(Image source: TAB Media)

The following excerpt comes from The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke. (© Kelsy Burke, 2022. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury USA.)

This excerpt explores an evangelical Protestant church program that promotes overcoming pornography viewership through an addiction-model of recovery and through strengthening one’s Christian faith.

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I arrived at Prairie Christian Church on a warm and humid summer evening. My directions first took me to the south parking lot, which was full even though it wasn’t Sunday; there must have been an event in the main sanctuary. When I drove around to the other side of the megachurch complex, I found the north parking lot mostly empty, but I could see lights on in the rooms in the north wing. I later learned that most rooms are occupied seven days a week, from six in the morning until late in the evening. There, church members and visitors can attend small groups and classes on a wide range of topics, from finance to Bible study. This wing of the church also contained a day care and preschool. My invitation to the church had come from Cheryl, a thin, petite white woman in her fifties with dyed black hair and matching eyeliner. For nearly a decade, Cheryl had been leading Redeemed! (a pseudonym), which uses the twelve-step model of addiction recovery with explicitly Christian language to treat and support people wishing to quit a wide range of behaviors, from drug abuse to pornography use to codependency. For a decade before leading the group, she was a regular and active participant in it, rarely missing a weekly meeting. Every Friday, Redeemed! has its public meeting, and once a month the meeting is preceded by a potluck; on the night of my visit, the potluck featured grocery store deli fried chicken and a crock pot of enchiladas. Knowing I was researching pornography addiction, Cheryl invited me to come hear Phil give his testimony. Curious about my background, she asked me about my life: what kind of addictions I might be confronting and whether I wanted to join the weekly women’s group, which met after the general meeting. She shared with me that her ex-husband had been an alcoholic, but that she attended Redeemed! herself because she struggled with an addiction to codependency.

“Don’t we all?” I asked, half joking.

“Mmm,” Cheryl said. “Codependency is just human nature without God,” she said earnestly. According to her evangelical beliefs, we are all born as sinners who need Jesus Christ to save us. “There’s messiness everywhere,” she continued. “Relationships, broken people with lots of scars from their childhood, a lot of behavioral issues. Addictions come from the hurt places. People do screwy things.”

When conducting research observations, I answer questions posed to me as honestly as I can, but without giving away too many details about my personal life. This is as much for me as for my research subjects—I want both of us to remember my role as a researcher, not a fellow participant. Somehow on this night, though, I ended up telling Cheryl that my dad was a recovered alcoholic who had spent months at rehab when I was twelve and who hadn’t had a drink since. He had “worked the steps” and attended AA meetings for years. Sometimes, he would agree to be somebody’s sponsor, and I remember answering collect phone calls and being instructed to accept the charges and hand the phone over to my dad.

“Sober twenty years,” I shared with her. “Praise God,” she said.

I suddenly and unexpectedly teared up. Cheryl hugged me, and I hugged her back. Then we walked together into a small sanctuary for praise and worship and to hear Phil’s testimony.

A small band (drum set, electric guitar, and keyboard) led us in a few songs of praise and worship, with the lyrics projected onto a screen partially obscured by the guitarist’s head. After singing, Cheryl gave her thanks to the band, made a few announcements about upcoming events, and then introduced the night’s speaker.

“My name is Phil,” he began, after making his way to the podium at the front of the room. “I’m a believer, and I struggle with an addiction to pornography and video games.”

“Hi, Phil,” the audience responded.

Phil looked down at a stack of notes, clutched in a somewhat shaky hand, and told his story: “I have struggled with pornography from the time I was in, like, seventh grade up through the first few years of my marriage. I always knew it was a problem, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I talked to a pastor and other people, because I didn’t know what to do. They told me to stop, but I couldn’t stop. I was always functional, but it was poisoning me and my marriage and poisoning my relationship with God.”

Phil continued, explaining how he took a leap of faith and trusted God, whom he felt was telling him to turn down what seemed at the time like a good job offer. In hindsight, Phil could see that this was the right decision, a turning point in his life and on his road to recovery. He found a different and better job, he was able to improve his physical health and eliminate his chronic back pain, and a friend introduced him to Redeemed! “Up until that point, I wasn’t really sure what sobriety meant.” Redeemed! helped him, he said, commit to “no porn and no masturbation,” as he put it. Phil’s recovery was not a straight path. After five years attending Redeemed!, and finally eliminating porn from his life for good, he started to fill the gap with computer games. “It took me a while to realize that was also a problem, that it was just an alternative addiction.” But he was able to bring this issue to his Redeemed! “family,” as he called them, and use the program to help make sense of how he was using both porn and video games to cope with outside stressors and internal shame and guilt. To end his testimony, he shared how he had channeled his compulsive porn use and gaming into an activity that he believed both healthy and godly: “I’ve memorized one new Bible verse a day for about two years.”

