The resources below highlight the psychological, physical, and spiritual impact of the sex industry in its various forms. This confirms Jesus’ warnings about lust, Paul’s warning that idolatry, immorality, and greed are bound together, and the older Jewish and Christian concern about idol worship and consuming something forbidden.

These are the images used in artistic physical displays. They are survey questions and conversation starters that are topically and thematically organized. They demonstrate how Jesus is relevant to each topic or theme. You can also just view the images on your device. If you would like, see all our Conversation Stations; below are the ones that relate to the topic of Sex.

Is a Good Friend Hard to Find? (instructions and conversation tree)

Find Your Heart's Desire? (and instructions and theology of desire)

Your Body: Does it Have a Purpose? (and instructions) 

Rate Your Last Relationship

Desires, Beliefs, and How We Know Truth

A presentation comparing the role of desire in various belief systems.  Our desires suggest that we have both good and evil in us (we’re made in the image of God & wounded by sin).  This does not prove, but it does agree with, the biblical story.  Some desires can be taken up and expanded by Jesus; other desires, Jesus reshapes or transforms.

How Our Choices Shape Our Desires: Experiencing the Triune God

Text of a message on various biblical passages on how our choices shape our desires.

Sex, Love, Dating, and Marriage 

This link takes you to our page on The Song of Songs: A Play in Five Acts. There are texts and slides of messages bringing this beautiful play into dialogue with our modern practices of, and ideas about, sex, dating, love, and marriage.

God is the Primary Owner of Your Body: The Purpose and Destiny of Our Bodies

Text of a message on 1 Corinthians 6:19 - 20; see also resources on 1 Corinthians

Is Premarital Sex Really Sinful?

An exploration of cultural assumptions and biblical passages

Does the Christian Story of Sexuality Make Any Sense at All? Sexuality and Social Justice

A message exploring how the Western, individualistic framework of modernism and postmodernism does not give us a relational framework for ethics; that means "sexual freedom" also logically leads to exploitative "economic freedom"

Does Jesus Satisfy Our Thirst? 

Text of a message on John 4:1 - 30. Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman by the well is a case study in addressing desire.

The Resurrection of Jesus - Its Historicity and Meaning

The foundation of a theological understanding of our bodies, souls, and personhood

National Center on Sexual Exploitation (website)

Stop Trafficking Demand (website) on the links between porn and prostitution

Stop Porn Culture (website)

Global Centurion: Fighting Modern Day Slavery by Focusing on Demand (website)

Fight the New Drug (website)

Culture Reframed (website)

Time Magazine Interactive, Addiction and the Brain. Time Magazine

Vanessa Grigoriadis, The New Position on Casual Sex. New Yorker Magazine, Jan 13, 2003.

David Amsden, Not Tonight, Honey. I'm Logging On. New Yorker Magazine, Oct 20, 2003.

David Bentley Hart, The Pornography Culture, The New Atlantis, Summer 2004.

Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. St. Martin’s Griffin | Amazon page, Aug 2006.

Michael D. Lemonick, How We Get Addicted. Time Magazine, Jul 5, 2007.

William M. Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain. InterVarsity Press | Amazon page, 2009.

Richard Abowitz, Rob Black, Porn’?s Dirty Whistlebower, Spills Trade Secrets. Daily Beast, Apr 21, 2013.

Mark Heisler, Role Models for the Id. Truthdig, Apr 25, 2010.

Julie Bindel, The Truth About the Porn Industry. The Guardian UK, Jul 2, 2010.

Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Beacon Press | Amazon page, Apr 2011.

Gary Wilson, The Great Porn Experiment. TEDxGlasgow, May 16, 2012.

Naomi Wolf, The Porn Myth. New Yorker Magazine, Feb 6, 2013.

Economist, Why Does Liberal Iceland Want to Ban Online Pornography?  The Economist, Apr 23, 2013.

Martin Daubney, Experiment Convinced Me that Online Porn is the Most Pernicious Threat Facing Children Today. Daily Mail UK, Sep 25, 2013.

Leonardo Blair, Ex Porn Star Vanessa Belmond Confesses Horrors of Seductive Porn Industry; Brings Porn-Loving Men Close to Tears With Story. Christian Post, Oct 23, 2013.

