The latest theater of conservative evangelicalism’s multiple-front spiritual warfare cosplay is being dubbed the “War on Technology” by Cypress Baptist Church of Benton, La.
It began as a gathering in October 2022 that promised to “help families win the technology battle in their homes.” The event, which was advertised as being “for adults only” made the news this week after it was discovered that during an interview, new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told the audience he and his underage son are porn accountability partners.
“I’m proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate,” he boasted. Johnson believes he knows this because he and his son utilize a program called Covenant Eyes that monitors electronic devices for their online activities.
“It’s accountability software. So men in a church, you know men’s Bible study groups will do it. That’s how it was presented at Promise Keepers,” Johnson explained. “But they also mention, hey, when your kids become teenagers, especially if you have boys, dads, they’re talking to the guys at this event, you might want to think about doing this with your sons.”
How exactly does Covenant Eyes work?
“It scans all the activity on your phone or your devices, your laptop … and then it sends a report to your accountability partner. So my accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. And so he’s 17. And so he and I get a report of all the things that are on our phones or all of our devices once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice,” Johnson told the congregation. “It’s really sensitive. It will pick up almost anything. It looks for keywords, search terms, and also images, and it will send your accountability partner a blurred picture of the image.”
Of course, subscribing to Covenant Eyes doesn’t guarantee anything. Josh Duggar was able to get past the Covenant Eyes software on his devices prior to being found guilty of having images depicting sexual assault against children on his computer.
But when Rolling Stone published the story last week about Johnson, many people outside evangelicalism began wondering why evangelicals would consider this behavior to be normal.
Evangelical men’s obsession with porn
One of the reasons Promise Keepers promotes Covenant Eyes is that 20 years ago, they discovered more than half the men who attended their rallies admitted to watching pornography within the previous week. More recently, according to Barna, 57% of pastors and 64% of youth pastors say they “have struggled with porn, either currently or in the past.”
According to a pornography survey of Christian men by Proven Men Ministries:
- 97% have viewed pornography
- 65% watch pornography at work
- 64% view it at least once a month
- 37% view it several times a week
- 21% believe they are addicted
Despite the fact that it’s hard to take evangelicals seriously when they constantly use battle and war language for everything, the reality is that evangelical men watch pornography at the same rates as the national average, with the one exception being that evangelical men are more than twice as likely to claim they are addicted.
What is normal? And is it healthy?
When the clip of Johnson talking about being his son’s porn accountability partner surfaced, social scientist Samuel Perry posted, “This is where you gotta understand the subculture. Of all the things Mike Johnson may promote, Christian antiporn accountability software may sound fundy & weird to outsiders, but it’s both mainstream & commonsense for folks who believe porn is cancer & addiction is rampant.”
Michael Bird added, “There are many reasons one might not like Mike Johnson, but his attempt to make himself and his son accountable to each other for not watching porn is not one of those reasons.”
“There may be more going on in the name of accountability and purity than meets the eye.”
But even though it may be normal for evangelicals to be concerned about sexual purity, it doesn’t mean the purity culture and control tactics of Covenant Eyes are healthy, or that being porn accountability partners with your underage children is healthy, or that government officials should have their electronic devices scanned by privately owned evangelical technology companies.
In fact, there may be more going on in the name of accountability and purity than meets the eye.
Strange bedfellows
While evangelical men and feminist women tend to be on opposite sides of virtually every front in the culture wars, many of them surprisingly have a lot in common regarding their views on pornography.
Nicole Prause, a researcher at the UCLA Department of Medicine, said in an interview on the Sex and Psychology podcast: “Historically, there have been two groups that tend to collaborate in this space: … religious groups and anti-porn feminists. Feminists tend to be divided on the porn topic. Some think it’s empowering and useful for women. Others think that it’s disempowering and abusive of women. So the feminists and religious groups who tend to have nothing in common have something in common. And they work together on these issues.”
