Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Part I

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Parents, Talk to Your Teens About Pornography: But Ground Your Words in Christian Truth — not in Secular “Science"

Over the course of the last several decades, it has become very, very clear that American culture in general has gone all in for pornography. That is to say that in the world around us, it is in general terms, no longer considered a serious moral issue. And so as you think of pornography, and by this I mean all forms of pornography, but particularly those available on the internet, when you think about pornography, you recognize that there are basically only two sectors of the society right now who believe that pornography is morally wrong. And by the way, they are not the same sector. They’re not often related together. But who would these two sectors be? What two groups in the United States right now still think of pornography as a morally significant issue?

Well, the answer would be on the conservative side, Evangelical Christians and other Christians, and those driven by some form of religious rejection of pornography as a form of sin. You say, well, who else would be on the field against pornography? Interestingly enough, that would be many feminists, in particular radical feminists who’ve gone to the point of speaking of pornography as a form of the oppression of women and the objectification of women that goes beyond any realm of moral acceptability. And so as you look at moral opposition right now to the issue of pornography, of sexual immorality, that is translated into a form of enticing entertainment, the two sectors are basically conservative Christians and liberal feminists. Those two groups don’t agree on much, but they do agree on this. 

But that also points out that they are arguing about something being immoral. They’re in common agreement about the moral judgment, but they are not anywhere close to common agreement about why. So it’s also interesting that when you look at the rest of society, let’s just say mainstream American secular society, it’s basically pro-pornography in some libertarian frame, but there are questions at which perhaps even the most libertarian get tripped up on, such as, what about minors? What about children? What about teenagers and pornography? Here’s where things get really interesting. In Saturday’s print edition of the New York Times Saturday of last week, there was a front page news article with the headline, “Talk to My Teens About Porn? Yes, Experts Say It’s Needed.” The subhead, “Frank Chats by Parents Can Reveal Realities.” Matt Richtel is the reporter. I just want to talk about the context of this. What does it mean that a story like this appears on the front page of the New York Times just days ago? Furthermore, what does the headline itself tell us? Let’s just do some world view analysis here.

Let’s think about the deeper issues. Here’s the headline again, “Talk to My Teens About Porn? Yes, Experts Say It’s Needed.” Well, you got some interesting categories there. You got teenagers, you got pornography, but you also have in the next line, “experts say.” Okay, so what’s really interesting about that in worldview terms? It is that in the course of the last several decades, what has arisen in society is this huge regime of professionals who are experts on all kinds of issues. And this regime of expertise, this universe of experts now surrounds parents. Peter and Bridgette Berger decades ago wrote a book on the war on the family in which they said that mom and dad are now surrounded by a host of uninvited consultants.

And these uninvited consultants now surround mom and dad to say, “You should do this. You shouldn’t do that. You must feed them this. You must not feed them. That they ought to be given some freedom to go outside and learn how to be a kid. No, they need to be in a sheltered environment because there are all kinds of dangers out there.” And a lot of this is the kind of conversation that just normal moms and dads could have with each other and with other moms and dads. They don’t need experts for it. But these days given the cult of expertise, the New York Times runs a headline that says that parents should talk to teens about porn because experts say it’s needed. Just a good reminder for parents that there is a limitation to the expertise that should speak into this situation when the basic issue is something far more fundamental than the kind of academic expertise that’s being cited here. The professor who’s being cited primarily in this article is Brian Willoughby, and he is a professor at Brigham Young University.

So let’s just insert here that Brigham Young University is the flagship institution of Mormonism worldwide, and there are other campuses, but the Provo Utah campus is the primary campus. The article in the New York Times begins with these words, Brian Willoughby knows he’s doing a good job when parents become uncomfortable. That’s because part of his job involves telling them that their teenagers are looking at pornography, hardcore, explicit, often violent. Sometimes the conversation is with a church group.” That’s the first paragraph. Then this, “Dr. Willoughby is a social scientist at Brigham Young University where he studies the pornography habits of adolescents and the impact this has on relationships. When he goes into the community to explain what the modern world is like, he speaks plainly.” Now, don’t worry on today’s edition of The Briefing, I’m not going to speak more plainly than this for my audience, but I am going to say that it tells us a great deal when the New York Times runs an article like this on the front page even of the Saturday edition. This turns out to be what the New York Times thinks is big news.

