Don’t protest porn by sharing it

“I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.” (Rom 7:9)

My colleague just preached a great sermon on Romans 7:1-13. There Paul says that giving a command can produce a desire to sin in an area that was otherwise dormant. Sin is so deceptive that telling someone not to covet prompts them to start thinking about what their neighbour has that they might want!

This brought to mind the anti-porn petitions that people keep sharing on Facebook. These posts generally rebuke inappropriate advertisements that depict scantily clad women, often in sexually suggestive poses.

The very correct criticisms made by these petitions include that such advertisements are often seen by children, they objectify and demean women, they commodify God’s good gift of sex, and they contribute to the damaging and undesirable pornification of society. Sometimes the problem image is from an online ad. Other times it is part of a window display, a billboard or something similar. 

But when well-meaning Christians and others share their online petitions or posts calling for companies to withdraw such advertisements, there is always an image attached. And usually it is one of the offending images. And the image is not always censored—or at least not fully.

What do you think might be the first reaction of someone seeing that petition image… at least for men? It’s not hard to imagine: it’s to look and be tempted to linger. And then to click through to see what other terrible images might be involved. And because due diligence before signing a petition means checking the original cause of complaint, in case they have been misrepresented, on it can go.

I have trained myself over many years to immediately scroll past any image of a scantily clad woman. I mostly now do it as a matter of course without a second thought. But the battle never ends this side of eternity, and it’s harder when the problem comes recommended by friends you respect.

My social media friends sharing the article with the auto-selected image command me: don’t objectify women, raise the standards. But the command gives the chance for sin to spring to life, and the desire to look and linger and lust is inflamed. 

I am not saying my friends are wrong to want companies to stop using such advertising. But I wish they were more careful in how they do it. The reason the social media people include the offending image is because they know people are far more likely to look at it than at a sanitised one—let alone an entirely separate image like the one selected for this article. But as Christians we don’t believe that the end justifies the means, and God has given us creative minds that we can use to find other ways to draw attention to the issue without perpetuating it.

“Don’t lust at pictures like these” is a particularly sad illustration of the truth of Romans 7:7-13. Let’s be more careful about how we commend actions to each other.