Fresh on the heels of countless pastors responding to the Philip Yancey 8-year affair with “it could have been any of us,” SBC Texas megachurch pastor Jonathan Pokluda asked rhetorically on an Instagram story “Why do I have a desire to sleep with beautiful women while I’m a married man?”
His wife, in the next room, could be heard telling him this hurt her. He asked incredulously, “Don’t you want to sleep with other men?” She replied she didn’t, and Pokluda walked back his declaration a bit, saying maybe he was only tempted by porn.
He ended the video calling out, “I love my wife!”
Sheila Gregoire
This isn’t the first time Pokluda, lead pastor at Harris Creek Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, has found himself in hot water over proclaiming his desire for hot women. Three years ago, he made headlines with a bizarre and breathy sermon anecdote about a woman who propositioned him for sex whose perfect body had “everything in the right places.” He claimed the only thing that stopped him from cheating on his wife was remembering a Bible verse.
Instead of making the obvious decision to issue an immediate apology for speaking of women like that, Pokluda took to the pulpit to claim God was on his side. He told of attending the Asbury Revival, where hundreds of people were hearing messages of humility from God. There, he apparently received a Scripture from the Lord that told him people who thought what he said was inappropriate were (a) evil, (b) against God, and (c) would soon die.
Eventually, though, he was so excoriated on social media he had to issue an apology for his offensive anecdote: “I’m concerned that it hurt women in making them feel objectified and could give men permission to do so. I said it from this stage. It was wrong, and I’m sorry, truly sorry — not because it cost me but because it hurt some of you. I do not like hurting people. I ask your forgiveness.”
Apparently his “appropriate word from the Lord” wasn’t so appropriate after all. Nevertheless, no retraction was given about his assertion that God promised to smite Pokluda’s critics.
Despite asserting his regret of his past objectification of women, just two weeks ago he once again went public with his desire to sleep with multiple women, even seeming confused that not everyone has those same predilections.
Pokluda is the lead pastor at a megachurch that has a large ministry to college-aged students. Just two weeks ago, he was one of the keynote speakers at the Passion Conference, attended by 45,000 people, mostly young adults 18 to 25.
“It’s worth asking what kind of faith he’s normalizing for them.”
It’s worth asking what kind of faith he’s normalizing for them.
But don’t we all have bad thoughts?
People standing at subway stops often think of pushing people onto the tracks. For most, it’s a fleeting thought. For others, having the thought causes distress and it becomes an obsession, but they still don’t actually want to push someone onto train tracks.
And then there’s a third category of people: Those who actually do want to push people onto train tracks.
We can categorize something similar with sex: Fleeting thoughts of a sexual nature (even highly explicit ones) are perfectly normal and happen to virtually everyone. Intrusive thoughts that cause distress also are very normal and do not belie a desire of one’s heart (and therapy can help reduce anxiety about this). But then there are people who do actively desire to cheat on their spouses and have to fight these urges, people who do enjoy objectifying others, people who are actively tempted because it is an active desire.
From his own statements, it seems Pokluda falls in the third category.
We should expect pastors to discipline their sexuality
A mere six months after he issued that 2023 apology, Pokluda said on his podcast that the most pleasurable sex is outside of marriage.
Screenshot
“On an erotic scale of 1 to 10, sex outside of marriage is an 11,” he asserted. He teaches that one of the reasons not to have sex before marriage is that it’s so erotic you will “chase it the rest of your life.” Pokluda then engages in sexual fantasy, talking about how hot it would be to have sex with a neighbor while her husband was on his way home.
Licensed counselor Sam Jolman, author of The Sex Talk You Never Got, commented on this clip, saying: “He seems super unself-aware here about his own arousal structure. He’s projecting his unexplored fantasy onto everyone and believing it arouses us all like it does him. … I am sad for him that no one is telling him to take this to his therapist. The joining of perversion or scandal to his arousal structure seems unexplored and disowned. I don’t know why people aren’t helping him see this.”
Pokluda seems to have a view of sex that confuses the illicit with the erotic.
“Without that inner work, porn always will have pull.”
That does not sound like someone who has had his sexuality transformed. As Andrew J. Bauman says, men can quit watching porn, as Pokluda claims he has, but still have a pornographic mindset. Quitting watching porn does not mean you’re fully healed. Healing involves addressing the internal issues that drew you to porn and that caused you to use it as a coping mechanism and emotional regulation tool and confronting the objectification of women inherent in lust.
Without that inner work, porn always will have pull — as Pokluda acknowledges it still does for him.
Given that just two weeks ago he thought it normal to actively be interested in pursuing sex outside his marriage, even if he holds himself back from acting on his desires, has he shown fruit in keeping with repentance? Has Pokluda been transformed by the renewing of his mind, as Paul calls us to do, or is he simply modeling a “white knuckled” faithfulness?
Is it true that no-strings-attached sex is hotter or better?
Unlike what Pokluda seems to think is universally true, most couples do not have to choose between sex that is healthy and sex that is pleasurable. In fact, for the majority of people, the two go hand in hand.
We’ve surveyed more than 40,000 people now, primarily evangelicals, looking specifically at marital and sexual satisfaction for our books The Great Sex Rescue and The Marriage You Want, among others. When women say they feel emotionally connected during sex, they’re far more likely to reach orgasm and sex frequency increases. When men say they feel emotionally connected during sex, they’re 24 times more likely to say they’re satisfied with their wife’s level of adventure in bed. For both men and women, emotional connection makes sex erotic.
