The Porn Conversations #17

He cornered me at an industry conference, shoulders already slumping before he said a word. A Christian music executive I’d known for years. Without preamble, without my asking, he announced that he was a sex addict. A porn addict. He told everyone, male and female colleagues, young interns, whoever crossed his path. The confession had become its own compulsion, a ritual re-wounding he performed publicly and called accountability.

I didn’t know what to do with that then. I still don’t, exactly. But I’ve spent time since wondering whether what I witnessed was a man in genuine recovery or a man so marinated in evangelical shame that he’d found a way to make the shame itself the performance.

The evangelical world built an entire industry around porn addiction. Covenant Eyes. XXXchurch. Weekend conferences where men (and an occasional woman) wept, confessed, and promised one another they’d install accountability software on every device. The underlying message was consistent and unambiguous: any use of porn meant you were an addict. Any addict was a slave to sin. The only path forward ran directly through public confession and pastoral oversight.

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Upon researching this, I learned that as of this writing, the two major diagnostic manuals used by every credentialed psychologist and psychiatrist on the planet (DSM-5 or the ICD-11) do not recognize porn addiction or sex addiction as a formal diagnosis. The debate among researchers is genuine and ongoing. But here’s the thing, the church never told us: most sex therapists and educators don’t subscribe to the addiction model at all.

We were handed a diagnosis that the medical establishment hadn’t agreed to give us.

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Then I found the work of psychologist Joshua Grubbs at Bowling Green State University, and I had to sit down.

Grubbs spent years studying what he calls “moral incongruence” — the gap between what you believe is right and what you actually do. He ran multiple studies across thousands of participants and found something that should make every evangelical refugee reading this want to throw something across the room.

Religious people were far more likely to describe themselves as addicted to porn than non-religious people — even when their actual usage was identical. Same amount of viewing. Same frequency. Completely different experiences of themselves as broken or whole.

The distress tracked the belief, not the behavior.

Which means, for many of us, what the church diagnosed as addiction was the friction between our humanity and our indoctrination. The suffering was absolutely real. We were not making it up. But the label — the addiction, the disease, the spiritual sickness — that may have been manufactured. Installed in us like software we never consented to download.

Holy fuck.

And the “addictive personality?” That thing we were sometimes told explained why certain men were weak, and others weren’t? The research is blunt about this:

No universal character traits common to all addicted people have ever been identified. The addictive personality, as a coherent clinical entity, doesn’t exist.

What does exist are individual vulnerabilities — genetics, trauma history, attachment wounds — that raise the odds for some people across a range of behaviors. But the evangelical version, the one that said certain men were just wired for sin, was a story that conveniently kept all the blame inside the individual and none of it on the institution doing the damage.

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I think about that music executive often and the young female interns forced to absorb his confessions. And what it costs a human being to make their shame a calling card — to walk into every room pre-defeated, shoulders caved, eyes down.

Whether he experienced genuine compulsive behavior that wrecked his functioning, or evangelical moral incongruence he’d mistaken for addiction, or some tangled combination of both — I can’t say. What I can say is that the church handed him one story. And that story kept him bent at the shoulders even when he was supposedly healed.

What if the simplest explanation is the right one? You watched porn because you were tired and stressed, and your body wanted some pleasure. That’s not a disease. That’s rainy days and Mondays.