When Russell Moore late last year reported about “sexbots”—the new wave of high-tech pornography that gives “sad, lonely people artificial intimacy with images and machines pretending to be persons”—he was advancing the warnings that Christianity Today has offered since it began 70 years ago.
Every Friday since last October we have presented on our website glimpses of how CT from the 1950s to the 1980s covered a variety of issues. We’ve quoted perspectives on abortion, race, politics, wars, rumors of wars, and much besides. I’ll summarize here some early articles on pornography, because over the years some people mocked evangelicals for being culturally behind the times by worrying about such matters—but it now looks as if CT was ahead of the times.
The February 17, 1958, cover story—sensationally headlined “Sex and Smut on the Newsstands”—began, “A virulent moral sickness is attacking American society. Its obvious symptoms may be seen at any newsstand in large cities or small. American society is becoming mentally, morally and emotionally ill with an unrestrained sex mania.”
Some restraints existed then, but CT “watched, appalled, as scores of new titles have made their appearance in the magazine field, many of them violating every standard of decency which has hitherto been recognized in the publishing field.” A CT writer at the time said, “It is high time that our churches awaken to the kind of material being circulated to teen-agers and young adults of both sexes, sold openly at drug stores and newsstands under the guise of sophistication and respectability.”
Exactly one month later, CT ran an investigative “Report on Obscenity: Indiscriminate Sale.” “Two young women learned that the ‘best’ literature in the nation’s capital is readily available to them, even though they are ministers’ daughters,” it said. “On a special research project for Christianity Today, they found easy access to the magazine stocks of three newsstands in downtown Washington.”
Within three blocks of the White House, they were able to buy “the May issue of Hush-Hush, which features ‘the inside story of the nude model who pinch-hit for Princess Meg,’ ” “the April issue of Ace, which includes the story of ‘a voluptuous wench,’ ” “the spring edition of Sunbathing Review, with more than 85 pictures of nude women and children,” and “the March edition of Night and Day, carrying several advertisements that offer by return mail pictures of women posed to order.”
On March 12, 1965, CT published “A Time for Moral Indignation,” in which editor in chief Carl F. H. Henry declared,
“The millions of Christians in America have a special duty,” Henry said. “They know that when anything becomes a national idol, it is because God has first been displaced and his moral law set aside. The final resolution lies with God, who alone can give purity of heart. But until such a time, Christians are summoned to reflect his holy wrath against every unclean thing.”
Every American dedicated to common decency must become morally indignant and let this indignation burn righteously in an articulate protest against an exploitation of sex that is unparalleled in the history of the world. Never before in human civilization has sex been so pervasively prostituted to financial gain, for the technological possibilities were not present until our time.
One month later, CT declared in “Facing the Tide of Obscenity” that “the decline of decency imperils wide reaches of modern culture and life. We are headed for doom unless pervasive immorality is arrested.” The only good news: “America has not sunk to the depravity of the pagan world that existed before revealed religion registered its impact upon society—not yet, happily.”
What to do?
The rising tide of indignation and concern also signals a moment of methodological danger for all who plot a remedial alternative. We should not rely mainly on programs that promote purity by destroying freedom. Legislative compulsion may provide penalties for infractions and restrain a sick society from iniquity momentarily, but no society will long survive whose citizens lack heart to abstain from evil; apart from the will to decency not even the best laws will keep men from destroying themselves.
CT criticized “the photographic cult of feminine nakedness supported by the magazine traffic in our day” and said, “At his first coming, Jesus Christ drove the money-changers out of the temple; in the final judgment will he not consign publishers and peddlers of sex temptation and their wares to the stenching refuse pits of Gehenna? . . . We are breeding a generation of sex giants with mustard-seed spirits.”
What role should government have? “Civil government will always be needed in a society of sinful and imperfect men. The promotion of just laws is a special responsibility of the people of God. In urging laws to halt the trend toward indecency we are on sure ground insofar as our concern is to protect human rights from the infringements of those who violate them.” But another danger lurked that way:
If we propose a paternalistic ground for government intervention whenever the license of madmen sets up a clamor for controls, we may be sharpening a two-edged sword of the state by a precedent that someday may threaten the freedom of good men and not simply, as we now propose, the license of bad men.