Mary Pulido, Child Porn: Basic Facts About a Horrific Crime. Huffington Post, Oct 17, 2013.

Ron Gavrieli, Why I Stopped Watching Porn. TEDx Talk, Oct 26, 2013. Notes that porn is about male dominance, and is filmed prostitution.

Danica Kirka and Jim Gomez, Operation Endeavor: Authorities Dismantle International Pedophile Ring That Live-Streamed Sex Abuse. Huffington Post, Jan 16, 2014.

Gregory Ciotti, Is Your Brain Truly Ready for Junk Food, Porn, or the Internet? Sparring Mind blog.

Rick Thomas, Five Sure Fire Ways to Motivate Your Son to Use Pornography. The Gospel Coalition, Feb 13, 2014.

Rachel Shteir, When Pornography Pays for College: The Trouble with Belle Knox. Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug 4, 2014.

Carl R. Trueman, The Purpose of Pornography. First Things, Aug 5, 2014.

The Young Turks, Do These Porn Watching Habits Surprise You? The Young Turks, Oct 2, 2014. Re: women choosing more often to watch lesbian, gay, and teen porn; men choosing teen, milf, mature

Luke Geraty, An Open Letter to My Porn-Watching Dad. Faithit, date unknown.

Robert Ferdman, Americans Aren’t Getting Married, and Researchers Think Porn Is Part of the Problem. Washington Post, Dec 21, 2014.

FaithIt, This Is How Porn Got a Huge Jumpstart in the World—I Had No Idea. FaithIt, date unknown.

Matt Fradd, Neuroscience Has Proved That Porn is Literally Making Men's Brains More Childish. LifeSite News, Jan 14, 2015.

Fight the New Drug, The Internet's Most Popular Genre of Porn is Disturbing. Fight the New Drug, Jan 27, 2015.

John-Henry Westen, Want to Stop Sex-Trafficking? Look to America's Porn Addition. Huffington Post, Jan 28, 2015.

Fight the New Drug, Companies That Profit Off Porn: This Year's Dirty Dozen. Fight the New Drug, Jan 30, 2015.

John Jalsevac, Even the Co-Stars Think "Fifty Shades of Gray" Is Awful (and Maybe Even a Bit Like Hitler). Lifesite News, Feb 11, 2015.

Gary Wilson, Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction. Commonwealth Publishing | Amazon page, Feb 2015.

Rescue: Freedom, How Clicking Porn Directly Fuels the Sex Trafficking Industry. Fight the New Drug, Mar 2, 2015. A 5 minute video.

Audrey Assad, For Women on Porn Addiction. The Porn Effect website.

10 Popular Ex-Porn Stars Share The Raw Reality Behind Their Most Popular Scenes. Fight the New Drug, May 26, 2015.

Alyssa Rosenberg, The Uber-ization of Porn. Washington Post, May 29, 2015.

Fight the New Drug, The New Epidemic: 2016's Global Porn Problem. Fight the New Drug, Jul 22, 2015.

Matt Fradd, 4 Ways Porn Warps the Male Brain. Covenant Eyes, Jul 31, 2015.

Dan Gray, The Serious Mental Costs of Watching Porn. Fight the New Drug, Oct 16, 2015.

David Vine, 'My Body Was Not Mine, But the U.S. Military's'. Politico, Nov 1, 2015.  Inside the disturbing sex industry thriving around America's bases

Kassondra Cloos and Julie Turkewitz, Hundreds of Nude Photos Jolt School. New York Times, Nov 6, 2015.

Fight the New Drug, Ex-Porn Star Explains Her Past to Newborn Son in This Beautifully Heartfelt Letter. Fight the New Drug, Nov 19, 2015.

Charles Camosy, On Pornography, U.S. Catholic Bishops May Find an Unlikely Ally. Religion News Service, Nov 20, 2015.

Jonathon Van Maren, Fancy That. Noam Chomsky Was Right About Porn. LifeSite News, Dec 21, 2015.