It is also something that the media present here with a certain amount of urgency. There is a crisis here. There’s some kind of near social emergency here. They don’t want to say it’s a moral emergency. So here’s the other thing I want us to note. The data in this article about the badness of pornography isn’t about the pornography itself, but rather its effects. And so that’s really interesting. The Christian understanding of what’s wrong with pornography begins with the illicit sexual desire that is reflected in it, the sexual immorality, that is the entire context for it, and it’s inherently immoral. It’s inherently wrong. Now, the Christian worldview doesn’t say the other dimensions aren’t significant. The objectification of women, yes. Sometimes even involvement in human trafficking, yes. And all kinds of descent into greater and greater depths of immorality.

We understand that’s the pornography business and we understand how sin works. Sin works by seizing the opportunity and once it has an open door, it pushes that door open further and further and further into all kinds of habits that become deeply entrenched in behaviors. And we have the modern term of addiction, which as Christians know, doesn’t say enough, but it’s not irrelevant to the conversation. So going back to the New York Times article, it is really interesting to see that the dangers that are cited here are the dangers that are associated also with age. And so let me just say that pornography is a moral issue, is categorical for Christians. That is to say it doesn’t change with age, but we do understand nonetheless that even when we can’t buy into the argument that says you get old enough in which this is no longer a danger, we believe it’s deeply deadly to the soul at any age, any point in the lifespan.

But we do understand there are particular horrifying vulnerabilities when it comes to young people. And what we’re looking at now is a technology in terms of the World Wide Web or the internet or whatever you want to call it, all these streaming platforms and all the rest that basically bring all of that onto a phone. And that phone can often be connected without any kind of filtering or any kind of monitoring. One of the issues that comes up here in worldview terms is also the technological imperative or technological determinism. One of the assumptions in this article is that it is implausible that children can be cut off from pornography in terms of some kind of technological step. But of course if they don’t have the smartphone, if they don’t have the access to the World Wide Web and if they do not have such things in privacy, that certainly radically reduces the risk in a child or teenager’s life.

The article in the New York Times comes with a parallel article by the same reporter, Matt Richtel, on how to talk to your adolescent about pornography. And here’s where the article really goes off the rails. Because this is where you understand that the concern here is for the wrong kind of exposure at the wrong age, with the wrong kind of all kinds of things that are connected with it. Now, again, I’m not going to speak more explicitly than that. In other words, the assumption behind this New York Times article is that technological imperative that determinism that your child, your young person, your teenager, is going to have access to the internet because you can’t define adolescence now without constant access to the internet. That’s the assumption here. 

Another assumption we need to note here is the assumption that there’s some safe level of exposure or there’s some safe, now seemingly normative level of involvement in pornography. What you need to be watching out for at least it appears in this article, is the wrong kind of exposure at the wrong time of the wrong stuff. That implies that within pornography, there’s some right stuff. For instance, one of the experts cited in this article says, “Help your child become a conscious consumer.” Let me just state that for parents, Christian parents, that is a horrifying proposition. We do not want to teach our young people to be discriminating in their use of pornography. We want them to say no to it. The professor cited there at BYU, Brian Willoughby says, “Don’t panic.” Rather, according to this article, he says, help your child 

“understand this is a normal and acceptable topic even if you’re stressed out.” Well, I’ll tell you I agree with one fundamental issue in this article and that is that parents must talk to their children and teenagers about this issue.

I emphatically agree with that basic point, and I’ll just point out that for Christian parents, there are a lot of awkward conversations that we have to have, but that is actually our job. So I’ll speak to you as Christian parents. This is your job. Your job is to have a succession of difficult conversations with your children and in particular with your teenage children. And to have those conversations timed to when they can be most beneficial to your child and when they are most necessary given the child’s likely exposure to any number of issues, the child’s need for certain kinds of information you need to give that child, certain kinds of moral teaching you need to make abundantly clear. You won’t have the same conversation with a five-year-old you’ll have with a fifteen-year-old. It’s also interesting that The Times cites what it calls a realpolitik approach.

That’s a foreign policy term that means politics based in realism, which is to say some parents are just coming to the realistic understanding that they need to have conversations about this. But the conversation that the New York Times seems to be encouraging here based upon certain experts cited is to make children more wise and discriminating in their engagement with pornography. There is a basic sense of surrender in this article to the inevitability and not only of the technology, but of the reach of pornography. Well, I’m going to step back and say there is a sense in which that’s true in the classic understanding of the problem that’s presented to us, and that is because there is pornography just about everywhere you look in this society, pornography classically defined by biblical terms. There is illicit and wrongful intention and desire linked to any number of representations even to how many people dress out in public.

