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April 11, 2014

Conservatives: The Internet Didn't Kill Faith, Porn Killed Faith

LOS ANGELES—Hot on the heels of last week's release of a study indicating that the demise of faith in America is in large part due to the rise of the internet, conservatives leapt to their feet in protest, claiming that the devilish demise was actually the work of porn. The demise is not trivial, according to the stats. "Back in 1990," reports MIT Technology Review, "about 8 percent of the U.S. population had no religious preference. By 2010, this percentage had more than doubled to 18 percent. That’s a difference of about 25 million people, all of whom have somehow lost their religion." Porn does not appear to be a major factor in the original study, which was conducted, per MIT, by "Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise [of religion] is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation." Not so fast, says Joel J. Miller at Patheos, who writes of the internet-killed-religion claim, "Maybe, but I don’t buy it. Downey’s answer plays off the modernist prejudice that equates religion and ignorance. That’s false on its face. But once we consider the Internet as a factor at all, there’s a far more obvious answer than wider horizons: porn." His reasons for coming to that conclusion are two-fold. First, he argues, "Porn has been part of the Web from day one. And the stats for online consumption are staggering, even among Christians." But that argument is inferior to the far more serious impact that porn inherently has on faith, according to Miller, who sees a unique Christian identity at play here. "Disaffiliation should come as no surprise," he states. "We’ve already seen that porn makes prayer and beneficial contemplation impossible. Given the Christian understanding of the spiritual life, we’re not capable of simultaneously pursuing our lusts and sanctification. Such a pursuit causes internal dissonance, and the only resolution involves eventually conceding to the pull of one or the other. (I’ve talked about that before here.)" As to why the pull of porn would have such a dramatic affect on otherwise faithful Christians, to the point where they actually lose their faith, is not explained by Miller, other than for him to intimate that it is the result of a decidedly anti-intellectual force. "If the rise of the internet has anything to do with a loss of faith—and it’s an interesting thought—the role of ideas is likely minimal," he concludes his piece. "Arguments don’t cool many hearts, but sin surely does." Over at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher picked up on Miller's thesis, linking to one of his previous posts with the comment, "As I’ve written before, if you accept the modern world’s view on sex, and abandon Christianity’s teaching, you will soon abandon Christianity. People don’t like to hear that, but it’s true." Remarkably, however, neither conservative intellectual comes to the correct conclusion based on the actual argument each is making, that Christianity is incompatible with porn. If that is so, and they certainly believe it to be, then should their conclusion not be that it is Christianity itself that has brought people to the point where they are forced to question their faith? Blaming the porn seems to be like the obese person blaming the food, which some people may do, but no one in their right mind actually takes the idea seriously. It's a kissing cousin of the Christian meme about porn addiction, making the thing into a "devil" that "wants" to "steal your soul." For religious folk, talk like that is reasonable. To the rest, it sounds insane. In another sense, however, the admission by these deep thinkers on ecclesiastical issues—and true believers—that faith so easily loses out to porn is more than a little shocking to those of us who believe that if God does in fact exist, s/he's there on porn sets, too. It makes us think that our own dubious faith is stronger than their unequivocal one.

 
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