Paula Banca, Laurel S. Morris, Simon Mitchell, Neil A. Harrison, Marc N. Potenza, Valerie Voon, Novelty, Conditioning and Attentional Bias to Sexual Rewards. Journal of Psychiatric Research, Jan 2016. See short summary by Guest Author, Pornography Addiction: Seeking Novelty Until Desensitized. National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Nov 25, 2024.

The Internet provides a large source of novel and rewarding stimuli, particularly with respect to sexually explicit materials. Novelty-seeking and cue-conditioning are fundamental processes underlying preference and approach behaviors implicated in disorders of addiction. Here we examine these processes in individuals with compulsive sexual behaviors (CSB), hypothesizing a greater preference for sexual novelty and stimuli conditioned to sexual rewards relative to healthy volunteers. Twenty-two CSB males and forty age-matched male volunteers were tested in two separate behavioral tasks focusing on preferences for novelty and conditioned stimuli… This study shows that CSB individuals have a dysfunctional enhanced preference for sexual novelty possibly mediated by greater cingulate habituation along with a generalized enhancement of conditioning to rewards. We further emphasize a dissociable role for cue-conditioning and novelty preference on the early attentional bias for sexual cues. These findings have wider relevance as the Internet provides a broad range of novel and potentially rewarding stimuli.

Nancy Jo Sales, Teen Girls and Social Media: A Story of "Secret Lives" and Misogyny. NPR, Feb 29, 2016.

Olga Khazan, Why Straight Men Gaze at Gay Women. The Atlantic, Mar 8, 2016.

Nicholas Kristof, Every Parent's Nightmare. New York Times, Mar 10, 2016.

Gail Dines, Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn't Matter: It's a Public Health Crisis. Washington Post, Apr 8, 2016.

Samuel D. James, See No Evil. First Things, Apr 27, 2016. Regarding porn addiction and how liberal culture fails because of its lack of a positive ethic of relational involvement.

Top Tenz, Top 10 Dirty Facts About Porn. Top Tenz, May 4, 2016. Psychological, neurological facts and industry stats

Lori Lowe, New Research Reveals How Porn Affects Relationships. Marriage Gems, May 5, 2016.

Fight the New Drug, How to Spot (and Rescue) a Sex Trafficking Victim. Fight the New Drug, Jun 21, 2016.

Judith Shulevitz, It’s O.K., Liberal Parents, You Can Freak Out About Porn. New York Times, Jul 16, 2016.

Bec Cranford-Smith, Progressive Evangelical Female's Story of Pornography and Sexual Addiction. Patheos, Sep 10, 2016.

Gail Dines, Why Porn Is a Public Health Crisis. Culture Reframed, Nov 28, 2016. And video of Gail Dines, Why Porn Is a Public Health Crisis. Culture Reframed, Feb 20, 2017. And Gail Dines, Extensive Research into the Harms of Pornography on Children and Young People. Culture Reframed, Jun 27, 2017.

Margaret Talbot, The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn. The New Yorker, Dec 5, 2016.

Brooke Jarvis, Can We "Cure" the Men Who Pay for Sex? GQ, Feb 2, 2017. Attempts at rehabilitating men who pay for sex

Andrew Brown, The Danger of Porn Goes Beyond Sex - It Normalizes Unchecked Desire. The Guardian, Jul 17, 2017. Insightful, and exposes the weakness in secular leftist thought since there is no check on the desire.

Monica Gabriel Marshall, Divorce Lawyers Say This Is Why Marriages Are Falling Apart. Verily Magazine, Jul 28, 2017. “In an informal meeting survey in 2002, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers questioned 350 divorce attorneys and found that roughly 60 percent reported that internet porn played a significant role in the divorces, with excessive interest in online porn contributing to more than half of such cases. It’s not just lawyers who are picking up on the trend. In 2005, Dr. Jill Manning, a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in sexual addiction, pornography, or betrayal trauma, brought her research on porn and its connection to divorce before the Senate. According to Manning’s research, 56 percent of divorce cases involve one party having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites.”

Fight the New Drug, How Porn Fuels Sex Trafficking. Fight the New Drug, Aug 23, 2017.

Julie Bindel, My Work as a Prostitute Led Me to Oppose Decriminalization. BBC, Oct 2, 2017. In favor of criminalizing the sex customer.

