The Dark Tales of the Christian Sex Addiction Industry [View all]

[marmar]

The Dark Tales of the Christian Sex Addiction Industry
There’s a reason so many young men believe their sexual desires make them depraved—or worse.

BY KELSY BURKE
MARCH 23, 20211:43 PM


(Slate) The many times I’ve spoken, for my research, to young Christian men who believe they have a porn or sex addiction, they tell similar stories. One told me that as a teenage boy in his evangelical church, sex and porn were “kind of the popular sin to talk about just because you knew that it was something that every guy was struggling with.” Another young man spoke of his longtime adulthood mission to “win the war and be ready to keep on fighting” against his sexual desires. These men use the language of “sobriety and relapse,” referring to sex and porn, and they told me common experiences about how they came to realize their reputed problem and began attending treatment, sometimes in their church basements. As one put it, when his faith leaders began workshops on the matter, “Every session was just full of people—like there were people standing in the back. That’s what opened the floodgates.”

Robert Aaron Long, the man accused of killing eight people at Atlanta-area spas last week, also told authorities upon his arrest that he was a Christian and a sex addict. (He reportedly said he targeted the victims, including six women of Asian descent, to remove “temptation,” a motivation that police offered in a now-infamous press conference.) Both claims came under immediate scrutiny. Long’s own church removed him from its membership, since it could “no longer affirm that he is truly a regenerate believer in Jesus Christ.” And psychologists have explained that there is no evidence linking compulsive sexual behavior to violence and that in any case, sex addiction itself is not a diagnosable disorder. Many believed Long’s claims to be an excuse for a hate crime against Asian women, a violent attack on sex workers, or both.

But as a sociologist who has spent years studying the peculiar but persistent relationship between conservative Christianity and “sex addiction,” I do not believe these motivations exclude one another, and they’re well worth understanding in tandem. I’ve written previously for this magazine about how many conservative Christians frame men’s sexual desires as potentially out of control, given what they perceive as men’s natural biological urges and the secular social pressure for men to indulge in their sexual fantasies. In turn, a Christian industry has cropped up to include literally hundreds of products and resources—books, websites, support groups, apps, and software programs—created by and for Christians to overcome reputed sex and pornography addictions. Long himself was reportedly a patient at an in-patient Christian treatment center that specialized in sex and porn addiction. Young white Protestant men like Long are indeed the most likely group to perceive themselves to be addicted to pornography, even though they use it less frequently than their secular counterparts. These “addictions” may not be traditionally diagnosable, but the system that pushes them—and in some cases profits from them—is very real. Many of the people behind this system are deeply rooted in the church and believe not only that young men’s sexual desires are pathological but that porn and sex work are an evil temptation that must be criminalized. We still have much to learn, but the killings in Atlanta should be cause for a reckoning among white evangelicals to reconsider the messages they send young people about sex, gender, and race. ...........(more)

https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/sex-addiction-fact-check-atlanta-shooting-history.html