But what about when we normalize men being preoccupied with porn and wanting to sleep with other women? As we reported in our book The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex, when women think their husbands are tempted by other women or by porn, they are:
- 2.4 times more likely to say, “I have sex only because I feel like I must”
- 1.4 times more likely to say, “When it comes to sex, I could take it or leave it”
- 1.7 times less likely to say, “I frequently orgasm during sex”
- 2.1 times less likely to say, “I am frequently aroused during sex”
- 3.5 times less likely to say, “My husband makes my pleasure a priority”
- 4.8 times less likely to say, “I am satisfied with our emotional closeness during sex”
“Men who give their wives reason to think they’re tempted by porn or other women tend to be worse lovers.”
Men who give their wives reason to think they’re tempted by porn or other women tend to be worse lovers, and women’s sexual satisfaction suffers.
But men’s sexual satisfaction suffers too. Unlike Pokluda’s theory, it is not risk that makes sex erotic but connection.
Men who say they struggle with lust are 47% more likely to say they’re unsatisfied with their wife’s level of adventure in bed — in other words, they don’t find sex in marriage erotic enough. Breaking that down further, compared to men who say they don’t have a problem with lust:
- Men who have a daily battle with lust but show no signs of actually lusting are 27% more likely to be dissatisfied with their wife’s level of adventure.
- Men who have a daily battle with lust and feel shame are 79% more likely to be dissatisfied.
- And men who have a daily battle but feel no shame are 302% more likely to be dissatisfied.
On the flip side, men are 86% more likely to be satisfied with their emotional connection during sex if they don’t use porn. Research suggests it isn’t that married, committed, healthy sex is inherently less pleasurable, but rather that a daily struggle with lust makes sex in marriage seem less erotic. Sexuality becomes distorted, but often — as we see from Pokluda’s podcast — men with lust problems mistakenly assume this is a universal experience for men, when it’s not.
Screenshot
Why is Pokluda allowed to say things about sex that are backed more by a pornified style of thinking than by research? How is it not a red flag when a pastor openly affirms men’s temptations to act out sexually? It sounds very much like a vibes-based theology, where the vibes are based on the objectification of women and a lack of sanctification.
But for so many young people, raised in church environments that have failed to present them with a healthy view of sex, what Pokluda is selling is attractive — you can be a Christian without putting selfish sexual desires to death. You can be a Christian man while still seeing women as consumable. You can serve God without challenging yourself to grow and transform.
Women are the forgotten victims of men’s lust
Finally, this brings us to one more problem: The effects on women of this kind of attitude are still being ignored. Pokluda, like the authors of Every Man’s Battle, seems to frame lust as a victimless sin. The main sin is against God, and the main victim is the man’s relationship with Jesus.
“Women bear the consequences when men objectify.”
Women, however, bear the consequences when men objectify. Women suffer a demonstrable and measurable drop in marital and sexual satisfaction when men’s lust is normalized. But church itself also can become unsafe. Women attend churches where they hear pastors saying it’s normal for men to find sex outside marriage far more enticing than sex within marriage. They hear pastors breathing heavily as they judge if women have “everything in the right places.” They hear that it’s normal for pastors never to defeat their temptation to watch porn. And women have to pretend this is all OK, even when it’s not.
Treating a woman as an object is not victimless. It normalizes a culture where members of the opposite sex are seen as “opportunities” or “sources of temptations” rather than co-laborers in Christ. It makes it harder for women to confront husbands about porn use or the way they look at other women because the pastor himself has normalized it. If even the pastor does it, how can she expect her husband not to?
Pastors, stop pretending to care about women when you obviously don’t
One of the most revealing moments in that Instagram live was how Pokluda handled his wife’s concerns. He continued his recording, calling out, “I love my wife!” so she would hear him in the kitchen. What he didn’t do was apologize or check if she was OK. His delivery was accompanied by an air that this simple declaration had now fixed everything.
And that seems to be the way pastors treat the women in their congregations who speak up, too. They humor us. They tell us they’re listening. If things get too dicey, they may even issue an apology.
But we haven’t seen many pastors like Pokluda change. Their attitudes toward sex still objectify women, often because these pastors work in denominations which don’t value our ideas, giftings or inputs. We’re just there to make them look good.
Women deserve better than this. We deserve pastors who are spiritually mature. We deserve pastors who have discipled their sexuality so we don’t have to sit through one more sermon of a man salivating over sexual sin.
Thankfully, even if pastors aren’t changing, people in the pews are. Our book The Great Sex Rescue, which shows both how toxic these messages about sex are and how we can re-frame our thinking, has now surpassed 100,000 in sales. When pastors say outrageous things, they do get called out on social media. People know this isn’t OK and that there is a different and better way.
Now we just need pastors to join the rest of us and stop being creepy. We deserve pastors who will set the tone in the congregation to be honoring of women, rather than objectifying of us.
We deserved more three years ago, and we deserve more now too.
Sheila Wray Gregoire is the founder of BareMarriage.com, and the host of the Bare Marriage podcast. She’s the co-author of The Great Sex Rescue, The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex, and The Marriage You Want.