It’s Time to Quit Porn

That’s quite a title, eh? Well, it’s intentional. More people tend to read their pastors’ emails as Easter approaches, so I figured this would be the perfect time to share a few thoughts on an increasingly important issue that is destroying millions of lives every day.

Pornography consumption is killing us. It’s alarming how little we’re talking about it. When Covid struck a few years ago, it was all folks were talking about, but I could argue that the negative impact of that pandemic has paled in comparison to the size and scope of our ongoing porn-demic.

Porn consumption is a virus that has spread into virtually all our homes, twisting our minds, damaging our relationships, and altering our futures for the worse in every conceivable way. Porn has been shown to lead to everything from sexual dissatisfaction and dysfunction to cognitive decline, divorce, and other (even more sinister) forms of sexual deviance. Recent studies have shown that a whopping 96% of men (age 18-40) and 59% of women regularly consume online pornography. These numbers would be even higher if we were honest with ourselves about the pornographic nature of much of the content found on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Whereas mainstream media outlets and many social scientists ran cover for the porn industry in the past by insisting that porn was mostly healthy and good, most secular experts now agree with what Christian leaders have been saying forever: across the board, pornography is really bad for people.

And not just a little bad. It’s really, really bad for us. You might even say it’s evil. Nefarious. Demonic. 

In recent years, I’ve made no secret of my years-long struggle with porn. I’m happy to say that, physically, I’ve only been with one woman in my life and that we waited until after the wedding to be intimate. What Geovanna didn’t know back when we were dating is that my virginity stopped at the surface; in reality, I was psychologically and emotionally promiscuous, having mentally been with many other women I never knew.

The truth was that I’d been regularly pursuing and consuming pornography since I was first exposed to the Playboy Channel around age 9 or 10. While Geo and I were dating, I justified my porn consumption by telling myself it was a healthier alternative than pressuring her for sex (as if those were my only two options). “Once we get married,” I told myself, “I won’t need porn anymore because we’ll be having sex all the time!” (That’s what single guys think marriage will be like.)

What I didn’t understand was how watching porn was rewiring my brain to respond to sexual stimuli that porn provides and real-life sex does not. And when the time came to be with my wife, a real person with desires and insecurities of her own, my mind was pre-wired for porn, images on a screen that I had controlled – avatars with no feelings, no needs, and no soul.

I don’t really need to go into all the negative ways that my prior porn consumption impacted our marriage early on. My hunch is that you already know how bad porn is bad for us, either because you’ve seen the studies that cite its many disastrous effects or because you’ve experienced those effects yourself. The question isn’t whether porn is evil; the only question is how to quit.

To quit anything as addictive as porn, you need a plan. With that in mind, I’d like to offer an abbreviated version of my personal roadmap to freedom from this particular evil. This will take a few weeks (so consider this part one of three!), but even still, this will by no means be an exhaustive plan. There’s much more to it than what you’re about to read – but if you are struggling in this arena, I offer this in hopes that you’ll see, at a minimum, that life without porn is possible. And, of course, I pray that when you are ready to take steps toward freedom in Christ, you will have some tools to help you get started.

1. I learned to see porn for what it is.

When it comes to overcoming any addiction, including pornography, the first step is a strong defense. My high school football coach used to tell us that offense might win games, but defense wins championships. And my buddy who coaches basketball likes to say, “The best offense is a great defense.”

Whether you’re playing a sport, fighting a war, or overcoming an addiction, the first step in building a great defense is knowing your enemy and seeing them for who they are. Pornography is a very specific brand of enemy, with clear strengths and obvious vulnerabilities.

Once I decided to size up my enemy, I soon realized that I needed to create some distance between me and porn. In other words, it’s impossible to accurately assess an enemy while sitting in his lap. If you want to overcome a porn habit, you’ve got to commit to creating space between you and it. For me, that meant giving up my laptop for a few months and offering my wife and my best friend on-demand, unfettered access to my phone and desktop computer.

It also meant knowing what my “triggers” were and avoiding them at all cost. We all have different triggers, but some of mine were financial stress, family conflict, and isolation (especially traveling alone). Obviously, such triggers can’t always be avoided, but your reaction to them can be managed once you’re aware of the power they’ve held over you in the past.

Once I was able to create some distance between me and porn, I could begin seeing it for what it really is. And I saw two things in particular: porn is both a stupid joke and a sorry substitute.

Objectively speaking, porn is absurd. Sitting alone in a room secretly watching total strangers enjoy (or pretend to enjoy, most likely) having sex on a two-dimensional screen is beyond pointless. It’s the epitome of foolishness. It’s a waste of your time and a waste of your life.

Research is showing that the average American man spends around 70 minutes per week on pornography. That’s 5% of your entire day! If he does that from around age 20 to around age 60, he will waste more than a hundred total days on one of the most pointless, humiliating activities imaginable.

Imagine standing before God one day, and He asks you to give an account for the time you were given on earth. And He knows. And He knows that you know. And you know that He knows that you know. How will you feel as you’re telling your creator that you spent over a hundred days on a stupid joke?

After reaching the conclusion that pornography is a stupid joke, I also began to realize that it is a sorry substitute. What I mean here is that I discovered that porn wasn’t really the object of my desire. I wasn’t actually a porn addict; I was addicted to distraction and dopamine. In other words, when given the choice to deal with stress, conflict, or loneliness OR to consume pornography, I too often chose porn. Once I took porn off the table, however, I still had the same addictive struggle to do anything but the hard thing, and I was constantly tempted to simply replace porn with some other brand of dopamine release (social media, video games, political comment sections, etc.)!

For more on this idea, I highly recommend this interview with Dr. Anna Lembke (author of Dopamine Nation, who also appeared in the Netflix hit The Social Dilemma) and this episode of the Maybe God Podcast featuring Dr. Lembke, among others.

Thank you for hanging in there for this long as we’ve delved into some uncomfortable waters. I hope you find this conversation helpful, and I will pick this up again with parts two and three in the coming weeks.