To further complicate the unlikely collaboration, a third partner joins in with the intention of making money. Prause explained that their message is: “If only you give me money, I can help you stop. I can help you find a path forward that will restore your masculinity, or that will allow you to be a man.”
Jesus and John Wayne on porn
While Prause focuses on research related to sexuality, those of us who are paying close attention to the broader conversations in evangelicalism cannot help but notice the language she observes about restoring masculinity and being a man. Could something considered so “normal” in evangelical circles as attempting to avoid pornography also be corrupted by the culture of Jesus and John Wayne?
On July 9, 2004, a member on a forum for the website BodyBuilding.com complained that his girlfriend was away on a trip, would not return for another 49 days, and ordered him not to have an orgasm while she was gone. The forum discussion grew until it eventually became a challenge to abstain from masturbation for a month. In November 2009, the “No Fap November” challenge started for men who wanted to abstain from masturbation for a month. In 2011, it was picked up by Reddit users. And since then, the trend has grown even more popular and extreme.
“You are a very good man if you cannot even think about sex, if you can banish sexual thoughts.”
Prause said these men consider it to be “a masculinity challenge. You’ll see them sometimes refer to monk mode. … And they use it to brag. ‘I did monk mode. I did 90 days monk mode.’ And that’s like, ‘I didn’t even think about sex.’ So it’s really heralded as like you are very strong. You are a very good man if you cannot even think about sex, if you can banish sexual thoughts.”
Having what Kristin Du Mez called “a nostalgic commitment to rugged, aggressive, militant white masculinity” combined with their fear and control of women’s bodies, white evangelical men were primed to be up for the challenge.
The pseudoscience of rebooting
As is often the case in evangelical conversations about the body, the apologetics of No Fap are filled with pseudoscientific myths. One of the terms that is used is rebooting, which is a time period during which abstaining from masturbation and pornography is believed to provide health benefits.
Prause explained, “At the end of this period of abstinence, they believe they will be reset, hence the term ‘reboot,’ back to their original healthy state which was prior to masturbating or prior to viewing pornography.”
One claim is that abstaining from ejaculation increases testosterone, despite the fact that science tells us abstinence from ejaculation decreases testosterone.
The result of relying on pseudoscience is that many relapse back into the behaviors they want to avoid, which further fuels their shame.
A self-identity of shame
According to Prause’s research, the more committed to the online forums the men were, the higher the symptoms were they reported, which deepened their shame.
“Overwhelmingly, people reported a very high amount of shame, which is not surprising because that seemed to be one of the strategies that they suggested for avoiding relapse in the first place,” Prause said.
One of the penalties people in these online forums face for masturbating or viewing pornography again is to have to post a picture of themselves on the forum to shame themselves. Prause explained, “It seemed to largely be just, ‘I have to post and say that I’m shameful and depressed.”
“This new rhetoric around pornography has allowed us to re-shame masturbation.”
Prause believes much of the shame around pornography today is actually the church’s attempt to reframe its shaming of masturbation. “A lot of the anti-masturbation rhetoric had fallen out of fashion when churches tried to promote this. It was seen as silly and outdated. But this new rhetoric around pornography has allowed us to re-shame masturbation.”
Shaming heterosexual men for masturbation ultimately fuels homophobia. The majority of these forum discussions focus on heterosexual pornography without mentioning homosexual pornography. Prause explains that people on these forums “tend not to be LGBT because viewing homosexual content in pornography is often viewed as an escalation and something to be avoided.”
An escalation of violence against the human body
Set within the broader evangelical culture where justice is defined as violent retribution against human bodies, it is no surprise that viewing porn would be interpreted through a lens of escalating violence.
The violence begins with harm against the self. “A lot of the forums use things like self-harm and shaming,” Prause details. “So they’ll say, ‘Punch yourself in the genitals to stop it.”