Don Mahle, One Man's Journey: How I Stopped Watching Porn for 1 Year and Why I'm Not Going Back. Films for Action, Nov 13, 2017. “The surprising effects of a man's experiment with eliminating pornography from his life.”

The Young Turks, How AI Is Being Used To Create Fake Porn. The Young Turks, Jan 30, 2018.

Jeet Heer, The Triumph of Porn Over Social Conservatism. New Republic, Jan 17, 2018.

Maggie Jones, What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn. New York Times Magazine, Feb 7, 2018.

Makini Brice, Jeff Mason, Jonathan Oatis, Trump Signs Law to Punish Websites for Sex Trafficking. Reuters, Apr 11, 2018.

Scott Beauchamp, The Pornification of Everything. The American Conservative, Jun 7, 2018.

Andrew Dugan, More Americans Say Pornography is Morally Acceptable. Gallup, Jun 5, 2018. From 36% in 2017 to 43% in 2018.

Kaitlyn Tiffany, Pornhub Wants to Be a Lifestyle Brand. Vox, Sep 14, 2018.

Sasha Savitsky, How Brittni De La Mora Left the Porn Industry for Relationship with God: 'I Didn't Want to Admit I Made a Mistake'. Fox News, Jan 4, 2019.

John and Julie Gottman, Renowned Relationship Therapists Drs. Julie and John Gottman Release "Open Letter on Porn". Fight the New Drug, Feb 19, 2019.

Isaac Chotiner, A Sociologist of Religion on Protestants, Porn, and the “Purity-Industrial Complex”. The New Yorker, May 3, 2019.

Fight the New Drug, 10 Ex-Porn Performers Reveal The Brutal Truth Behind Their Most Popular Scenes. Fight the New Drug, May 22, 2019.

Michael H. Keller and Gabriel J.X. Dance, The Internet Is Overrun With Images of Child Sexual Abuse. What Went Wrong? New York Times, Sep 28, 2019. “Online predators create and share the illegal material, which is increasingly cloaked by technology. Tech companies, the government and the authorities are no match.” “Children, some just 3 or 4 years old, being sexually abused and in some cases tortured.”

William Z. Nardi, Feminists Have Turned on Pornography. National Review, Oct 18, 2019. “Decades ago, one prominent activist identified porn as decadent and exploitative. That insight is now in short supply.”

W. James Antle III, Welcome To The Conservative Porn Wars. The American Conservative, Jan 15, 2020. “The Right is divided over the proper role of government and whether it should be used to pursue the common good.”

Saagar Enjeti, NYT's Pornhub Victory Shows Conservatism Is Irrelevant. Rising | The Hill, Dec 10, 2020. Refers to Nicholas Kristof, An Uplifting Update, on the Terrible World of Pornhub. New York Times, Dec 9, 2020. “Young heroes lead in confronting pornography companies that monetize rape and child abuse” and Nicholas Kristof, The Children of Pornhub. New York Times, Dec 3, 2020. “Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?” Enjeti argues that social conservatives have isolated themselves into grievance-oriented media bubbles and fail to speak to the country’s center-left culture, which speaks the language of harm and not religion, tradition, or sacredness. Co-host Krystal Ball suggests that libertarian economic conservatives and neoliberals reign in both the GOP and Dems, though.

Elle Stanger, The New York Post Outed A Paramedic As A Sex Worker. Here’s What They Didn’t Tell You. Huffington Post, Dec 19, 2020. “Women get harassed, stalked, even targeted for assault and murder when people question their sexual morality in a public and shaming manner.”

Amy Bond, When I Was Outed For My Porn Past, Pole Dancing Helped Me Heal. Huffington Post, Feb 1, 2021.

Frontline PBS, Sex Trafficking in America.  Frontline PBS, Mar 30, 2021.  A one hour documentary. Highlights the work of Arizona law enforcement officers pursuing pimps and buyers.  The process of prosecution highlights why it is imperative that trafficked women are not held to be offenders, but victims.

Christa Stamper, Sex (and Sobs) on the Set: Actresses Lay Bare Their Thoughts on Baring it All. American Thinker, May 21, 2021.

