It tends to be that when a society gets their view of God wrong they also get their view of sex wrong. These two things are intrinsically linked. Our worship is closely connected to our view of sexuality. We can see many examples of this throughout Pagan cultures, and even throughout the Old Testament, most notably in the Exodus story of the golden calf. It then should not come as a surprise at all that a culture which is dominated by pornography, contraception, and so called “casual sex” is also a culture that profoundly misunderstands God and worship. Could it be that these deviant sexual behaviors are themselves a form of worship? That would certainly explain why we have lost our ability to understand true worship. In this article, I want to explore just one of those forms of worship: pornography. Further, we will examine the idol behind the worship.

Worship

One might be willing to agree that pornography interferes with our true worship of God, as all sin does, but isn’t it a little bit far to say that it creates an idol? Every year the world’s largest pornography site releases usage statistics for their platform. One chart they release describes the usage for each day of the week.  In three of the last four years in which data was released the most popular day is Sunday.

source: pornhub.com/insights

The fact that the most visited day of the week is the day which is culturally set aside for worship is uncanny to say the least. In fact, as will be argued later in this article, given the worship like nature of pornography there is good reason to believe that we are dealing with an idol here. Furthermore, users of pornography must often make sacrifices to continue their use. To name a few users must often sacrifice their marriages, jobs, and, ironically, even their normal sexual function. Since idols always demand something from their worshippers, it would seem that there is indeed an idol behind pornography.

Idols as Charms

Before the word “fetish” was widely used in a sexual context, it was a term that meant a charm viewed as having a captivating spiritual power. The word has roots in the Portugese word feitico meaning charm or sorcery. One widely discussed effect is that the longer a person engages with pornography the more fetishized the types of pornography that they use needs to be. As Dr. Norman Doidge points out in his book The Brain that Changes Itself, pornography has become increasingly more hardcore and fetishized. Additionally, Mary Harrington describes the law of “erotic entropy” as the tendency for a user to turn to more extreme forms of pornography over time in order to achieve the same arousal. The neuroscience behind this matches up with this law. Pornography stimulates the release of dopamine in the brain, and as the brain adapts to the levels of dopamine more extreme content is required to give the user the same “high”. To bring us back to the point, pornography has moved increasingly in the direction of fetishes which serve as charms and idols. 

Further, engaging with pornography itself is a parody of the center of Christian worship. While I am certainly not the first to point this out, the act of engaging with pornography itself is an inversion of the central words of the Mass: “This is my body given up for you.” Instead, the viewer of pornography says, “This is your body taken by me.” The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is total and selfless act of life giving love, but pornography is the offering of another’s body to the idol of one’s desires. Pornography is the worship of an idol.

Making the Connection Clearer

It has already been alluded to, but it is worth making the connection between idolatry and pornography clearer. It is certainly tempting to conclude that pornography itself is an idol, however, pornography is not an end in itself. Just as the Mass is not what we are worship, but the means by which we worship, likewise pornography is not the true end which the user is seeking but a means to an end. So naturally, the question is what is the end? 

To answer this question I think we must first ask what pornography is. The root of the word comes from the Greek, pornographos, meaning something like “depicting prostitutes”. Interestingly enough, it was also a word used to describe sexually graphic paintings that were put in temples of Bacchus. This brings us to an important connection between pornography and art. Oftentimes, when one walks into a church, especially older churches, he is struck by all the artwork in the church. The artwork is there not because we are worshipping the art itself, but because the holy images elevate our mind to the contemplation of God and His mysteries. On the other hand, pornography is a kind of anti-art. It was not put into temples because they worshipped the paintings, but because it led their minds to the indulgence and elevation of their base desires and fantasies. Thus, while holy artwork is used in the worshipping of God, pornography is used in the worshipping of the self. 

What should be done?

In closing, there are two things that I think are important to point out. First, I would like to make clear why I have written this article. I have written this not to shame those who struggle with this issue. In fact if you do struggle there is a certain sense in which that is a good thing, so do not stop struggling. However, there are many people and even many Christians who sadly have given up on fighting this issue. These people foolishly believe that pornography is not that serious. It is for these people that I have written. Second, we must remember how idols need to be dealt with. As the story of King Josiah from 2 Kings reminds us, idols must be destroyed. They cannot coexist with true worship. We ought to seek to make pornography both legally and culturally unthinkable for the good of both the producers and consumers, but as is argued in this article pornography is not an idol, but the means by which we worship an idol: the self. Ultimately, the idol needs to be destroyed in our own hearts or it will destroy us. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book The Gulag Archipelago reminds us of this truth: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”