I have been writing about pornography since the earliest days of this site—long enough to have watched it move from the shadows to the mainstream, and long enough to have heard from thousands of people caught in its grip. It has been the subject of one of my books and many of my articles. It is also the subject of the question that brings more people to this site than any other: “Is watching porn a sin?”
This page gathers the best of what I’ve written on the subject into one place. Whether you are fighting this battle yourself or fighting it alongside someone you love, I hope it will serve you well.
Is Watching Porn a Sin?
Let’s begin with the question so many people are asking. The Bible never mentions pornography by name, but it speaks with perfect clarity about God’s design for sex and sexuality, and Jesus himself said, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). It is simply impossible to reconcile that with pornography. So in Is Watching Porn a Sin? I answer plainly:
So yes, my friend, I want to affirm what I am pretty sure you already knew or at least suspected: Watching porn is a sin. It is a sin you ought to stop for the good of your own spiritual and relational well-being. And I want to encourage you that it’s a sin you can stop. In fact, you can even get to the point where it’s no longer something you crave. Most of all, I want you to know that pornography is a sin that God can and will forgive.
And it is a sin that goes far deeper than lust alone. As I wrote in 8 Sins You Commit Whenever You Look at Porn: “It is sinful to lust after another person and to enable this lust through pornography. Yet the sin bound up in pornography goes far deeper than mere lust. It extends to idolatry, adultery, deceit, theft, greed, sloth, sexual violence, and ignoring the Holy Spirit.”
What Pornography Really Is
Years ago I wrote a series (and book) called Sexual Detox, meant to help men replace pornography’s lies about sex with God’s truth. At its heart was this conviction:
Pornography is inherently violent, inherently unloving. It is a perversion of sexuality, not a true form of it, and one that teaches violence and degradation at the expense of mutual pleasure and intimacy. It is about conquests, about conquering. It is the very opposite of God’s intention for sex. It tears love from sex, leaving sex as the immediate gratification of one’s most base desires. It lives beyond rules and ethics and morality. It exists far beyond love.
Pornography detaches sex from everything God has bound it to—from a real physical encounter, from a shared story, from consequences, from ethics. I explored those four detachments in Pornographic Detachment. And because so much pornography records the real exploitation and abuse of real people, I have argued that to watch it is to be complicit in it: What Do Hitmen and Porn Watchers Have in Common?
The Lies It Tells
Pornography keeps its grip on people by whispering the same falsehoods again and again: it’s not that big a deal; it only affects me; it’s my secret; this sin will satisfy; you are beyond hope. I answered each of them in 5 Ways Porn Lies To You:
Sin promises satisfaction and delivers death. God promises satisfaction and delivers far more than we can ask or even imagine. Take God at his word!
Counting the Cost
In 7 Good Reasons To Stop Looking at Porn Right Now I counted the cost of this sin—the cost to your soul, your neighbor, your church, your family, your mission, your witness, and your Savior. The first of those costs is the weightiest:
If you have no sorrow for sin, if you have no real desire for victory, if time and again you recklessly choose your sin over your Savior, you need to ask yourself this: Do I love pornography enough to go to hell for it?
Pornography exacts a particular cost from the young, stealing away the very years when they ought to be growing into maturity and service. I coined a word for that stalled condition—pornolescence, “that period when a person is old enough and mature enough to know that pornography is wrong and that it exacts a heavy price, but too immature or too apathetic to do anything about it.”
A Christian’s growth in holiness and his development in Christian maturity is directly and inextricably tied to sexual purity. A person cannot full-out pursue God while also full-out pursuing porn. It’s either/or, not both/and. God will not be mocked. God will not allow you to soar to spiritual mountain tops while you stoop in pornographic filth.
The Path to Freedom
Nobody drifts out of pornography. In Sexual Detox II: Breaking Free I described the real problem:
Every Christian guy who looks at porn wants to stop, but many of them want to stop just a little bit less than they want to keep going. And so sin prevails. The only way you will stop is if you begin to see the monstrous nature of the sin you are committing. You will only stop if the sin is more horrifying to you than the perceived goodness of the enjoyment of that sin. You will need to hate that sin before you can find freedom from it.
But this is a battle to be fought with hope, not despair:
God is infinitely more willing to deal with your sin than you are to commit your sin. You may love this sin and be committed to it, but if you are a Christian, God is more willing than you are to overcome it and destroy it. He will grant grace for you to put sin to death.