So let me just say there are very few places in American society in which pornography is impossible, but let’s also understand that’s not primarily what this is talking about. That’s not what these “experts” are talking about. They’re talking about pornography as an explicitly pornographic product which is being presented to someone in order to have a pornographic effect. The first thing that largely ambient pornography is just about everything, means that we have to have those conversations at younger ages than we would have in the past. But then again, it is the Christian parents’ responsibility not to bring some of these issues up too early, but hopefully not a second too late. And this is where Christian parents understand this is not an abstract issue. This is an issue that might vary with every single child. Certainly by the time every child reaches adolescence, some kind of conversation like this needs to take place.

And as I say, a series of ongoing conversations. But this is where we understand that one of the problems with so many contemporary families is that parents and children have so little communication on anything of importance that any conversation like this turns out to be awkward. And this is where in the Christian home with Christian parents, Christian moms, Christian dads, responding rightly and raising their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord life is one long conversation interrupted by more intentional conversations. Now, I also want to point to a crucial issue of distinction between a secular viewpoint on these issues and the Christian worldview on these issues. So I’m going to read to you from the article this particular sentence, “But what should adults say? Thus far, science has not firmly answered whether online pornography known to researchers as sexually explicit internet material is harmful or to whom.”

So again, citing experts, guess what the so-called experts on this issue from an entirely secular viewpoint identified here even as a scientific viewpoint, they say the evidence is not yet clear. One professor at the University of Montreal, a professor we are told who studies pornography use said, “What we can say is that for some people it might cause issues in their sexuality, relationships and so on.” She went on to say, “But we don’t have enough scientific evidence to say it’s harmful or not for everyone.” Incredibly eye-opening. Let’s just look at that statement made by a secular professor listed as an expert, cited as an expert in this article on pornography. And as an expert, she says, “We don’t know much.” And that is because if you’re looking for secular expertise here grounded in a secular worldview because they cannot make any kind of clear or comprehensive moral judgment, all they’re left with is it might be dangerous for some people in some context add sometimes.

My purpose in raising this issue is because frankly, there have been few issues that have been presented to us in public with such a clear distinction between a Christian understanding and a secular understanding in which you just can’t avoid the difference. You can’t avoid the conflict, the contradiction between the Christian view of the issue of pornography and a secular view of pornography. The secular view says there can’t be anything wrong with this unless science can prove that there is something inherently harmful in this. And even then it might just be for some people. This is where Christians come back and say, “No, it’s wrong because it’s objectively, inherently wrong.” It is the objectification by the way of other human beings. But that’s just a dimension of the fact that it is a distortion of God’s intention of sexuality from the first point. And it’s a rejection of God’s intention for sexuality, and it is indeed a celebration and a commercial profit industry built on the corruption of the sexual interest, the sexual urge, human sexuality into something that is, let’s just say the word perverse.

You’re not going to find that kind of language in the secular discourse. Instead, they’re just going to talk about different variants which might have some distance away from mainstream moral consensus. That’s all they can say because all they’ve got is moral consensus and the authority that they just cite here over and over again as science. Only to tell us the science is unclear. I’ll just say once again, it’s one of the clearest collisions of the Christian worldview with the contemporary conversation you’re likely to see.

Part II

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Pornography Restrictions Are Not Government Overreach: Arguments Against Pornography Blocks for Teens Reveal a Huge Moral Problem

But then I’m going to come here to the Louisville Courier Journal, that’s the local newspaper here in Louisville where a guest columnist wrote an article about his opposition to a law here in Kentucky that requires some kind of photo ID for access to certain commercial porn sites on the internet.

The headline of his article is this, “A Photo ID to See Porn? Welcome to the Nanny State.” Well, the headline in this case is indicative of the article. He’s saying that basically this is an intrusion upon human moral freedom that you have to identify yourself with some kind of verifiable photo ID in order to have access to pornography. And he mentions that one of the results of this is that the major porn site known as PornHub, “Has disabled access to their library of sexually explicit entertainment for us Kentuckians on account of a rather Draconian age verification policy demanded by our elected officials here in the Commonwealth.”

He goes on to say, and this is important, he says this, we’ll just say what he says. He says, “It doesn’t affect me personally, but I’m nevertheless alarmed by this development. You should be too.” Yeah, well, whatever. It does concern me and it concerns me because here you have the argument that it is an intrusion upon the civil liberties of Americans that there should be a legislature such as here in Kentucky that would go so far as to outlaw access or in this case to assign damages or penalties against companies that allow access to minors, which is supposed to be by the way illegal.

