Faith Infiltration: Jubilee Church Pt II

In our last blog post, I wrote about the Jubilee Church and how I think that if their goal is to make society better, they are going about it in the wrong way by demonizing pornography. This is part II of our Faith Infiltration. Would you believe it or not, we’re not done talking about porn yet!

After apparently making up some statistics about porn, the pastor went on to say that porn will not “spice up your marriage” and that all we had to do for verification was ask any psychologist. Any psychologist will supposedly tell me that porn trains men to be lustful and selfish.

Of course, this is probably true if we ask any Christian psychiatrist or psychologist who has a preconceived notion that porn watching is wrong. I think the negative effects of porn are more due to the political panic over porn than the actual porn watching. The trouble is that there is so little research that isn’t conducted by researchers with an ideological bias that I can’t clearly weigh the evidence. So instead, I’ll go with analogy:

My lovely Fiancé Flimsy enjoys painting miniature wargame figures. He spends (or would like to spend) hours each week doing this. While at work and at home, he looks at pictures of painted miniatures on the internet. He reads books about miniatures. Occasionally, he forgoes a night of spending time with me to paint miniatures.

Because I grew up in a society in which it is (mostly) okay to paint miniatures, this is no big deal. But if I grew up in a society in which painting miniatures was seen as immoral or bad and I agreed with society, the situation would be much different. If I believed that mini painting was bad, and the rest of society agreed with me, I could easily believe that mini painting might destroy our marriage, demand that Flimsy stop, and watch our relationship crumble in a self-fulfilling prophesy. This would not be due to the fact that mini painting is inherently wrong, but due to my beliefs about mini painting.

If we look at all of the reasons why porn is bad, either those reasons – when subjected to objective evidence – are not true, or they could apply equally as well to anything else Flimsy engages in. Part of the reason that porn has such a negative impact on relationships is because of what we’ve been led to believe about porn. In the same way, part of the reason why miniature painting might have a negative impact on our relationship is due to what I’ve been led to believe about mini painting.

Unfortunately, there is a serious paucity of research of the effects of porn on couples who happily consume porn together, or couples who do not care if their partner consumes porn. The best we can say from the available research is that some of the supposed societal impacts are not true (such as the claim that porn leads to increased sex crimes) and some of them are perhaps due to societies perception of porn and self-fulfilling prophesies. For example, the pastor at Jubilee church claimed that porn causes men to view women as objects, but this is objectively untrue, according to researchers. Similarly, I am certain that porn leads to divorce, but mini-painting could just as well lead to divorce if I were led to believe that he didn’t love me if he wanted to spend time crouched over small pewter figures with tiny little paint brushes until he got arthritis.

The pastor also threw out several more statistics: that 90% of women only do one porn video before they stop, and that 90% of women in porn videos claim to have been sexually abused as a child. I tried to look up these statistics but unfortunately I cannot find the study by which they originate – just statistics quoted without citations. Perhaps part of the problem is that scientists have trouble locating funding to do research on pornography. Just imagine trying to propose a study to an IRB board in which your participants come to the lab to watch porn. The people who are most likely to get funding are not researchers who view pornography neutrally, but researchers who are part of organizations that are ideologically opposed to pornography. The whole issue of pornography is so ideologically driven that I am absolutely overwhelmed to try to find objective sources of information about it. I think the best correlation is that while porn access is easier than ever and porn has become much more accessible via the internet, we have not seen an increase in violence, divorce, sex crimes, misogyny, or any of the other badness supposedly associated with porn consumption. Instead, porn is repeatedly demonized, and those who use it made to feel victimized by the rhetoric.

After the topic of porn seemed fairly well exhausted, the pastor moved on to divorce, throwing out some more statistics:

40% of people in marriages engage in adultery,

20% of couples have “emotional affairs”,

67% of marriages end in divorce (Sorry, this is total nonsense. It’s more like 41%),

Children of divorced families are 2 times as likely to divorce as adults, and 3 times as likely if both partners are divorced.

Does anyone else think that these statistics sound a little off?

The pastor went on to say that the reason divorce is so prevalent is because the enemy has a plan to destroy marriage by making everyone go off “one-fleshing” before they are married, and getting you to attach to as many people before marriage as possible so that the “Velcro” of your love becomes overused and weak. Therefore, we should make our pre-marriage relationships as “brotherly” and “sisterly” as possible because – duh – screwing your sibling is icky. Premarital sex is bad, and we should be thankful if our pre-marriage relationships don’t end up working out, because it’s obvious that if they don’t work out, it is because god has a plan for us to find that perfect special someone. The good news is that we can get hope and grace from the god we cannot escape.

After this, the pastor told his audience that his god doesn’t care “what your deal is,” he will still forgive you. A song began to play, and people began to pray earnestly. As we left the sanctuary, we saw a young couple huddled together in what looked like some serious prayer.

Instead of hearing a fresh new perspective on sex from a Christian perspective, I felt as though we were spoon-fed the same clichés about the evils of premarital sex. The church is billed as being different, but to me they seem like the epitome of stereotype.