This wasn’t the first time Phil shared his story with the group, but it was the first time he weaved together the different elements having to do with both pornography and video games. Later, in an interview, I asked Phil what it was like when he shared his testimony for the first time. “I remember it going really well,” he said, “but I remember reading it and, about halfway through, thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud to a group of people.’ But at that point, I was like, ‘Let’s just get this over with,’ and I did. I had a lot of people come up to me afterward and say, ‘That was really brave.’ I just felt really honest, and that felt really good.”

The reason Phil has stayed involved in Redeemed! for all these years is because he feels it is a place for him. It doesn’t matter that his addictions are not the same as those for people struggling with drugs or alcoholism. The focus of the group is on the recovery process, which is the same regard- less of the addictive behavior.

Googling “how to quit porn” will inevitably, and ironically, result in myriad pornographic images and video clips. But below these, one will likely find among the first search results an article from Covenant Eyes, titled “How to Quit Porn: 6 Essential Steps.” The tag line for Covenant Eyes is “Quit porn. Win at life.” First step: You must want to quit. Second step: You need to find a different way from the unsuccessful strategies of the past. Third step: You have to be honest with at least one other person. Fourth and fifth steps: You have to get rid of all your porn and stop new porn from coming in. Sixth and final step: You need a friend to help you stay on track. The subtext is, of course, “Have you tried Covenant Eyes?”

It’s convincing marketing that reinforces the problem it claims to solve. And the problem, according to company messaging, is a serious one. Covenant Eyes stresses the physical impact pornography has on your brain—at one antiporn conference, I picked up a brain-shaped stress ball with the company logo from a table of swag—and so, it makes the damage of porn seem physical and hard to reverse. All the more important to sign up for a subscription! It costs about as much as a monthly subscription to Netflix or Hulu, and it is pitched similarly: $15.99 per month for the family plan, which includes unlimited devices and up to twelve users. In 2019, the company reported annual earnings of over $26 million.

Covenant Eyes software doesn’t just block pornographic content (though it does that, too, through a convenient “add-on” feature, for an additional fee); it also tracks websites that are used each day and then sends a report to an “ally” of your choosing. As the CEO of Covenant Eyes, Ron DeHaas, explains, “The best means of losing weight is to weigh yourself every day, and so the best means of fighting pornography is to have an accountability ally. That ally is the person that you depend on to monitor what you’re doing on the computer.” For most of the men I interviewed who used the software, they chose male friends whom they trusted and who were often themselves on the journey to quit porn. In one unusual example, one interview respondent, Brad, explained to me that after he was caught looking at porn at work, reports of his history went directly to his boss—which happened to be an evangelical church. Rather than firing him, his supervisors decided that he could continue his work so long as he installed the Covenant Eyes app on his work and home computers and attended weekly support groups at a neighboring church for men like him who struggled with pornography addiction.

DeHaas, a devout evangelical Christian himself, started Covenant Eyes in 2000 from his home office in a small Michigan town. As he describes it, a personal tragedy made him realize the importance of protecting the family. In 1992, his wife and two young children were killed when a tanker truck hit the family’s vehicle with them in it. DeHaas received over two million dollars in a settlement from the trucking company, and he decided to use it to start a company he believed in and that he believed the world needed. “I made the decision to spend all of my money,” he told one journalist, “I did not have anything left. I couldn’t afford a cup of coffee at McDonald’s.” With the help of a seventeen-year-old computer programmer, DeHaas developed the Covenant Eyes accountability software and made a deal with Promise Keepers, at the time the largest and most well-known evangelical organization for men’s fellowship. The company grew slowly but steadily, and since 2010, it has been recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. As of 2020, DeHaas has employed a staff of more than two hundred people who work in a forty-thousand-square-foot complex.

Beyond Covenant Eyes and Redeemed!, there are hundreds of products and resources (books, websites, support groups, apps, and software programs) to help young men avoid pornography. Fight the New Drug’s porn addiction recovery program, Fortify, is free for anyone under eighteen who can explain why they want to quit using porn. The app, normally costing $9.99 per month for adult users or $6.95 for college students, resembles countless other health and wellness programs, where users document daily habits in order to track incremental progress. Upon reaching milestones, such as thirty days without porn, users get coins, badges, or level-ups that offer a sense of pride and accomplishment. There are guided meditations, journal prompts, and opportunities to connect to other Fortify users, along with “allies” of your choosing, people in your real life who agree to support you on your recovery journey.

