The following is a list of reasons pastors self medicate with porn. It is not an exhaustive list perhaps, but it covers a lot of ground.
I love pastors! These are some of my favourite people in the world. The compiling of this list is meant as a means of understanding the tremendous challenges so many of them face on a regular basis in carrying out their calling to God.
In the early years of my Christian walk, I got to know a lot of different pastors via church growth, church planting and leadership conferences. I was fortunate enough to be a founding member of a church plant many years ago, and I can tell you, this is a tough gig! So, I have a ton of respect for pastors in general and want them to be successful.
1. It can be a very lonely and isolating job.
Back in the spring of 1996, I was able to go through a program called “Life Skills” by the late Dr. Paul Hegstrom. Paul’s personal story was an incredible “Saul to Paul” type of conversion. He had suffered some very traumatic experiences as a child and the pain and confusion from those early struggles followed him into his marriage and life of parenting. To say he turned his life around would be a gross understatement!
A group of about 35 of us Christians spent 4 consecutive evenings together getting to know him and what he had come through and how his program could benefit us. He went into great depth about the childhood trauma he had gone through, how it affected him and his family and how he had been helping people overcome these same sort of problems. It was terrific!
At the end of the 4 days together, he proposed we go into the next phase of the recovery process. He had developed a 15 week program involving small group meetings for people to go through at the local church level. I eagerly signed up and I can say that it was a fabulous decision by me! I got a ton out of the program.
Now...a pastor friend of mine, also wanted to go, but he had a problem. He knew that he had, what we used to call the 1970’s “hangups.” He new he had real issues to deal with from his childhood that were negatively impacting him in his adult life, but he had a problem.
He couldn’t risk opening up and sharing his problems with other Christians in the area where we lived for fear of being rejected: for fear of being fired and losing his capacity to support his family. Fortunately, he was able to go across the border into Washington State and join a group of people who didn’t know him, and get a lot of healing that he also needed, just like the rest of us.
You see... if I sin, and perhaps it's sexual sin in the form of compulsive porn use, I don’t need to worry about being fired from my job, but pastors generally do.
2. A good number of codependents/addicts are drawn to the “helps” professions as a means of avoiding their own deep trauma.
When I reference the “helps” professions, I am talking about careers in health care, social work or church work like pastors and missionaries.
My unscientific guess as it relates to health care is,
that about 25% of all people in health care have high level addiction
problems and a big part of their “fix” is found in helping other
people deal with their problems, so they can avoid addressing their
own personal hang ups. These personal hang ups or shortcomings include compulsive porn use but are not limited to it by any means.
I know this well because at the age of 28, I heard the term codependent for the first time. It was suggested that I might be one of “them,” so I went out and got a book on the subject. I was a hard core codependent. I have been recovering from codependency for over 30 years now.
Codependents make good pastors because they are very attentive to other people’s needs. Codependents are not good pastors because they have developed an addictive habit of running away from difficult and painful issues in their own life.
Codependent people like myself are predisposed to porn addiction/compulsive porn use because we have developed the habit of using people like an alcoholic uses liquor to numb the pain. When a pastor gets the buzz from helping someone else solve a problem, it can be very intoxicating and sadly be a means of avoiding dealing with some pressing personal problems of their own.
3. We love and respect pastors who work hard.
Workaholics are some of the most revered people in society. In general, we pay little attention to the fact that excessive work hours can have a negative impact of other parts of a person’s life. Pastor’s kids and denominational teacher’s kids are some of the most neglected children in our culture.
We love people who are “working hard for the Lord.” Unfortunately, the stories that I have heard over the years paints a very different picture. Many wives and children of pastors feel abandoned by their hard working spouse.
Over time, if the pattern of neglect continues by the pastor, there will be increasing distance between them and their family. The hurt feelings will come to the surface in time and the pastor will need to deal with the inner conflict of serving the Lord and also taking care of his family simultaneously.
If the pastor is hard working and codependent, then the environment for wandering into sexual sin/compulsive porn use is very favourable, not in a good way, of course.
4. Pastors are expected to have children that are a cut above the other children in the congregation, that once more increases the pressure pastors need to deal with in their calling.
Author Carol Cannon wrote an excellent book back in 1993 dealing with addiction within the Christian church. The title of the book is “Never Good Enough: growing up imperfect in a perfect family.”
One of the best insights I got out of the book was the following: “alcoholics, workaholics and churchaholics raise the same children.”
As someone who grew up outside the church and didn’t come to into a saving relationship with Jesus until the age of 28, I can say with painful certainty, that I am in large part, thankful I didn’t.
Some of the most emotionally/spiritually messed up people I have met in the last 30+ years have been those raised in a church group where one or more of their parents were working for the denomination.
I knew all about alcoholics and workaholics, having grown up in the world, but I had no idea about churchaholics! The neglect and pressure these adult children of church workers dealt with was acute. They dealt with serious issues stemming from abandonment and neglect. They often didn’t have the same grace afforded to them that other normal or regular children got.
So many of them were told to give their life away for the cause of Christ, yet they themselves were still in the formative years of life and were being asked to do things they couldn’t possibly do. A pattern of trying and failing, trying and failing was set in place because they weren’t allowed to be normal, fallible children.
This pressure would logically weigh on a pastor because in most cases the welfare of the his children was directly tied to his ability to earn a living leading the local church.
So on one hand, he is trying to do what is right for the congregation, and at times, what is expected from many in the congregation is in direct contradiction to doing what is right for his children.
Here’s a good example of what I mean. If I run an apple orchard and an apple tree takes until the 5th year to bear fruit, should I expect the apple trees in my orchard to bear fruit in year one? What about year 2? The logical answer is: I should wait until the apple trees are mature enough to bear fruit. How old was Jesus when he started his ministry?
