Christian apologist Josh McDowell was in Singapore in March 2018 for the Reasonable Faith Conference. He spoke to Salt&Light on the sidelines of the conference and shared his concerns over the issue of pornography. You can read his handles on dealing with an addiction to pornography here.

THE PERVASIVENESS OF PORNOGRAPHY

In every culture in the world, every church in the world, the Number 1 problem is pornography. There is no church in the world, not even in the furthest jungles of Africa, where there is no electricity or anything, where pornography is not the Number 1 problem.

I would say that about almost any church in the world – no matter how biblical it is, how Christ-centered. It affects some of the greatest churches in the world.

You can stand up, and look out over any congregation of 18 to 34-year-olds and know that between 72% to 78% of people there are addicted to pornography; meaning consuming 11 hours or more of pornography a week. It affects 56% of women, and half of pastors.

I was asked to meet someone on the sidelines of a seminar who wanted to ask me something. “What is it?” I asked. She said: “We are in charge of the 4,000 young adults aged 18 to 24 in the church” – that’s a huge church! – “’and we have a problem. Pornography.”

So I am in a foreign country, I am a guest. I knew I had to be careful, so I shot way low, and I said: “Yeah probably 60% to 65% pursue pornography on the Internet.”

They threw their hands in the air and said, “Oh no, it’s 100%. We cannot find one person in our church between the ages of 18 to 24 who doesn’t watch pornography.”

When was the last time you heard a sermon about pornography in Singapore? You say, “We don’t have that problem. It’s against the law.”

It’s against the law, you say? Almost every country where it is against the law is in the Top 10 pornography consumers in the world.

Singapore, from what I understand, it’s illegal. But if you “accidentally” come across a porn site, you can’t download it or pass it on, but you can watch it legally. That’s almost a farce. 

If you measure the time spent on pornographic websites in any of the 210 countries in the world, Singapore is Number 2. (The world average is 3 minutes, 16 seconds.)

This is where the church is, every church in the world, on pornography.

PASTORS AND PORNOGRAPHY

I’d say minimum half of all evangelical pastors in Singapore are addicted to pornography. The deacons, the elders, oh yeah. It’s so prevalent.

I got an email yesterday from a very prominent pastor of my country and three countries in Africa. He is used to training 1,500 pastors. Yesterday, he sent me an email where he said that 100% – every single one of those 1,500 pastors in three African countries! – are addicted to pornography. But nobody talks about it, he said.

One man in my country, Dr Ted Roberts, is probably the Number 1 counsellor on pornography, he really helped us in Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru). He was a former pastor, started a church in his garage and almost overnight it grew to over 12,000 people.

He ended up eventually leaving the pastorate, because he realised that the majority of his deacons, his elders, the leadership, the young people – they were all watching pornography. And he realised pornography is not the problem. It’s a surface manifestation of a deeper root problem.

And so he left the ministry and went and got his PhD in psychological counselling in the area of trauma (which pornography is). He has personally counselled 1,300 evangelical pastors. And more than 4,000 have gone through his clinic, it’s called Pure Desire. He also wrote a book, Pure Desire.

A year ago I hosted the first ever global summit on internet pornography – it was three times larger than any conference ever held on pornography. Dr Roberts was one of the presenters and he made this statement and we all thought he was joking. He was dead serious.

He said: “As of 3 years ago, I will never counsel a Christian pastor or leader, I will never let them go to my clinic, until they take a lie detector test.”

We all thought he was joking, but he was serious. He said addicts lie. When pastors are addicts – the pastors will lie. And he said if evangelical pastors don’t really come clean … until you come clean, nobody can help you. If there are still little hidden areas, nobody can help you, no matter how much they teach you the word of God, no matter how much they pray over you, everything.

Also, I would say that 95% of pastors who offer counselling on pornography – it breaks my heart to say this – are doing more damage than good. They are destroying peoples’ lives. Because it’s different. You cannot counsel pornography like any other issue in the history of the church. It is so different.

One of the first things that happens is that it starts to erode the authority in your life: The authority of Jesus, the authority of Scripture, the authority of your pastor, the church, your parents. And when that authority starts to erode, just about everything in your life is affected.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL IMPACT OF PORNOGRAPHY

What happens with pornography is that as soon as you start watching it, it becomes addictive. Because of certain chemicals in your brain that start to be released, you keep going back to it.

Before it’s a sin problem, pornography is actually a brain problem. It’s a neurological problem.

When pornography passes by you on a moving screen – like a smartphone, an iPad, whatever – within 1.5 seconds, a process begins in your brain. Within 9 minutes, your brain is structurally changed. Not emotionally, but physically, biologically changed.

If you do not deal with that brain change, you can teach the person the Word of God all you want, pray with him all you want, it won’t help. You’ll be doing him more damage.

You need to recreate what are called neurological pathways. You have to create pathways in your brain of cells that fire together. You need to create a new combination of cells that fire together, that will be more inviting and stronger than pornography.

Because here’s the principle, when it comes to your brain and the firing of these cells: Cells that fire together, wire together.

THE PATHS THAT LEAD TO PORNOGRAPHY ADDICTION

When you look at pornography, certain combinations of cells will fire. Next time you look at it, the same cells fire and every time, you are developing connectors between the cells that go deeper and broader.

Like a jogging path in the woods, it starts out as just grass. You start jogging, then all of a sudden, the grass is beaten down and then the grass disappears and becomes dirt, and with more joggers, the wider it becomes, the deeper it becomes.

That’s what happens in your brain. So that after maybe just 5 hours, you’re driving down the freeway and anything – maybe a certain odour, a certain song on the radio, a certain risqué billboard – that your brain identifies with pornography could appear, and instantly those cells fire.

And then you have to go masturbate. You lose control of your life. 

So we need to find ways to overcome that. To start with, you need to find an alternative that you like, that brings you satisfaction and gratification.

For many, and I wish it could be for everyone, I wish it could be memorising Scripture. You think of Scripture, and these cells fire and it brings you gratification as you get to know more and more and more Scripture. You are lengthening, deepening and widening these neurological pathways.

For my wife, it would be photography. For me, it’d be redoing antiques. I love to buy junk and turn them into priceless antiques. For many people it could be running marathons. When those cells fire, they think of marathons, they see shoes, and they think: “I can hardly wait to get back from work and get to exercising and running.”

And what happens then is that when you use those combinations, you’re not using those combination of cells for pornography. With neurological pathways, “use it or lose it”, that’s the phrase. So the less you see pornography, these cells and the connections begin to die, and they lose their influence on you.

You got to fight it. If you don’t develop new neuro-pathways, it’s all for naught.

For more insight into handles on dealing with an addiction to pornography, read the second part of this two-part series:

How to deal with addiction to pornography: Josh McDowell