More than 50% of U.S. Christians admit to consuming sexually explicit material and 22% say they do so weekly, according to an evangelical research firm.
The Barna Group recently reported that its survey of nearly 3,000 U.S. adults found a 6-percentage-point increase in consumption of adult material among men since 2015, from 55% to 61%, and a 5-point increase among women, from 39% to 44%.
The 2023 Barna survey was conducted with an intentional oversample of those who regularly attend church, identify as Christian and cite their beliefs at the core of their daily lives. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
The survey also asked users about their response to their use of explicit materials: 84% of all users said they deal with this issue alone, with few seeking outside help.
“I think there’s a lot of shame tied up in explicit pornography use,” said the Rev. Garrett Kell, pastor of Del Ray Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, and author of “Pure in Heart: Sexual Sin and the Promises of God.”
Mr. Kell, who once struggled with what he describes as a “debilitating addiction,” argues that the emotional and spiritual fallout is too heavy to handle alone.
“People look to it for intimacy and connection — things that God designed us to desire. But it’s a counterfeit of the joy only God can give, and it often leads to deeper struggles like depression and isolation,” he said.
Mr. Kell says that as the church encourages openness, congregants will find not only accountability but also spiritual support.
But Marty Klein, a sex therapist and author in Palo Alto, California, says the increased use may simply be driven by differences in Christian viewpoints on explicit content. This disparity reflects an evolving conversation around modern sexuality, one he doesn’t see as a negative, he adds.
“There’s a spectrum of Christian views on sexuality,” Mr. Klein told The Washington Times. “Some Christians see sexuality as a divine gift, which creates different interpretations on matters like explicit content and masturbation. Not every Christian believes the same thing about what it means to manage that gift.”
Other researchers argue that the struggles Christians feel around explicit content may stem from beliefs about the nature of explicit content — rather than the behavior itself.
Nicole Prause, a Los Angeles-based neuroscientist, pointed out that people often experience guilt and shame because they perceive explicit content as a social ill that especially targets women.
“If someone believes that all women in explicit content are being exploited, they may feel they’re participating in abuse just by watching,” said Ms. Prause, a full member of the International Academy of Sex Research. “Obviously, if you think that, you’re likely to feel awful about yourself.”
A quick online search seems to lend some support to that idea. Fight The New Drug reports that a PubMed study that analyzed “hundreds of the most popular explicit content scenes … found that 88.2% contained physical violence or aggression. They also found that 48.7% contained verbal aggression.” Other studies repeatedly showed women as the targets of this violence, the report says.
Researchers seem to be at odds over whether aggression in explicit content translates into aggression in real-life sexual experiences.
Christopher Ferguson, professor and co-chair of psychology at Stetson University in Florida, contends in his findings that evidence linking exposure to explicit pornography with increased sexual aggression remains thin and uncertain, hinting at more complexity than causality.
However, a recent meta-analysis found in the Journal of Communication found consumption to be linked to sexual aggression worldwide, affecting both males and females across various studies. There were stronger associations found for verbal rather than physical aggression — and violent content could be heightening this risk, the researchers reported.
“Pornography is the training ground for abuse in our sexual culture,” said Carl Trueman, a Grove City College professor and longtime writer at the Christian journal First Things.
According to Mr. Trueman and others, the Christian argument against explicit content wouldn’t be radically different even if violence in it were not a factor. Rather, he said the basis for their dissent is rooted throughout Christian theology.
“Christians have historically objected to explicit pornography, usually on the grounds that it promotes lust. We have the comment of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: that whoever’s looked lustfully at a woman has committed adultery with her in her heart,” Mr. Trueman said. “So clearly there are Christians historically being very sensitive to see [sex] as not merely being a body — an action of the body — but as being something that has its root in the will in the mind. That renders us just as guilty, in a sense, as any bodily action.”
’The ubiquity of the internet’
Joshua Grubbs, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico, has studied Christian use of explicit content for over a decade. He says the shift toward open use doesn’t indicate a fundamental change in values but rather a pragmatic acceptance.