Far too many children raised in well meaning Christian communities feel unreasonable pressure to “have their act together” when they are going through the same learning curves and challenges as other normal children. This pressure weighs on pastors and the pressure can make them more vulnerable to seek refuge in addictive outlets like porn.
5. Young married pastors who have children, have a lot less time to spend alone with their wives.
It has been said in relation to sex, that “men are like microwaves and women are like crock pots.”
As men, we can generally go from “zero to sixty” as it relates to sexual arousal, which is almost always faster than a typical wife with kids. When children are young, the mother’s demands are high and many of us men often feel neglected or left behind. I can attest to this being a very painful experience.
This painful experience can cause us to seek refuge in other activities like food, work or porn, depending on what sort of coping skills we have developed up to that point in our lives.
A lot of young mothers have children climbing all over them throughout the course of the day and they have a legitimate need for “space.” Being touched isn’t necessarily high on their priority list, to say the least!
6. The pressure on pastor’s wives can be very high and therefore make them more stressed out and less likely to want sex.
Have any of you heard your wife utter the following statement, “I don’t feel attractive?” I know I have, many times. Buuut.... from my perspective as the husband, “you look good to me honey!”
Once the male mind is turned on to the opportunity for sex, it’s turned on. I have been feeling like death warmed over and just dragging my tail around the house, but if there is an opportunity for sex with my wife, I summon all my strength and get er done.
Women aren’t like this in most cases. Most women who are tired and stressed out have little interest in sex. Most of us men who find our stress level rising look forward to sex as a means of reducing the stress we are feeling. Women usually want to bring the stress down and get into a more relaxed state of mind in order to be able to consider having sex with us.
Any man that has been married with children knows that a stressed out wife is not a high probability partner for sex, therefore compulsive porn use is a very real and ever present temptation.
Porn is always there, whenever we want it. This is not a good situation.
7. For some pastors/ministers, sex may be considered dirty in their denomination so understanding healthy sexual needs in marriage may not be understood between husbands and wives.
This is masterful work by the devil. He takes what God has created for good, and he perverts it. He creates wild extremes when it comes to sex, in this case “all or nothing.”
The “all” has to do with no boundaries, and that closely mirrors porn and it’s seemingly endless options for pleasure. There are no checks and balances and it reflects the first commandment of satanism, which is to “do whatever you want, is the whole of the law.”
The “nothing” has to do with painting the picture in people’s minds that sex is something dirty and only for procreation purposes and no other reason is possible. He takes a real problem that people face regarding the highly emotionally charged experience of sexual intercourse with another human, and condemns the act and benefits that are to be derived from what the Bible says “and the two shall become one flesh; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh.” Mark 10:8
This is a profound piece of scripture and speaks to a union that cannot be experienced in other walks of life for a believer in Christ. If the devil is able to deceive one or both of the partners in a Christian marriage that sex is something dirty, then he has succeeded in defiling what God has meant as a marvellously intimate human experience.
The devil goes after God’s children in order to cause them pain, because he can’t hurt God himself, so he works to hurt and deceive those who are most precious to our Heavenly Father, as a means of getting even with our most Holy God.
8. Being raised in a pornified culture
This one point regarding pastors really hits home for me. The more I reflect on my life and what the prevailing social influences have been since I was born in 1965, the more sobering it is to realize how immersed in a pornified culture I have been. Compulsive porn use has been largely normalized.
I heard a story recently of 2 fish. One fish says to the other fish, “How’s the water today?” The other fish say, “What’s water?”
Based on the statistics from people like Josh McDowell and The Porn Epidemic study he had done in 2016, the number of professing Christians in their teens and twenties that engage in regular porn use, has now become the norm, not the exception.
One of the key problems many Christians have, and I myself do as well, is that I was raised in a world of porn that is so prevalent that at times I am just like that fish who doesn’t know what water is. It’s difficult to know what porn is because it’s so overwhelmingly present!
So, as crazy as it may seem, it is certain that some pastors/ministers aren’t really clear on what the dangers of sexual sin really are.
In advertising the most powerful messaging is what is called social proof. Things like price point and other features may be important to the buyer, but what has the biggest impact is the social proof of what other people are doing.
Unconsciously, people make decisions in large part based on what the social norms are, not on what they think is right or wrong.
A terrific book was written by Robert B. Cialdini called “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." It is a well researched book about how we behave as people and I want to share with you one story from the book that demonstrates how we are impacted by social proof, and not in a good way.
The researchers set up a situation where there was a young woman in the bushes who was in distress. She was calling out for help. She herself wasn’t really in distress, she was a part of the experiment. They tested their hypotheses in two ways.
The first way they did it was to have her in the bushes and when a lone male walked by, she would cry out for help and see if he would act on his impulse to help.
The second way they ran the experiment was to have two other males (who were part of the experiment) walking past the bushes with the unsuspecting male and have her cry out again. The key to this second set of circumstances, was that the two males were to act like nothing was happening. They were to ignore her cries for help and give the clear message that they shouldn’t or didn’t need to get involved in.
What do you think happened?
I don’t remember the percentages, but the influence of the two males discounting the girl’s cries, dramatically reduced how often the unsuspecting male would stop what he was doing and try to provide assistance. The social cues had a big impact on the young man’s behaviour, and not in a good way.
Now, as I mentioned at the beginning of this 8th point, there is a "pornification" of our soceity that is well entrenched. Regular porn use has been normalized to a great extent and it is impacting Christians as well.
Many Christian pastors were already using porn compulsively as an outlet before they became professionally employed by the church. The pornification of our society has made it more difficult on pastors than ever before.
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Sincerely,
Your Brother in Christ
Chris Keenan
Windswept Recovery Groups