Break the Agony and Bondage of Pornographic Addiction

God’s Holy Word Has the Solution

Psalm 139 in the Holy Bible tells us that our mighty God sees all, knows all, is all-powerful, and is present everywhere all the time. God is omnipresent. Why, if you believe that God is with you every second, would you constantly let Him watch you watching pornographic images in magazines, videos, internet sites, and in strip joints? It is one thing to hide your sin from other Christians out of fear that they may not want to worship with you if they know who you really are in secret. It is a totally irrational thing to forget or ignore God’s constant presence in your life. He knows everything about us and what happens to us. Matthew 10:30 says that God even knows the number of hairs on our heads.

The instructions that Paul sent to Titus, a Greek converted to Christ Jesus, to organize and oversee the churches on Crete, is a message for Christians addicted today to pornography. He said that Christians are to be self-disciplined as individuals, and that they must be orderly as people who form one body, the church. The good news of salvation is that we can’t be saved by works, only by faith in Jesus Christ. The things we do to serve will never be enough to save us. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross has saved us, and called each of us to serve. Our conduct in our homes and offices (where there is easy access to pornographic Internet sites) reveals our character and fitness for service in the church. It has been said that who you are is just as important, if not more so, than what you can do. Titus 2: 11-14 tells us, “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say ’no’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope - the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all wickedness (pornographic addiction, the “invisible addiction”, the “secret sin”, the “overwhelming obsession”), and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.” We are instructed here to say, “No” to the ungodliness, the wickedness, and worldly passions of pornography. Unlike alcoholism or drug addiction, the agony and bondage of pornographic addiction is “invisible” to others, including those in the immediate vicinity. But God knows and sees all, and His saving grace is always available.

Genesis 1:27 states that man and woman both are made in God’s own image. Neither man nor woman is exalted nor deprecated. Therefore, the theological position against pornography begins with the fact that every human life has dignity and is sacred. Focus on the Family’s Citizen Link wrote the following statement:

Pornography is a perversion of the gift of sexuality. By its nature, it diminishes the humanity of everyone involved. Those captured by camera images are treated as mere sexual products to be manipulated and consumed rather than as fellow humans worthy of dignity and value. The viewer’s humanity is also diminished by becoming party to exploitation. Millions of families are feeling the negative effects of online porn; yet it’s at this grassroots level where consumers have the power to address the issue in the marketplace - especially in the online world - by scrutinizing service providers along with other venues of porn.

The proliferation of the pornographic industry in America and worldwide has reached epidemic proportions. Young people are scarred for life. Teenage boys are given a dangerously distorted view of women and how they should be treated. Marriages are broken beyond repair. Family finances are wrecked. The dignity of women is degraded.
Pornography is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry, run by well-educated businessmen and Fortune 100 companies. Oregon Public Broadcasting aired American Porn, a Frontline documentary, in 2002, which stated:

It’s one of the hottest industries in America. Easier to order at home than a pizza, bigger than rock music, it’s arguably the most profitable enterprise in cyberspace. AT&T is in the business, as is General Motors, which owns the cable company, Direct TV, that shows porn movies. YAHOO! Has profited from it. Weston, Marriot, and Hilton make more money selling it than they do selling snacks and drinks in their mini-bars. And with estimates as high as $10 billion a year, it boasts the kind of earnings every American business envies.

During the 1990's in the Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno said, “Priorities had to be set, and national security and human life free of violence were the priorities.” Consequently, the federal pornographic prosecutions stopped and the “flood gates” for making money in an uncontrolled environment were opened about as wide as they could get. The Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) within the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, basically went out of business. Frankly, I fail to see how Attorney General Reno could not make the logical and documented connection from testimonies of convicted sexual offenders who claimed their long-term involvement with pornography and not include pornography so detrimental to “national security and human life free of violence.”

In 1996, Americans spent more than $8 billion (today, it’s between $10 and $14 billion) on hard-core pornographic videos, peep shows, live sex acts, adult cable programming, sexual devices, computer porn, and sex magazines - an amount much larger than Hollywood’s domestic box office receipts and larger than all the revenues generated by rock and country music recordings. Americans now spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional and non-profit theaters, opera, the ballet, and jazz and classical music performances combined. (Oregon leads the nation as the state with the highest adult industry per capita.)
Former pornography addict, Gene McConnell, spoke at the University of New Mexico in 2001 at a presentation sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ and other groups. McConnell said:

We live in a sex-saturated culture that reduces women to little more than body parts and distances us from what we desire most, an intimate relationship.” He also said that pornography is a, “bigger business than professional football, basketball, and baseball, put together. ...The porn and fashion industry is a measuring stick to what is sexy. If you don’t fit in, then you’re not beautiful. This promotes and encourages body shame. ...No one that I love would I treat like they treat women in porn, it just glamorizes, eroticizes, and sexualizes hate. ...When we reduce people to objects, we can do anything we want to them because they aren’t human.

There are over 300,000 pornographic web sites with several hundred new ones coming online each day from Europe, Africa, and the Far East. I heard a man on the radio talk about his 12-year-old son running up a $1,200 telephone bill with a porn site in Madagascar at $10.32 per minute. Between February and July 2001, the N2H2 filtering software company documented a 345% increase in child pornographic Internet sites.

We Adventists are not immune from this intrusion of pornography in an unintentional search on the Internet by an adult, teenager, or pre-teen. The major concern and danger to one’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ is lack of self-discipline and self-control that Paul wrote about in his letter to Titus. There are many reasons why this invisible addiction takes place, just as there are for other visible addictions, but God’s grace is more than sufficient to overcome this struggle. Our Adventist churches have to be safe places that are accepting of the pornography-addicted individual who acknowledges his or her problem, truly wants help, and is willing to be accountable. We need to be developing strategies and programs to assist the addicted, but first we need to have an accurate picture of the magnitude of this problem. It’s huge in our society, just look at the money being spent on pornography. It has to be huge in our church as well.

BIOGRAPHY -- Pastor George E. Hocker, Jr. joined the Oregon Conference of Seventh-Day Adventist in October 1999 and began working as the Administrative Pastor at the Hood View Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Boring, Oregon in November 1999. In January 1992, Pastor Hocker retired from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after a career of over 34 years in Covert Operation as a Spymaster with the civilian rank equivalent to Brigadier General. In 1989, Pastor Hocker became the first Senior Advisor from CIA to the Drug Enforcement Agency as part of President Bush's "War on Drugs". He also had two careers in the private sector between 1992-1999. He has witnessed the growth of pornography in the United States and all over the world. Pastor Hocker has lived a total of fifteen years overseas in five countries and he has visited 53 countries.