Due To Lockdown, Christians Are Developing Huge Porn Addiction, Evangelist Warns

When boredom strikes and no one’s around, people’s thoughts may turn to spending some quality time wrestling the eel or paddling the pink canoe.

I don’t think 80-year-old Christian author and evangelist Josh McDowell approves, but he really hates it if you look at pictures of nekkid people while you’re, you know, in the process.

“… is right at this moment destroying… more marriages, more people’s lives, more relationships than any one thing has ever done simultaneously in history.”

Citation needed.

And if Christians view porn, whoo boy. They’re doing it in greater numbers than ever thanks to the lockdown, McDowell says; and he thunders that

“Porn is by far the greatest cancer ever to the church.”

Huh. So, a greater cancer than Christianity’s serial crusades. Worse, too, than conservative Christians promising everyone outside the tribe torture by fire in the afterlife. Worse than drawing and quartering apostates and heretics or burning them alive. Worse than excusing the slave trade with Bible verses. Worse than Christianity’s 1,500 years of antisemitism and pogroms. Worse than not caring about the lives and the safety of others and blithely spreading contagion in a pandemic. Worse, even, than the rape of at least several sports stadiums’ worth of children by pastors and priests — and that’s in the last 50 years alone.

People like McDowell may be really good at never touching their nethers for pleasure (though I kinda doubt it), but they’re just not that talented at producing compelling phrases that don’t make their propositions sound ludicrous from the start. I’m reminded of Pastor Jay Dennis, who in 2013 referred to porn as

“…the new bubonic plague.”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

According to McDowell,

“98 percent of people who start watching and become addicted to porn will not make it out [of the addiction] without others around them.”

Just like that. No facts, no research, no proof.

The smutfighter also says that pornography “rewires” the human brain and believes that it takes “three to four years” to break free from porn once you’ve become “addicted.” Those claims have been repeatedly refuted by psychologists and neurologists, including here and here.

McDowell further believes that it’s imperative for parents to talk to their children about the dangers of porn before the kids are even five years old. (Is it just me, or does that actually sound a bit skeevy?)

Oh, and he claims that if you were to “print out the data” from just one porn site (which he doesn’t want to name!), you’d have

“…enough pornographic materials to fill the Empire State Building every single day for a year.”

What kind of metric is that? (And print out what? A list of available photos and videos? Screenshots? Every frame in every dirty video on offer?)

It’s like religion itself, apparently. Once you’ve willed yourself to just have faith, you can toss around all the twaddle you want. Most people on the receiving end will stay silent for one of two reasons: because it’s not “polite” to challenge another person’s religion-based convictions, or because they hope that slowly backing away and ignoring the crazy guy is most likely to get him off their backs.

The whole notion of porn (or sex) causing addiction is pretty much hogwash. Since a lot of people, with excellent justification, see addicts as patients rather than sinners, it’s tempting for an incorrigible Christian masturbator to don the mantle of porn addiction, rather than to say, “You know, I just really love to spank the monkey.” These habitual hand-jivers with guilt complexes can now medicalize their behavior and claim that it’s a condition. Better to be a victim than a pervert, I suppose; perverts get no sympathy and very little forgiveness, and addicts just might.

The best words on the topic may have been spoken years ago by one of the characters on the TV series Louie:

“Tiger Woods claims to be addicted to sex. Bullshit! These are hot women he was having sex with. If he was having sex with a dead chicken, I’d say, wow, that guy is addicted to sex.”

Amen and hallelujah to that.

(Screenshot via YouTube)