Violence against the self escalates into violence against a neighbor. According to Prause, “One in five people who visited these support forums reported that they witnessed threats to harm someone else in the forum, that is some type of homicidal content.”
Conservatives ultimately resort to threatening the violence of eternal conscious torment in hell for viewing porn.
Prause discovered that eventually the violence escalates into thoughts of suicide. Out of 270 individuals studied, 12 reported they became extremely suicidal. That’s nearly 5%.
This culture of escalating violence spills over into other arenas as well. As part of his ties to the New Apostolic Reformation that promoted the January 6 insurrection attempt, Johnson currently flies the insurrectionist Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office.
Safety concerns
With the messages of fear and shame teenage boys receive about sex and masturbation at church and home, along with the growing sexual desires they experience, many are afraid to talk with their parents or youth pastors about their struggles. And given the high percentages of their parents and pastors who are also regularly viewing porn and wrestling through their own shame spirals, they may not be the best resources for help anyway.
So they end up logging onto these forums instead.
“In some of the forums we study, we’ve seen people saying they’re 10 years old, a lot of folks saying they’re 11 years old,” Prause said. “So it seems like there’s a mix of youth put in with adults talking about sexual topics, which is hugely problematic.
In the case of Johnson, there is a growing concern that the national security of the United States may be at risk. But in the home, what about the safety of kids who are soliciting help for their masturbation habits from anonymous strangers online in forums that motivate through toxic masculinity and shame and escalate threats of violence?
Narcissism and identifying as a pornography addict
Prause observed, “Narcissism is the strongest predictor of identifying as a pornography addict in this sample, which is unique and adds to our knowledge of who might be in that group from previous publications by labs that have primarily been focused on religiosity and conservative upbringing.”
“Narcissism is the strongest predictor of identifying as a pornography addict in this sample.”
When those who identify as addicts are disappointed with their careers and relationships, Prause says they blame the pornography industry. She says they use arguments like: “It’s not my fault. They robbed me. They ruined my brain. And here are the women who perform for them. They made me do this.”
When sex researchers such as herself begin to explore the nuances involved with those who identify as porn addicts, rather than simply agreeing with blanket condemnations of masturbation or pornography, those who identify as porn addicts claim the scientists are “shilling for the industry.”
Prause explains: “I think narcissism and conspiracy beliefs have a pretty tight relationship. We’re also doing some new studies around conspiracy beliefs in these groups. It seems like the narcissism has a lot of a protective factor, kind of saying, ‘It’s not me who’s doing this, or not being effective in my life. My brain has been hijacked. Or somebody else is doing this to me, but it is not my fault. It’s being done to me.”
From Covenant Eyes website
Seeking help
Because many of the underlying issues that fuel pornography use have to do with John Wayne masculinity, pseudoscience, theologies of shame and escalations of violence, a major part of the healing has to be deconstructing these factors that are inherent to conservative evangelical theology and culture.
For many people, going to therapy is unaffordable. But Prause cautions against seeking help from online coaches. “It’s not that we don’t want these guys to get help. I think they’re truly suffering, trying to figure out what’s wrong and how to help themselves,” she acknowledges. “Coaches, because they have no licensure, if they were to harm you, you have no recourse. They don’t have HIPAA protections. They can tell anyone who they’re talking to and what you said.”
So for those who cannot afford therapy, Prause suggests avoiding forums that focus on sexuality and instead look for forums that discuss underlying issues like depression, anxiety or couples conflicts.
Ultimately, her desire is for those who identify as porn addicts to seek professional help from a licensed therapist. She suggests: “It may be helpful even just to have a few evaluation sessions. Say, ‘Can you help me understand what’s going on with my pornography viewing and what you think is a good way of understanding what’s happening with me?’
“I really encourage folks to get out of the echo chamber as best you can. Try and get multiple opinions from people who are experts, if not licensed, who may be able to help you sort through what’s actually going on so you can find an intervention that’s most likely to be helpful to you.”
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He recently completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.
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