Porn Is Plotless

Author - Umn ministry

February 03, 2022

Faithful love requires a storyline, not just a series of sensations.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

The young man looked down as he talked to me about his ongoing struggles with what he felt to be a compulsion toward pornography.

After this many years in ministry, I’ve had that conversation so many times I can almost script it in advance. But this Christian was able to summarize his situation better than most. “I guess I would say that my problem started with lust,” he said. “And then it was guilt and shame. It’s still all that, but it’s something else too. It’s boredom.”

The same afternoon I talked to a middle-aged Christian, really successful in his career, who said, “I’ve achieved everything I set out to do; and now it just all feels so empty and without meaning. It’s like I’m bored.” I’ve had that conversation too, countless times.

That day, though, I started wondering if, in some way, these conversations were really about the same problem.

I was prompted to ponder this question after reading a jeremiad against “today’s turn towards the pornographic”—not from a likeminded conservative evangelical viewpoint, but from a decidedly secular anticapitalist philosopher.

In his book Capitalism and the Death Drive, Byung-Chul Han clarifies that this “pornographic turn” does not just show up in explicit sexual depictions on the internet, but an even deeper aspect of spiritual malaise.

Han argues that pornography attempts to sever signs from meaning, sensations from communion, the bodily organs from the person. This results in a fragmentation that comes from a kind of hypervisibility and hyperavailability.

Pornography makes use of sexuality, ...