Elizabeth Bruenig, Modern Porn Education Is Totally Unprepared for Modern Porn. The Atlantic, Jul 18, 2021. “Courses to train young people to be ethical consumers of porn have a hugely complex task ahead of them.”

Ron Dicker, Billie Eilish Says Porn Fixation Starting At Age 11 'Destroyed' Her Brain. Huffington Post, Dec 15, 2021.

Anna Moore, ‘I Have Moments of Shame I Can’t Control: The Lives Ruined by Explicit ‘Collector Culture.’ The Guardian, Jan 6, 2022. “The swapping, collating and posting of nude images of women without their consent is on the rise. But unlike revenge porn, it is not a crime. Now survivors are demanding a change in the law.”

TLDR News, The Surprising Company Who Secretly Controls Porn.  TLDR Business, Aug 23, 2022.  Credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard.  

Maham Javaid, Barbie’s ‘Pornographic’ Origin Story, as Told by Historians. Washington Post, Jul 19, 2023. “A new trailer for the Barbie movie shows her visiting the real world. In reality, the doll was based on a German sex toy called Lilli.”

Thom Hartmann, Alarming New U.N. Report Proves Feminists Right - Want to Know What Men Really Think About Women???  Thom Hartmann, Jun 12, 2023.

Amanda McCracken, How Longing [for Love] Keeps Us from Healthy Relationships. TEDx Talks, Sep 29, 2023. McCracken shares her personal journey of realizing that she had become addicted to the longing for love, which was rooted in a sense of personal shame and also neuro-chemical realities about how we can become addicted to unrealistic fantasies, rather than believing she was worthy of love and understanding what healthy love is. This insight is going to be increasingly important to Christian spiritual formation.

Karen Travers and Emmanuelle Salina, Fake Explicit Taylor Swift Images: White House is ‘Alarmed’. ABC News, Jan 26, 2024. AI-generated porn.

Reuters, OnlyFans Exposed. Reuters, Mar 13, 2014.

Trish Leigh, Mind Over Explicit Matter: Quit Porn and Improve Intimacy through Neuroscience. Thomas Nelson, Mar 2025. See interview with James Li, Is P0rn Ruining Society? Neuroscientist Weighs In. Breaking Points, Nov 17, 2024.

Eva Wiseman, Sex, Love, and Robots: Is This the End of Intimacy?  Guardian, Dec 13, 2015.

Max Opray, Robots May Change the Sex Industry But Could They Replace Intimacy? Guardian, Apr 4, 2017.

Jenny Kleeman, The Race to Build the World's First Sex Robots. Guardian, Apr 27, 2017.

Trace William Cowen, Get a Closer Look at the $15,000 Sex Robot Set to Be Unveiled Later This Year. Complex, Apr 28, 2017.

Karen Turner, The Pros and Cons of Having Sex with Robots. Vox, Jan 12, 2018. Interview with author Neil McArthur, Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications. Amazon, Oct 13, 2017.

Sean Illing, Sex Robots Are Coming. We Might Even Fall in Love with Them. Vox, May 11, 2018.

E.J. Dickson, Sex Doll Brothels Are Now a Thing. What Will Happen to Real-Life Sex Workers? Vox, Nov 26, 2018.

Meredith Goldstein, I Could Really Use a Robot Companion Right About Now. Boston Globe, Jun 5, 2020. About emotional companionship

Desi Lydec and Trevor Noah, How Human-Robot Sex May Become Real. The Daily Show, Apr 23, 2021. A 6 minute humorous video

Vice, Secret Sex Parties of the Mega-Rich | Informer. Vice, Feb 2, 2022. A Front of House Manager reveals what working in a hotel for the super-rich is really like. From hiring out the whole hotel for a ‘themed’ orgy to covering the tracks of staff sleeping with customers, the Informer details how the job can be demanding physically and emotionally. Blood and gore are all part of the job. At the 6 minute mark, the House Manager says that they used a “divide and conquer” strategy among different ethnic groups working in teams at the hotel.

John Oliver, Sex Work. Last Week Tonight, Feb 28, 2022. Points out that sex for pay before a camera is art and therefore covered by free speech, but sex for pay without a camera is illegal in most states.