Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has released a new video explaining the ways pornography has been “weaponized” in our culture.
As a young minister, Moore recalled traveling to rural Indiana, where he had been preaching. He stopped at a gas station, and across the street, he noticed a gaggle of people standing around.
“I asked the person standing next to me, ‘What’s happening over there?’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, that’s an adult video store. And the people in this community, they don’t want it here, and so they’re over there taking pictures of all of the license plates on the cars that come into that adult video store and they’re putting them up downtown at the central store there in order to let people know: you’re not going to be anonymous here.’”
Shortly thereafter, Moore explained, internet pornography became fairly commonplace. It has only expanded since then.
As a result, those who consume pornography in today’s culture can do so with a great level of anonymity, and, because of its prevalence on the internet, can simultaneously procure it without thinking of themselves as people who would drive to a smut store and purchase explicit magazines and videos.
“You can have this self-identity of almost, sort of feeling as though you’re just accidentally drifting off into pornography,” Moore said.
Pornography has also been “weaponized” in the sense that, because it’s so accessible, those who consume it can be easily tricked into believing everyone looks at it — “so it must not be that bad,” we think.
“That ubiquity, though, is not a sign of its innocence,” Moore warned. “It is a sign of a crisis. … Pornography is always a perversion of the one-flesh union.”
He added that, within each of us, there is a desire for a “one-flesh union,” which is why pornography will never truly satisfy us.
“You can’t find an image naked enough to actually access the mystery of Christ and the church present in the one-flesh union of real marital intimacy,” Moore said.
You can watch the rest of his comments in the video above.
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