The Elephant in the Room

On Tuesday evening, various media outlets in the U.S. scrambled to cover the arrest of a Homeland Security official caught in an internet sex sting, just one of many currently undergoing operations. Hours before, the news was dominated by the lurid and heartbreaking tale of Justin Berry, the teenage victim of internet pornography who testified before a Congressional committee, urging lawmakers into action.

Many of the statistics offered on pornography (multi-billion dollar industry, tens of thousands of predators, etc.) were indeed startling. Suffice it to say, pornography — aided and abetted by the internet like never before — is so pandemic it might be next to impossible now to find an individual not affected by it in some way or another.

Most of us have seen the "Just say no to drugs" public service advertisements (PSAs). Yet we know that pornography is just as addictive as drugs, if not more so; it is just as spiritually destructive, if not more so. Pornography use is psychologically debilitating and socially crippling, but compared to drug use, its effects are so much more easily masked — especially to its users. We know that pornography is the documented gateway to so-called alternative lifestyles, sexual crimes, murder, illegal drugs, witchcraft, you name it. But when it comes to public opposition to pornography these days, the silence from mainstream quarters is deafening.*

Popular media is only angered/alarmed by the "illegal" forms of pornography because in fact so much of the revenue of these large corporations comes from mainstreamed pornography — or at least what would've been deemed as such 50 years ago. The general public is already sick with small doses of pornographic poison given under different labels. Many go on to larger doses. The public and the media refuse to see the connection.

Because so many churches have fallen prey to the damage wrought by pornography, they say little about it — as if fear of hypocrisy were some kind of excuse for lack of conviction. The demonic genie is out of the bottle. Pandora's Box has been smashed open. Meanwhile, church leaders waffle and offer platitudes like "sin is sin," which is an egregious misinterpretation of the Scriptural truth that Sin (with a capital "S") separates all men from God. Sin (with a capital "S") gives birth to innumerable sins (lowercase "s") of varying qualities and degrees. Just as the symptoms of a disease are not equal, sins (lowercase "s") do not all have equal destructive weight/consequences — spiritually, mentally, or physically. The Bible makes a distinction for sexual sin in 1 Corinthians Chapter 6:

¹⁸ Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.
¹⁹ Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;
²⁰ you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

You won't hear a reasonable unbeliever make the absurd and irrational contention that murder is somehow no worse than telling a "white" lie.

While the world is shocked and pretends not to understand how we got to this point of societal decay, Christians should know better. Believers have emboldened the enemy's plans by getting too close to the world. In a rush to counter the problem, some have overreacted by dismissing their grandparents' perceived prudery ("repression") by putting Christian labels onto man-centered, sexually oriented material (or putting man-centered, sexually oriented labels onto Christian material — see an example from Slice of Laodicea). It's the equivalent to the case of a parent buying beers (or who knows what) for their child's party and saying, "If they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it in my house."

But the Old Man (i.e. the old sin nature) isn't buying it — he wants the world, and he'll take it free of the phony labels, thank you. Carnal Christians are being fed a steady diet of worldliness plus some Christianese messages of self-love ("happy-talk"). Result: utterly defenseless whelps left to the devices of a raging lion.

*Once fierce voices of opposition, like the feminists and fundamentalists, appear to have been muted. Some younger feminists today embrace, even promote, pornography.