Though some porn addiction recovery resources like Fortify are not explicitly religious, evangelical Protestants more than any other religious denomination have dominated the pornography addiction recovery industry. In 2002, Craig Gross and Mike Foster, two young, hip white evangelical pastors, founded what they dubbed XXXchurch. The website advertised “Porn, Sex, Girls, Guys” on its home page to invite visitors who had no qualms about porn to read on to learn why they should avoid it. The organization now offers a software program similar to Covenant Eyes, called X3watch. One of its tag lines is “Jesus loves porn stars,” and today, a former performer, Brittni De La Mora, leads XXXchurch, along with her pastor husband. Together, they spearhead a project, Strip Church, that ministers to dancers in strip clubs. They also attend the AVN Awards each year to spread their Good News.

(Image source: XXXchurch)

Between 2006 and 2019, Pastor Gross publicly debated porn performer Ron Jeremy at universities across the country—“Porn Pastor versus Porn Star,” as the event was heralded. Typically, Jeremy mustered the louder applause from whooping college guys upon first entering the stage. Without similar celebrity status within the presumably liberal “hookup culture” of universities, “I’m by far the underdog,” Gross has reflected. He was always the one to present his position first, something that Jeremy demanded, since, in his words, “I have no problem with his career; he has a problem with my career.”

“I’m not about shutting down the porn industry,” Gross insisted to his audience at one event. “You have the right to view it.” Still, “the next time you’re tempted, you have a thought, you’re visiting a porn site, I would just ask yourself why. Take a beat and just think about it.”

Evangelicals are “cultural innovators,” in the words of sociologists Shayne Lee and Philip Luke Sinitiere, and thus have remained successful and salient in contemporary American culture, even when denominational church membership and attendance has declined. What emerged in the late twentieth century was a “spiritual marketplace,” where religions competed to produce innovative forms of worship and convince individuals that religion had a place for them. Evangelicals are successful in this marketplace because they are “in the world, but not of the world,” as a common saying goes, meaning that they participate in secular culture even while clinging to traditional and conservative beliefs. Some examples of successful evangelical enterprises include televangelism, Christian self-help books, Christian rock music and movies, and the emergence of gyms, day cares, and coffee shops within nondenominational megachurches. Yet evangelicals don’t see this as cultural appropriation, but rather, as cultural transformation. Craig Gross, onstage next to Ron Jeremy (with his slick, dyed black hair and pierced ears), epitomized this trend. Today, he leads an organization, Christian Cannabis, that promotes recreational marijuana as a spiritual practice.

Sociologist Jeremy Thomas has traced how Christianity Today, the largest evangelical periodical in the United States, started by Billy Graham in 1956, changed its coverage of pornography so that since the 1990s, an addiction framework has come to dominate. Before the mid-1980s, most articles relied on what Thomas calls the “narrative of traditional values” to discuss porn, with the articles centered on how pornography contributes to an overall moral decline of society along with the disintegration of the nuclear family. In the mid-1980s, influenced by the feminist antipornography movement, the narrative of public/performer harm (which centers on how pornography harms women both as porn performers and within the broader society) emerged. Around the same time, Thomas names the narrative of personal viewer harm (which emphasizes the harm pornography causes to individual consumers), which outlasts the public/performer narrative and has, indeed, shaped the antipornography movement into the twenty-first century.

By the 1980s, evangelicals could no longer pretend that pornography was a problem only outside their communities. Sex scandals involving televangelists Jim Bakker (who covered up a rape accusation by his secretary by paying $279,000 to the alleged victim) and Jimmy Swaggart (found to have paid prostitutes for sex) seemed evidence for a bumper sticker sold at the time: the moral majority is neither. But far from admitting defeat, evangelical leaders instead began acknowledging that pornography’s consumers were also Bible-believing men (and sometimes even women). Evangelicals confronted what they saw as the mistaken values and market of sexual liberation making their way into evangelicals’ lives and relation- ships. Some of the most prominent evangelical political activists—including Tim LaHaye, husband of Beverly LaHaye and founder of the secretive conservative networking group the Council for National Policy, and James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family—were also authors of bestselling Christian self-help and advice books. Their writing focused on how pornography harmed marital relationships and personal well-being, but at the same time acknowledged how devout Christian men might be tempted by it.

Sociologist Samuel Perry describes this as a shift from offense to defense—to defend against pornography addiction, which was perceived to be a threat to evangelical men. And in some ways, these evangelical leaders were right. Protestant men are more likely than any other groups, including those with no religious affiliation, to perceive themselves to be addicted to pornography. And yet, evangelical men as a whole actually watch less porn than their nonevangelical counterparts. In one national survey, about 25 percent of born-again Christian men reported that they had looked at porn in the past week, compared to nearly 50 percent of men who were not born-again. But those who look at porn are more likely to consider themselves addicted to it or to be troubled by their porn use than men who are less religious. Several studies have found that religious commitment is a better predictor of perceived porn addiction than actual porn use.

Kelsy Burke is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and the author of The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Christians under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet (University of California Press, 2016).

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 26 of the Revealer podcast with Kelsy Burke: “Religion and Pornography.”