Yesterday Rod Dreher posted an article on pornography on his site.  He begins it with this …

Whenever I go to a Christian college to speak, I talk to professors, staffers, and campus ministers about what they’re seeing among the students. Two things always come up: 1) far too many of their students know next to nothing about the Christian faith, and 2) pornography is a massive problem.

At one Christian college I visited over the past few months, a professor said, “For the first time, I’m starting to see it becoming a problem for my female students, not just the male ones.” A campus minister who works with young undergraduates headed for professional ministry told me that every single one of the men he mentors has a porn addiction.

Every. Single. One.

He goes on to illustrate how porn has become a problem among elementary school students (including girls in the fourth grade), whose parents have been stupid enough to give them smart phones.

As distressing as this is, the problem is not just masturbation in front of a computer screen.  The problem is that pornography and lust itself (not just sexual desire, but lust) objectifies other people.  Men seem to be wired in such a way that we are more likely to see sex as an experience disconnected from love, marriage or babies – or from humanity, in a sense – than women are.  This is why the gay male culture is so horrific when it comes to promiscuity and brutality.

But we are dealing with a technology that was unimaginable a generation ago.  When I was a kid, pornography was hard to come by.  Now it’s ubiquitous.  All varieties of sexual activities are right there in your pocket and can be accessed within mere seconds, even for Christian men who try to avoid the temptation (and don’t fool yourself, the addiction is universal, including among devout Christian guys, or as Rod says, “Every.  Single.  One.”)  It’s as if we’re all walking around with a handy supply of heroin that we can rely on for an intense high when we’re down or lonely, mad or tired, horny or simply bored.

And, again, it’s not the sin of the flesh that is so harmful.  As serious sins go, sins of the flesh are the least harmful, as Christian culture has always recognized.  What’s harmful is the spiritual side of this sin.

And the spiritual side of it comes down to this: ABUSE.  We can’t just follow our lusts and be happy.  The more we indulge them, the more we think of other people as mere tools and the more we feel contempt for them.  I’ve experienced this attitude even in Devout Catholic young women, who have probably never viewed pornography, but who are nevertheless steeped in the throwaway culture, a culture that sees not only sex but intimacy and friendship and even basic social interaction as self-serving and cut off from a real encounter with the Other.

This is one of the things that makes Facebook so horrible.  There’s a kind of endless posturing, making a show of your beliefs and ridiculing others in the process.  My wife uses Facebook for sharing pictures and keeping up with her friends, but my Facebook friends engage in debates – except they’re not debates: they’re tirades or polemics or shouting matches, the object of which is to prove you are righteous and that you are justified in viewing the Other with contempt.  Without that final dismissal of the value of the Other, there’s no payoff, no “money shot”.  Polemic Facebook posts are posturing at best, “rage porn” at worst.

This is why technology is not neutral.  And we are not neutral, either.  We tend toward sin, and must be raised to goodness through grace and hard work.  Given good environments, we can be edified and educated and cultivated toward virtue and happiness.  Given bad environments, we will become abusive – to ourselves and to one another.  We all have this potential.  We can go either way.

Dreher and the people he quotes are right.  Pornography and the entire attitude that accompanies it (including the Rage Porn of Facebook) is the most serious problem in our society today.  And yet I have never heard a homiliy on it.  Ever.  The greatest spiritual threat in the world is simply ignored at the parish level.

The opposite of love is use.  And mere use always become abuse.  And we live in a culture of abuse.