And this particular columnist is writing as a guest columnist for The Courier Journal. He’s identified as an advertising copywriter and concerned citizen in Lexington, Kentucky. But I’m citing this article in particular because I think there’s something deeper here than the actual argument in this article. I think the tying together of a verifiable ID and the use of this kind of sexually explicit material, this kind of pornography, I think there’s something here that inherently becomes a problem of conscience. I think there are a lot of people whose conscience is at least strong enough to make them think twice about signing up for something that’s going to require photo verification of their identity. And I think the Christian worldview also tells us that that should tell us something very loudly.

I have no ability to read this man’s heart. I can’t read his mind. I can read the words that he has provided in this column. I can make a judgment about his article. And I think the majority of parents are going to say, “I think that law makes an awful lot of sense to me.” And it also turns out that opposition in this form to this law is itself very revealing in moral terms. I think we all know that. I think that’s why this writer comes back to say that the law, “doesn’t affect me personally, but I’m nevertheless alarmed by this development.” Okay, again, I’ll take him at his word. But the point is that he is linking this article to his personal identity and that comes with a certain moral responsibility. My argument is that’s exactly the way it should work when it comes to the kind of pornography we’re talking about here. And anyone who wants to make it more available to teenagers or to anyone without that kind of age verification is not part of the solution, but rather part of the problem.

Part III

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Americans Are Failing at Life’s Basic Tasks? The Breakdown of the Family is Reverberating Through Society, Harm After Harm

But while we’re talking about these issues, let me shift to something that also has to do with moms and dads and their kids. It also has to do with what we see and don’t see, what we know and don’t know. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece with a headline, “In a Test of Adult Know-how, Americans Come Up Short.” Well, it turns out as the Wall Street Journal reports that there are indices of how much Americans know about say common sense issues. And by this it means the kind of information you need in order to live an operational adult life. Basic numerical literacy, basic reading literacy, those are on the list, but also are, say the ability to estimate the distance between two spots, for instance, how far is here as compared to there. It turns out that even though Americans are awash with information, a lot of them don’t know how to use it anymore.

How long exactly is a mile? Some people only know if their smartphone tells them. Those behind the study point out that there is a decrease in the number of occasions when Americans need to use, “proportional reasoning”. Well, that’s just one form of reasoning that Americans don’t have to use much anymore, and this is one of the reasons why. Yeah, I mentioned moms and dads and sons and daughters. This is one of the reasons why dads need to teach their boys some of the things that a man needs to know and how to do certain things a man has to know how to do. And the same thing’s true of mothers with their daughters. The same thing’s true in general terms with parents and their children because some of this is not in any natural way assigned to gender, but some of these things are, and this is where intentionality matters massively.

And that means that even though there was a day when a boy was basically in the house and the dad was doing the work of his iron-smithing in a lean-to beside the house, and the boy was very much a part of that, and he learned simply by being alongside his dad, in today’s very complex, modern, advanced economy, dad’s not usually working in a lean-to on the side of the house. And that means that far more intentionality is required of us. And all this is just a judgment on America’s educational system, at least as implied in the study. But a lot of this stuff is not what America’s educational system is equipped to deliver no matter the form of that education. A lot of this has to start in the home. And we as Christians understand number one, that that’s true, but we also understand why it’s true.

It’s because an awful lot of the most important things we learn in life, the most foundational things we learn in life don’t come at any particular grade level. They come in the relationship between parents and their children. So you break up the family, you take dad out of the equation in so many homes, you split up in which you have mom and dad, one in this house, one in that house, or you even look at the further fracturing of the family that’s becoming more and more common in our society. And thus it’s no surprise that so many young people in our society are growing up without much of a clue how to do an entire range of things or think about such things because no one has ever done it in front of them or done it repeatedly in order to demonstrate it to them and taught them how to do it and then observe them doing it and said, “That’s exactly how you do it. Well done.”

You may have noticed that that three-year-old boy sitting on the floor loves to play with the toy hammer. Let me ask you a question. Does his thirteen-year-old older brother have a clue what to do with one? All this just underlines, all we’ve talked about today just underlines the importance of the Christian home, the importance of Christian parents in the Christian home, the importance of Christian parents having one long conversation with their sons and daughters. Until such time as those sons and daughters leave the home, we need their time in the home to be one of constant conversation and even after they’re gone, as much conversation as possible.

And I can tell you one of the great blessings of life is seeing your own offspring having those conversations with their own children. You might think God actually had this as his plan.