Where should you begin? Not with an app, and not with marriage, which will not make the sin go away. Begin with your local church: “The local church is the ideal context for battling this kind of sin since in the local church you will find the authority and the support to help you fight and, ultimately, to help you win.” Go to your pastor, or to a trusted, mature, Christian man or woman, and bring the sin into the light.
Then build your defenses before the battle comes. The principle I try to live by is this: when you are at your best, plan for when you are at your worst. “The wise Christian fights sin even when sin seems distant and dormant.” And know this: even victory over pornography is not the end of the war, for behind the porn stands the older and deeper sin of lust. I wrote about that longer battle in Big Sins Little Sins.
Purity Is Positive
It would be easy to conclude that sexual purity is merely a long list of things to avoid. It is not. As I wrote in Positive Purity:
Do you see it? Sexual purity is not ultimately about what to avoid, but what to pursue and what to enjoy. It’s about putting those old and ugly behaviors to death in order to free yourself to pursue the better ones. God wants to free you from sin so you can enjoy his gifts. God’s purity is a positive purity.
For Parents and Families
Few discoveries bring parents more grief than learning their children have been looking at pornography. In Help! My Kids Are Looking at Porn! I offer counsel for that painful moment—don’t despair, be careful with shame, ask questions, go to the gospel, plead with them, and take measured action. “Your goal is not to convict your children of their shame before mom and dad, but to assist the Holy Spirit as he convicts them of their guilt before God.”
Its companion, The Porn-Free Family Plan, lays out a complete strategy for protecting a home—devices, filters, accountability, and, far more importantly, the ongoing heart-level conversations between parents and children. This is the calling of a whole generation of parents, as I wrote in Hope in a Pornified World:
We will remember the way we struggled, we will remember what pornography did to us, and we will move heaven and earth to help our sons and daughters avoid it. We will pray unceasingly that God will protect them from seeing what they should not see.
There Is Hope
Of all porn’s lies, the cruelest is the last one—that you are beyond hope. Hear me on this:
You are not beyond hope. There is no sin stronger than the blood of Jesus. There is no sin you have committed so many times that you have to commit it again. There is no sin that Jesus cannot and will not forgive. So do not give in to the despair. Do not allow yourself to think you are beyond hope and beyond redemption. You have the greatest hope in the world—the hope of the gospel.
Start Here: Essays on Pornography
- Is Watching Porn a Sin? An answer to the question that brings more people to this site than any other.
- Sexual Detox. The five-part series that became the book: how porn distorts our understanding of sex, and how to replace its lies with God’s truth. (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)
- 8 Sins You Commit Whenever You Look at Porn. The sin goes far deeper than lust alone.
- 5 Ways Porn Lies To You. The falsehoods that keep people trapped, answered one by one.
- 7 Good Reasons To Stop Looking at Porn Right Now. Counting the full cost of this sin.
- Pornolescence. How pornography steals the best years from young Christians and stunts their growth.
- Big Sins Little Sins. Why defeating pornography is only a skirmish in the longer war against lust.
- A Simple But Life-Changing Realization. Real and significant progress in purity is possible—don’t settle for less.
- No Man More Pitiful. A man without self-control is a city with broken-down walls.
- Pornographic Detachment. How porn detaches sex from everything God has bound it to.
- What Do Hitmen and Porn Watchers Have in Common? On complicity in the exploitation porn records.
- Positive Purity. Purity as pursuit and enjoyment, not just avoidance.
- The Porn-Free Family Plan. A complete strategy for protecting your home. (Companion: Help! My Kids Are Looking at Porn!)
- When You’re at Your Best, Plan for Your Worst. Building your defenses in peacetime.
You can browse everything I’ve written on the subject in the pornography topic archive.
The Book
The Sexual Detox series collected on this page grew into a book: Sexual Detox: A Guide for Guys Who Are Sick of Porn. It is short, direct, and written for men who are ready to stop—to reject pornography’s counterfeit and to reorient their understanding of sex according to God’s design. If this page has been useful to you, the book is the natural next step.
More Help
For those who want to pursue purity day by day, 31 Days of Purity offers a month of Scripture, reflection, and prayer. And I gladly recommend Into the Light, a free teaching documentary on battling pornography within the context of the local church.
This guide is one of a series. You can find them all on my guides page.