Commercial pressure might be a better approach: “Let us ask whether publishers, distributors, and magazine store operators approve these products for their own teen-agers.”
CT editors commented on July 2, 1965, that “now and then we read Playboy—not often, confessedly, but when Hugh Hefner, its editor, occasionally sends a copy hoping Christianity Today will debate his philosophy of sex and give him free promotion.” The editors quipped, “There seems to be only one aspect of grammar that interests Mr. Hefner as an editor—gender, the feminine particularly, so exposed as to suggest a maternal attachment that Mr. Hefner hasn’t yet outgrown.”
The descent since then has been steep. Russell Moore elsewhere summarized a Harper’s article about “ ‘gooning’—a pornography-obsessed subculture among predominantly Gen Z males who spend hours, even days, consuming pornography, often in front of multiple screens in specifically constructed rooms they call ‘gooncaves.’ ” Some gooners are “ ‘pornosexual’ . . .not just uninterested in real-life sex with a real-life person, but … terrified by it.”
Moore’s analysis is in line with the CT tradition, but high tech has brought people lower:
If we propose a paternalistic ground for government intervention whenever the license of madmen sets up a clamor for controls, we may be sharpening a two-edged sword of the state by a precedent that someday may threaten the freedom of good men and not simply, as we now propose, the license of bad men.
What’s unique here is not lust and shame (as old as Eden’s fig leaves) but the ecosystem that can give us exactly what we think we want—until we are so trapped that we no longer know how to feel want. Sexual sin distorts attachment; this ecosystem dissolves it. Porn industries and their allies don’t make people sexier. They evacuate the capacity for human eros by abstracting pleasure from persons, from story, from place, from love.
Moore is also right in his response:
The gooners are not some freakish fringe. They are omens of a disembodied age that beckons us all. We can say no to it. We might seem powerless in front of such matters, even willfully ignorant, but the broader body of Christ, transcending time and space, knows the way out: the mystery of Christ (Eph. 5:31–32).
But escaping this disembodiment will require us to recognize that we face not only our own fallen flesh but also an entire industry of unseen algorithms trained to lead us, step by step, toward this post-human hell.
CT writers in the 1960s saw where we were going. I did not see things as clearly when in the 1980s I taught a media law course at The University of Texas at Austin and told the students about Miller v. California, the 1973 case that opened the doors wide for pornography as a hallmark of individual liberty.
I don’t suspect those Supreme Court justices had imagination, or awareness of the depth of sin, to foresee this enslaved new world. Nor did I, and I gave the students my opinion: I thought it a poor decision, but one that did take into account First Amendment protections.
I look at it differently now. If laws on pornography are to change, many people need to stop associating its omnipresence with freedom of the press. We should instead see it as a right to enslave. I’m suggesting this not as a matter of constitutional law but as a media-philosophy approach: Given enslaving algorithms, my fellow journalists should describe porn not as First Amendment freedom but insidious psychological bondage.
Any legal action, even if it could get past cultural czars, is probably too late, because the thin fence of the law can’t stop a social avalanche. We need a cultural awakening, which maybe at some earlier point could have come through reserved intellectual persuasion. Now (and I suspect it was always this way) it can come only through Christ changing hearts.
Moore’s conclusion: Christians need to be “seeing clearly and modeling a different story—one that is set at a wedding feast, not in a warehouse of screens.” He writes, “Among the first tasks of the 21st-century church will be to break this spell—to remind ourselves that we are creatures, not machines, and that we are created for love. … We can offer grace and mercy and community through the gospel and, with it, actual life and love.
“The gates of hell cannot withstand that kind of love. Surely the screens of goonspace can’t either.”
Marvin Olasky is editor in chief at Christianity Today.
This article appeared in the May/June 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "The Moral Rot of Pornography".
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