get a quizzical look and often the erudite answer, “nothing.” Now sometime it comes out as I don’t know, or I don’t know yet, or I haven’t figured it out, or I’m going to take some time off. Seldom is the answer definitive or part of a new life’s direction. It’s mostly a response suggesting what is being left behind, and not what is ahead. The allure of nothing? Kind of strange, isn’t it, that a large majority claim nothing as their goal in retirement. Instead of a move from success, or even meaningful existence to significance, it's a move from something to nothing. A quick look in Webster’s suggests the following about nothing: not any being or any particular thing, a state of non-existence, worthlessness, or unconsciousness. This eruption of nothing has exploded to the point where January 16 is identified as our National Day of Nothing. If more people were aware of it, less would get done. A lot of nothing for sure. The more or less official description of the goal of the day is to provide Americans with one national day when they can just sit without celebrating, observing or honoring anything. Raise the flag for nothing? No, that would be doing something. I thought I’d see what else I could learn about nothing. In the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon takes about all of man’s desires as meaningless, or nothing compared to the majesty of God. The word is used to describe the lack of value as in Proverbs 13:7 where Solomon again opines, one person pretends to her rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth. Nothing and “naught” are often used to portray the nothing of man compared to the wealth of God. Interestingly, in John 1 Jesus says that without a relationship with him, you can do nothing. Following the logic, if you are doing nothing, you will not have a relationship with him. Not only no relationship but no meaningful action either. So why in our culture, our faith-based culture, have so many bought into the cultural priority of doing nothing in retirement? The allure of making every day a Saturday is certainly there when you have worked at a job for 30 years. But 30 years of Saturdays leaves much to be desired. Made for more than golf Part of the cultural allure, even deception, comes from the desire to escape from work and then tie leisure to value. Thirty years of playing golf won’t bring meaning or purpose to the Christian who realizes that we are called to be faithful for a lifetime. Another subtle meaningless thought is that church, bible study, etc. alone reflects God’s plan for your life. God does have one, you know. And it does not stop when you retire from your job, sell your company, or even leave the pulpit. There is more to be done, perhaps interspersed with a bit of nothing thrown in. But nothing as a goal, as a reflection of God’s plan for the rest of your life? Absolutely not. Here is some encouragement to move beyond nothing. It’s from a 1981 United Technologies Corp. ad that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, likely written by their CEO Harry Gray, who was close to retirement at the time: Retirement doesn’t have to be a red light. It can be a green light. Othmar Ammann would agree. After he “retired” at age 60, he designed, among other things, the Connecticut and New Jersey Turnpikes; the Pittsburgh Civic Arena; Dulles Airport; the Throgs Neck Bridge; and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Paul Gauguin “retired” as a successful stockbroker and became a world-famous artist. Heinrich Schliemann “retired” from business to look for Homer’s legendary city of Troy. He found it. After Churchill made his mark as a world statesman, he picked up his pen and won the Nobel Prize for Literature at age seventy-nine. Don’t just go fishing when you retire. Go hunting. Hunt for the chance to do what you’ve always wanted to do. Then go do it! Shifting gears is different than stopping I had a conversation with a man on the plane. He’d sold his companies 6 years prior. When asked what he’d been doing, he answered, nothing! How is that working out for you? I asked. Not so good. As a matter of fact, I think I’m about at the end of nothing. God did not prepare him for nothing. That’s true for you and me too. Too often we make nothing into all-or-nothing. Either I’m working, or I’m doing nothing. We don’t leave any room for shades of gray. I’m convinced we need to change how we think about the nothing we call retirement. Need to find meaning and purpose. The meaning and purpose God intends for us during these last three stages of life. A comedian used this phrase to define the word “nothing”; “Nothing” is an air-filled balloon with the skin peeled off. A graphic description don’t you agree. Nothing is not anything until we think or reflect on it, then it becomes something. Starting to think about our next life stage of nothing, is important, valuable, encouraging, and yes, exciting. Every little kid has asked, “what are we going to do next?” Their voice is full of anticipation; ours should be to whether we are in our 50s, 70s, or 90s. Here is some accumulated wisdom from those who should know: Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Robert Schuller, “I'd rather attempt to do something great and fail than to attempt to do nothing and succeed.” Helen Keller, “Life is either a great adventure or nothing.” “There is a definite cost to doing nothing.” Edward Livingston And here is the thought that challenges me the most: The hardest work of all is to do nothing. I’d rather be excited about the day, week, and months ahead. How about you? So how important is nothing? Victor Hugo said, “Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men." Stay with us as we journey together. Don’t disturb me either, as I am very busy doing nothing. Bruce Bruinsma champions the emerging Retirement Reformation Movement along with other key members of the Retirement Reformation Roundtable. The Retirement Reformation Manifesto is an initial step to encourage Christians to radically change the way they think about retirement. For the last 30 years he has given leadership to a financial services firm providing retirement plans to ministers, missionaries, churches, and faith-based organizations. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife of 56 years, Judy. This is reprinted, with permission, from his blog at www.BruceBruinsma.com. ...