The modern attack on all that is good, true, and beautiful can be traced to one point. Indeed, a large portion of the recent gains progressives made in their conquest of western civilization can be attributed to a wide hole they’ve stabbed into our social fabric.
The spearhead that opened that wound — letting the rest of the ideology imbue our culture unimpeded — is pornography. There is no other source to which the flood of insanity can be so directly traced.
The utopians who ushered in the system of liberalism we come into conflict with today saw the destruction of sexual morality as a key component of their goals. Marx openly expressed his wish that all women be held in common in the communist manifesto. As well, Nietzsche railed against the “slave morality” and claims that classifying anything as “impure” is the cardinal crime against life. Today the culture continues to hold that “love is love” and that all forms of sexual expression, no matter how harmful or degenerate, are equal.
The attack on sexual ethics is liberalism’s silver bullet: It is perfectly tailored to kill Christianity, the family, and the market economy. And what could possibly be more effective in carrying out this attack on sexual ethics than pornography?
Porn gives its users the illusion of privacy. It makes one think that their sexual perversions are secrets safe from the world. It’s a fantasy world where people can hide — an imaginary harem where the most degenerate aberrations are just a few clicks away — yet safely gone without a trace with a single click of the “x.” Porn isolates its viewers, making them feel alone and turning them inward and away from the people that could help them.
But porn is also addictive, changing human behavior and thought on a chemical level. Like a drug which requires a person to take increasingly high dosages to achieve the same “high,” to satisfy a porn addiction, a user must view increasingly violent, disturbing, and taboo forms to achieve the same level of arousal. A “little” porn use is a gateway into images of actions so hellish that the person now choosing them once would have shuddered to consider them.
What’s more, porn can be viewed by everyone. While even the most hardened sex addicts would think twice before acting out their vile practices in front of children, pornography has no conscience. It is not bound by laws or standards of decency. In fact, the average age of first exposure to pornography is estimated to be between 9-years-old and 12-years-old.
Porn breaks — or should I say it has broken — the nuclear family. Today, lawyers report that more than 50% of all divorces involve one partner having a porn addiction. On top of that, pornography is often a gateway into an extramarital affair —something that pornography glorifies.
Porn also encourages people not to even get married in the first place, leading people to seek the non-committal, “me first,” hedonism modeled by porn. Porn also leads women to view themselves as sexual objects, turning them away from family life and driving abortion.
Porn addiction leads people to give up on their faith, and to feel that God has abandoned them.
Karl Marx, I’m sure, would be happy to hear that the annual productivity loss to companies due to porn is calculated to be around 17 billion dollars as it leads individuals to disengage at work.
But the thing about porn that makes it more effective at destroying everything good, true, and beautiful is actually you and me.
Conservative Christians refuse to talk about porn. We see it as an ugly, awkward conversation.
If we’ve been exposed or addicted, we don’t want anyone else to know. Pornography hides behind our discomfort and continues destroying our culture. Porn is silent, invisible, and isolating. Its spell works best when cast over a single victim.
It’s well documented that it’s nearly impossible to break a porn addiction alone. The porn industry thrives on silence.
The brave among us should be marching to end pornography — a key component in the culture of death that validates abortion. As it stands, there’s basically nothing in existence to combat it. This needs to change.
It’s not enough to put up age verification laws on major porn sites, though that’s a good first step. We need to make pornography unthinkable in this country by revealing it as the evil that it is. But this means work. This means taking risks and initiative. This means working together to create the kind of movements that have been successful in uniting people against abortion.
But more than anything else, your community needs you to risk an awkward conversation. It needs you to show courage and conviction for the truth. Because if you don’t talk about porn, nobody will.
