Pastors, Pulpits & Pornography
or
The "Perfect" Sin
Dr. Stephen Arterburn
New Life Ministries

The call came to me from a very desperate pastor’s wife.  Her husband was deeply depressed and suicidal; expecting to end up in a prison after what he believed was an inevitable public humiliation.  His curiosity with Internet pornography led to an online habit that ended at an FBI- monitored pedophilia site.  His screen went from images of naked young boys to a yellow-and-black declaration that the site was monitored by the FBI. The banner informed him that he was guilty of a felony for being on the website, and that he would be contacted and prosecuted.  His reaction was so severe that his wife demanded to know what had happened.  When he told her, she called for help.  There was no public humiliation or loss of his life or ministry.  He got the help he needed, and he and his wife are, for the first time, connected in an intimate marriage.

Another call came to our 800-New-Life number rather than to me personally.  It was from a pastor who was willing to do whatever it takes to end his fascination with and dependency on pornography.  The day before the call, on a wonderful Sunday full of hope and promise for his congregation, he had experienced the ultimate humiliation.  He explained to the phone counselor that he always places his sermon on PowerPoint on his own computer.  Then he takes the computer to the audiovisual specialist who hooks it up to the projector.  When the praise and worship was over he rose to present God’s Word, pointing the remote control at his computer.  For some strange reason, rather than his first slide coming up, one of the most vile and explicit pornographic pictures from his private collection filled the screen.  What started as a normal service ended in tears, shame and open confession.  Amazingly, the elders did not fire him but demanded he get help and go through a process of restoration.  The worst thing turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to him, because today he is free from the bondage and burden of pornography.  It is sad that these men are part of a small number of pastors who get help for a problem that affects 30 to 60 percent of pastors. Online surveys reveal these staggering numbers.  Even if they are off by 50 percent, they are still extreme in a profession that teaches sexual integrity, purity and the sanctity of marriage.

The Perfect Sin

What these men of God are involved in is perhaps the perfect sin.  I call this the perfect sin for several reasons.  First of all, it’s so easy to participate in it.  One click and you’re there.  You don’t have to drive anywhere or even pay anything for it.  Additionally, it is one of the most secretive of sins.  Whether it is the privacy of your own home or office, there is very little chance of being found out if you know a little about covering your tracks.  And unlike other sins such as gluttony and excessive drinking, there are few indications or outward evidences of the problem.  You don’t see this on a person’s body or smell it on his breath.  You have to look deeply into his eyes to see the emptiness, shame and despair.  It is also one of the few sins you can access all the time, anytime from just about anywhere.  And finally, it results in a deep and seething shame that spins him off into a compartmentalized private world that he will share with no one.

The shame of pastoral pornography causes the pastor to believe he is a fraud and unworthy of doing his job.  It cuts him off from God and others who love him.  Failure after failure to stop what he knows is wrong may even lead him to question his salvation. This perfect sin slowly but surely destroys him from the inside out. The problem will also hurt and perhaps devastate people who are close to him.

The Pornography Path

Most men involved with pornography have no idea how they ended up on this wide path toward destruction.  There are several things that have led our society into this sin that has saturated the world.  First of all I think that access and proximity have exploded this sin upon us.  In the days prior to the Internet it was not so easy to get hold of pornography without someone seeing you buying it.  I had to bail a housemate out of jail one night because he did not want to be seen buying dirty magazines. To protect his witness he stuffed them under his shirt and fell into the arms of a large security guard who had been watching him.  Desperate people do desperate things.

Rather than obtaining pornography from the drug store down the street or the XXX theater across town, now every man has access to millions of sites of all types to fit a variety of desires.  Couple that with what Hugh Hefner did for pornography, and you create an epidemic.  In 1953, the year Playboy Magazine and I were both born, an insidious process began, stripping the shame from pornography use.  Hugh convinced us it wasn’t that bad, especially compared to the really hard core stuff, and that if we would just follow his lead, he could make us into world-class lovers.  To some degree, that affected most men.  Most men were exposed and some were hooked early on.  When the Internet came along, we were ready to go where we had never gone before, into the vilest and reprobate places to fulfill fantasies or satisfy curiosity.

Hugh Hefner was a liar.  He said he would make us men better lovers if we followed him, but that has not turned out to be true.  He and his pornographic philosophy that have objectified women have also neutered us men.  We are not better lovers; we are crummy lovers because no real live woman can measure up to the pictures inside our head.  We are cut off from desiring our wives as we lust after objects and body parts.  The separation is deep, and the disconnection robs us of ever experiencing true intimacy.  We replace the intimate moments of pleasure with intense moments of pornographic thrill, making it difficult to look at ourselves in the mirror and our wives in their eyes.