“Back in the early 2000s, church leaders often said that if a man viewed explicit content, he wasn’t fit to lead,” said Mr. Grubbs, an investigator at the Center on Alcohol, Substance Use and Addictions. “But at some point, they realized: ‘If that’s the standard, then no men would be left to lead.’”
“It’s not that Christians are now saying explicit content is OK,” he said, “but they’re acknowledging that it’s a reality for many people.”
The numbers certainly bring that to bear. In 2023, the U.S. adult film industry raked in $1.15 billion — matching the revenue of the NCAA and underscoring explicit content’s vast reach, according to data from FHE Health, a behavioral health treatment facility in Florida.
Adult content, too, is available on 12% of all websites, and the sheer volume is staggering: visiting one adult video site per day would take 84 years to see them all. And in the last year alone, up to 80% of men in the U.S. tuned in, FHE reports, showing just how entrenched explicit content has become in everyday life.
Mr. Trueman says the proliferation of adult films is directly tied to internet access.
“I think it’s the ubiquity of the internet. … I don’t think today’s young men are intrinsically any more evil than the young men of my generation,” he said, adding that the typical social shame mechanisms that used to apply simply don’t anymore.
“In my generation, if I’d wanted to indulge in pornography, I’d got to actually go to that creepy cinema, or I’d got to be seen buying that dubious magazine from the sleazy bookshop. It could have been spotted by a neighbor or by my grandparents, something like that,” Mr. Trueman said.
Yet, as self-reported explicit content addiction rates grow, Ms. Prause says research links “addictive” explicit content behaviors with narcissism, wherein people externalize their struggles as problems caused by explicit content rather than taking personal responsibility.
“There’s often a victim mentality where people feel like the ‘explicit content industry’ is against them,” she said. “But that’s often more about self-perception than the act of watching explicit content itself.”
Groups like NoFap, a secular movement promoting abstinence from explicit content and masturbation, often emphasize this “battle mentality” of resistance against a sort of societal conspiracy targeting masculinity — a view Ms. Prause sees as reinforcing narcissistic, rather than moral, attitudes.
Depression, too, likely plays a role in use, she says.
“We’re literally just getting data on this — so [the study] is not published — but overwhelmingly, people who think they have explicit pornography problems would qualify for a diagnosis of major depressive disorder,” Ms. Prause said.
“Well you say, OK, then if you’re using explicit content, it’s because maybe you’re isolating, maybe it’s the one thing that still brings you pleasure — that’s a very, very common pattern with major depressive disorder,” she added. “Our hypothesis is a lot of people who think they’re struggling with porn issues actually have another underlying issue. It just happens to manifest in that domain for them.”
Mr. Klein, the sex therapist, said that meaningful discussions about explicit content among Christians start with a basic question about attitudes toward sexuality as a whole. Adult videos, he says, are almost exclusively used in the context of masturbation, which he believes is the real subject of a much-needed conversation among Christian groups.
“If a person can’t accept that masturbation is legitimate, then porn is going to be viewed as inherently troubling,” he said.
Mr. Klein argues that by focusing first on beliefs around personal practices, religious communities can understand what’s behind an individual’s struggle, allowing for a more constructive conversation.
The Barna study shows that those conversations are happening much less than churchgoers would like. Just 10% of Christians said that their churches offer help for those struggling, even though 58% of congregants said it’s an important issue to address.
“That is an abdication of pastoral responsibility,” said Mr. Kell, the pastor. “So whatever church is not addressing this from the pulpit and in small groups and in normal one-on-one conversations — I think it’s pastoral negligence.”
Many Christians feel that acknowledging explicit content use openly, rather than avoiding the subject, is essential to helping congregants, he added.
Mr. Kell said that faith communities need to offer support that goes beyond moral condemnation.
“We’re not just training people to avoid lust; we’re helping them respect themselves and others,” he said.
But as more Christians acknowledge the realities of adult film, these perspectives reveal both an evolving openness and the desire for compassionate, practical support.
“People need to know they’re not alone,” Mr. Kell said. “No matter where they’re coming from, that’s the first step.”
In the meantime, Mr. Trueman warns that focusing on pragmatic acceptance within the church risks compromising core beliefs.
“If we shrug it off as inevitable, what does that say about our values?” he asked.
This post was originally published on here
