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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
Christianity and pornography don’t mix.
Except that they often do — whether believers and church leaders want to talk about it or not.
Over half of practicing Christians report consuming porn with some level of frequency, and most say no one helps them avoid it, according to a Barna Group study.
“In my opinion, it’s the biggest threat to Christians families in the U.S. there is. Period,” said David Rhyne, chief operating officer for Ever Accountable, a digital accountability software company with 40,000 subscribers.
Rhyne, a Reformed Baptist who lives in Manassas, Virginia, speaks from personal experience.
Now 35, he grew up in a Christian household with no R-rated movies or Playboy magazines — but the football cheerleaders he saw on TV and the lingerie ads in department store catalogs that came in the mail caught his attention at an early age.
“I knew I liked something there, but I didn’t know what was going on,” Rhyne said.
By age 15, he gained access to the internet and began watching porn online.
“It was all too easy to find some privacy and look at stuff that was wrong, and I hated it,” he said. “I was full of shame and full of guilt. I had prayed and prayed and cried and cried and cried. But I was so ashamed that I kept it completely secret. I did not tell a soul.”
He tried and failed to quit porn more times than he could count.
This pattern repeated itself until — in Rhyne’s early 20s — a friend became aware of his struggle. After that intervention, his porn usage declined.
But Rhyne did not find true freedom from porn, he said, until embracing Ever Accountable and its focus on online transparency and human connection with an accountability partner.
He loved the digital platform so much that he left his product design job earlier this year and went to work full time with Ever Accountable. Other major accountability software providers include companies such as Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You.
“Many people find blocking or reporting software to be helpful in their recovery,” said Steve Holladay, founder of Ultimate Escape, a Tennessee-based ministry associated with Churches of Christ. “Having said that, many of those same people report that they find ways around the software or habitually uninstall, act out and then reinstall the software.”
Holladay first detailed his “escape from sexual addiction” in a 2006 interview with me.
“Commitment to ‘rigorous honesty’ within a 12-step group or healthy accountability group is vital to long-term recovery,” he said in a text message this week. “Proactive accountability, looking at the days ahead and identifying potentially challenging situations and making plans to deal with them, can be a game changer in the recovery process.”
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
Shutterstock photo
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