Allen Parr is a pastor and YouTube superstar, and he’s a powerful voice in the fight against pornography. In our recent podcast, Pastor Allen shared with us the hidden ways that porn can destroy your life before you even realize it. He also offered a powerful message of hope for those looking to overcome porn.
Here are six questions about porn with Allen Parr of The Beat!
Article at a Glance:
What’s a surprising way that porn can harm your life?
“One of the things that is plaguing a lot of men—and this used to be an issue that only surfaced in older men, middle aged men—is erectile dysfunction.”
Studies are showing a significant increase in erectile dysfunction issues in younger men. “When you’re consuming a lot of pornography, it basically trains you to only get excited—to only get aroused when you see all this crazy stuff,” explained Parr.
There’s lots of research to back up this claim, as we’ve written here.
Pastor Allen continued, explaining how our brains learn to crave the novelty and variety offered by porn. Consequently, when we approach sex with a real human being, porn conditions us to be dissatisfied and disappointed. “The newness and excitement is nowhere close to what you’d see on the screen. The body is not responding to what you naturally experience as God intended.”
How does porn impact our relationship with God?
One of the main concerns we hear from people who come to us for help is that they feel farther away from God because of pornography. Porn creates a rift in our spiritual walk with God.
Pastor Allen explained why this happens, “When we get saved, we are indwelt by the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit. One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to convict us.”
Consequently, the Christian can’t simply look at porn with impunity. The Holy Spirit living within them will bring conviction, making the conscience uneasy and compelling them to remove this obstacle to closer communion with God. How so? Parr pointed to two specific ways:
First, we feel we are displeasing God when we watch porn. We know this is because porn goes against God’s design for sex. Second, we have the feeling of being a hypocrite and ashamed of what we’re doing. How can we profess to Christians when we have this habit in our lives? So, there’s a natural feeling of being distanced from God when we look at porn.
Porn is considered a “small sin” by many people, Christians and non-Christians alike. But Parr explained, “When we get saved, all we see is the big stuff. But the more we grow, we get more convicted about little things.”
How does porn lower our self-esteem?
Porn actors are paid actors. They get paid to act. It’s fake intimacy. It’s a counterfeit of God’s beautiful gift of sex. We always need to remember that porn is an imitation. It’s not the real deal.
Pastor Allen went on to explain how this impacts the way we see ourselves, “Naturally, when we consume pornography, we’re going to make comparisons. We’re going to compare ourselves with other people.”
So, if you watch porn, it can hurt your self-esteem because you feel like you don’t measure up to the porn performers. Recent research bears this out. One study of both men and women concluded, “Participants who used pornography more frequently reported higher levels of sexual insecurity”1
Pastor Allen said it can make a guy think, “I’m not going be able to truly please a woman sexually.” Likewise, it can affect the way men view their sexual partners, as we explain here.
How does porn contribute to sex trafficking?
Porn doesn’t just affect you and your personal relations. Pastor Allen told us about a recent conversation he had with a former porn actress. She compared the coercion and abuse she experienced in the porn industry to modern-day slavery.
You can read more about the connection between porn and sex trafficking here.
How does violence in porn shape our view of sex?
“Satan likes to tempt us with sexual boredom,” Parr said. What does this mean? It means that lust can lead to masturbation, masturbation can lead to porn, and porn can lead to increasingly extreme and deviant forms of porn and even sexual behavior.
When you watch porn, initially, it’s exciting and very arousing. What happens over time, however, is that the same kinds of porn can lose their stimulating effect. For many people, this leads them on a path of increasingly violent and even illegal porn.
What’s the first step away from porn?
Pastor Allen’s answers to these five questions could be very discouraging! Fortunately, he didn’t leave us there. Our last question was about the path to freedom from porn.
He said, “We’re always looking for a quick fix. We’re looking for ways to get over certain things. While there’s value to those things, I believe it comes down to a matter of the heart. When the pain of your sin outweighs the pleasure you get from it, then you’ll stop.”
(We’ve written here about how long it takes to recover from porn addiction.)
What’s the practical way to begin evaluating the pain of the sin versus the pleasure it gives you? Parr says you take an inventory. Begin by asking these questions:
- How is it impacting me?
- How is it hurting my marriage?
- How is it affecting my ministry?
- How is it wasting my time?
- How is it draining my finances?
To listen to the full podcast with Allen Parr, click here!
1 Paul J. Wright, Robert S. Tokunaga, Debby Herbenick, & Bryant Paul, “Pornography, Sexual Insecurity, and Orgasm Difficulty,” Health Communication (2021). Accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10410236.2021.1958985