If Jesus were to weigh in today on the practice of pornography and its ultimate purpose of giving men an object to lust or masturbate over, I think it might go something like this.  I am not putting words in the mouth of Jesus, I am just giving an opinion of what he might say, which is, “You have heard it said that you are not to commit adultery with another woman, but I say if you look on her with lust, you are essentially guilty of the same thing.  And if you look at an image of another woman, and go beyond mere imagination by masturbating and climaxing to that picture of her, you have committed a sin greater than lust of the heart and involved your own body in sexual sin.”  My point is that what men are doing with pornography is far more damaging than just lust of the heart.

To make matters worse, to prevent ourselves from being overcome with shame, we cut off our sex lives from the rest of our lives.  Rather than integrate our sexuality into the rest of who we are, we keep this little compartment or lock box separate from the rest of our being.  We don’t share it with anyone, and it splits us into two people.  One is the sex-craved guy who will do just about anything to feel like a man or get some gratification and relief. The other is the sexless guy who has a thousand excuses for why his wife just does not do it for him anymore and why he has lost interest in the sexual acrobatics that drew them together and were enjoyed together in years gone by.

There is one final influence on pastors that pushes them down this road.  It is the fact that they are pastors living out the expectations of others rather than living an authentic life.  They stand before their flock and refuse to share real-life personal struggles. They keep themselves on the pulpit pedestal rather than share who they are and how they struggle. No one knows them fully, and they don’t really know themselves. They believe that if they don’t acknowledge the problem and act like it will go away, that it just might. But the problem does not go away, you go away.  You lose yourself to the art of illusion, making people believe you are more than you are and have less struggle than you do.  You become the fake and the fraud, and you pressure people into living up to a standard that even you cannot live up to.

Doing the Next Right Thing

If you find yourself in trouble or struggling to keep your thought life clean and pure, there are some things that you can do.  As I present the options, the question to answer is, “What is the next right thing for me to do?”  For some, the next right thing is to get into a program for a week or a weekend intensive.  The Every Man’s Battle Workshop lasts 3 days, and almost every workshop includes one or more pastors who struggle.  This is a bold move out of isolation and into healing.  James 5:16 does not exclude pastors in our need to confess to each other to experience healing.  A program with strong content and solid counseling can be a start to being open and healing.  If that is not an option, attending an anonymous or recovery group on a weekly basis can lead you down the right path. What a refreshing evening, when at a Celebrate Recovery gathering I attended, the pastor was there, admitting that one of his problems was with lust.  He had never had an affair, and if he stays on this track of openness and honesty, it is not likely he ever will, because revealing our secrets takes the power out of them.

The other option is the scary act of forming a small group of other pastors, each vowing a code of silence and confidentiality and an agreement on what would happen if anyone were to talk about the personal lives revealed in the meeting. It is not a bad idea to get a legal agreement that if anyone breaches the code, they will pay a sum of money to each person in the group.  Whatever you need to do to feel safe to share, do it.  Each of these three options is designed to help you get honest, get real, get connected and get well.

If you decide not to do anything other than struggle alone or suffer in silence, it is likely that the problem will get worse, and you will eventually have to reach out. The only problem is that most likely the consequences will be much worse later.  So while you pray and fast and study, be sure that you don’t miss the need to connect with other men.  Stubborn resistance, arrogant entitlement and justifiable resentment are powerful words, and I have come to understand their meaning from personal experience.  They are the big three, the Triple Crown of spiritual stagnation. They prevent us from admitting that if we had the ability to control or change ourselves we would have done it by now.  We don’t have it in us, so we must go outside ourselves and seek real help to experience healing and restoration.

Band Aids

Jeremiah 6:14 speaks of prophets and priests who cover the deep wounds of people with superficial treatments.  It is like our modern-day slogan of “putting a band-aid on a wound that needs surgery.”  Band aids won’t fix the deep wounds that lead to pornography and are caused by pornography.  My challenge to you is to reach out and get help while you still have the chance to do so.  Humbling ourselves and seeking help rather than hiding and trying to fix ourselves is always the next right thing to do.

Stephen Arterburn is the founder of New Life Ministries and host of New Life Live radio program. He also founded Women of Faith in 1995. He is the best-selling author and co-author of over 70 books including the Every Man’s Battle series which has sold over 3,000,000 copies, and his latest book, Reframe Your Life. He is the recipient of 3 Gold Medallion Awards for writing excellence. Steve preaches in pulpits around the world, and often fills in for Rick Warren at Saddleback. For more information you can contact him sarterburn@newlife.com.