Sexual Addictions and the Church

Recently, I heard a counselor and speaker give a talk on sexual addictions. While he has been in recovery for many years, he began his lecture by sharing his own painful journey through addiction, and the high costs for both his wife and himself. As he spoke, his very presence arrested me. Here was a man who came with such strength, who began his teaching by first asking me to see him: his ugliness, his sorrow, his inescapable beauty.

I began to ask myself, how do I as a woman look at a man who is a sex addict? Or perhaps the men in my life who confess their more occasional struggles with pornography? What has felt so painful to me about pornography is that I fear it trains men to see women as sexual objects, not people. And yet, as I was listening to this man speak, I realized I too make choices to make objects out of persons. The man speaking before me would not let me see him as an object: he invited me past my judgments to see a person. And in seeing his heart, I began to see more of my own, which was not that different than his.

The speaker moved from his personal story to more formal education. He spoke about the pornography of the internet being the crack cocaine of sex addicts, hard wiring neuro-pathways in their brains to need more and more intensity to achieve the same high. Hence, porn web-sites are set up for escalating stimuli: he explained that many sites are designed to lead the viewer to child pornography and sexually violent material. He clarified that while some sexual addicts act out primarily with pornography or extra-marital affairs, others act out in their marriage, using their spouse as an object of their sexual addiction, not as a person with agency and their own needs. Both men and women in surprisingly equal numbers are struggling with different kinds of sexual addictions.

The speaker explained that at heart, sexual addictions are intimacy disorders; they are fueled by deep senses of shame, isolation, and feeling of inadequacies, though they are often expressed in manipulation and control of others. He taught that, “Healing is getting out of the secret”: learning to be honest about the addiction and understand the impulses behind the behavior. Part of the work in healing is to develop desires, needs, and wants in a healthy way.

The speaker explained that studies show that those in the church are hardly immune from the cultural epidemic. He shared that, “My hope is that the church will put more energy into healing with sexual addiction…it is a disease in the church.”

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In reflecting on the words of the speaker that day, my mind has traveled to the words of a well¬known pastor. Mark Driscoll, in his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev, wrote about a comment he had made to a man who called tearfully in the middle of the night needing to confess his viewing of pornography. The pastor– though understandably tired and annoyed in the middle of the night–responded with, “You need to stop watching porno and crying like a baby afterward and grow up man. I don’t have time to be your accountability partner, so you need to be a man and nut up and take care of this yourself. A naked lady is good to look at, so get a job, get a wife, ask her to get naked, and look at her instead” (page 60).

While I want to be careful in criticizing too harshly the counsel of an overworked pastor at 3 am, the passage in Mark’s book does disturb me. Certainly, true intimacy is a good goal: it’s just, you can’t imply swapping out images of a naked woman for the realities of real–life intimacy will fix the heart issues of shame and loneliness. Furthermore, Mark’s words seem to me to reinforce shame and loneliness.

While I have appreciated this particular pastor’s continual efforts to speak about pornography in the church, I still hope he will begin to nuance his thinking. He is the same pastor, who in an effort to help men avoid adultery, has emphasized the importance of wives "keeping themselves up" and being more "sexually available." In an evangelical culture that preaches the values of wives submitting to male headship, what about the abuse of a husband’s authority in the bedroom? (Since 1976, United States law is finally acknowledging that marital rape is a crime; recent studies are beginning to show the trauma experienced with coercive marital sex). Coercive sex aside, how do Mark's words plant subtle seeds for a wife to think herself responsible for her husband's addictions? (Like thinking she is not beautiful enough to meet the needs of her husbands,)

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In listening to the speaker, listening to Driscoll’s words, and struggling through the muti-faceted issues of sexual addiction, I am beginning to ask harder questions. What is the responsibility of the church, as it seeks to be relevant to the culture, to begin to understand and speak more to the complex issues of sexual addiction?