There’s a strange silence in the Church when it comes to porn. Not silence in the sense of absence—anyone who grew up in youth group remembers the sermons about “guarding your eyes” or the endless purity pledges—but silence in the sense of honesty.
Because behind the warnings, the accountability software, the pulpits pounding on “sexual immorality,” sits a reality too many Christians live with: shame so suffocating that most never actually admit their struggle to anyone.
Porn is an open secret, buried under the pews. The statistics bear it out: about two-thirds of Christian men admit to viewing porn at least monthly, with most saying they’ve watched in the past week.
Among women, the numbers are rising fast. Barna has reported that 56% of women under 25 watch porn, with a third doing so monthly. Yet church conversations still tend to pretend this is a “men’s issue,” as if women’s desire were some foreign concept. What that means in practice is that people—men and women alike—fight their battles in silence.
And that silence is killing us.
Shame has always been Christianity’s favorite bludgeon when it comes to sex. From purity culture “modesty talks” to marriage books that frame women’s bodies as marital debt, the message is clear: if you’re not perfectly pure, something’s wrong with you. But shame doesn’t heal anyone. It just ensures people never raise their hand for help.
Sheila Gregoire, author of The Great Sex Rescue and one of the most prominent Christian voices critiquing the Church’s sexual teaching, has spent years documenting the fallout.
“The evangelical Church has done so much to make sure that men and women are seen as very different, I think to perpetuate a gender hierarchy,” she said. “And what that does is it really makes everybody double down on the fact that men and women are different sexually, even though it doesn’t work that way necessarily.”
In practice, that hierarchy doesn’t just distort marriage. It distorts discipleship. Women told Gregoire’s team they felt “like prostitutes” in their own marriages. Young girls are told their value is tied to what they can offer sexually. Boys are told they’re doomed to lust forever, so porn is just inevitable. The net result? No one actually believes freedom is possible. And when porn becomes inevitable, honesty becomes unnecessary. Why confess what you’ve already been told is unfixable?
It’s not just men watching porn. It never has been. But churches have written their script as if lust is a male problem, and women are just supporting characters. The sermon illustrations, the “Every Man’s Battle” small groups, the awkward locker-room-style accountability sessions—they all assume one gender struggles while the other is tasked with managing that struggle.
Gregoire is clear about how damaging that framing has been.
“Sex in the evangelical world is seen primarily through a male lens,” she said. “Sex is about a man’s needs, and men are entitled to sex. And then women have to provide it. Because men have a sex drive, which is insatiable.”
That insatiability narrative has been weaponized into excuses: a husband “needs” porn if his wife doesn’t “give him enough.” A teenager “can’t help himself” if he stumbles online. A pastor who falls is framed as a cautionary tale for men, not a betrayal of his whole community. Women, meanwhile, are left unacknowledged—both those wounded by this culture and those struggling in their own sexual shame.
But the numbers don’t lie. More women than ever are consuming porn, and the younger the demographic, the more normalized it becomes. The problem isn’t that women have suddenly become more “like men.” It’s that women were always sexual beings. The Church just pretended otherwise.
Here’s the toxic cycle: churches preach about porn with language dripping in shame. People who struggle feel too ashamed to admit it. Because they don’t admit it, everyone thinks they’re the only one. And because everyone thinks they’re the only one, the shame deepens. Rinse. Repeat.
Rebecca Lindenbach, one of Gregoire’s co-authors, put it starkly.
“A 13-year-old watches porn for the first time and thinks, ‘Well, I’ve done it now. This is my life because I’ve been told as soon as it starts, it doesn’t stop,’” she said.
This is the lie porn shame tells us: that the moment you’ve failed, you are your failure. You don’t get redemption. You don’t get help. You don’t get to speak up. So you shut down. And the Church, too often, lets you.
Why has the Church been so reluctant to open up this conversation in healthier ways? Partly because fear-based control is simpler than messy honesty.
“Many youth pastors try to scare students into staying away from lust, using fear to control people into doing the ‘right thing,’” Gregoire said.
Fear works in the short term. It gets teenagers to sign pledge cards and married couples to perform out of obligation. But fear doesn’t transform hearts. It just buries wounds until they resurface years later. Porn addiction festers in that buried place. What could be exposed, healed and walked through in community instead becomes hidden, secret and corrosive.
So how do we break the silence? It starts with stripping shame from the conversation. Gregoire insists sexual attraction itself isn’t the enemy.
“We need a much better conversation around lust that sexual attraction is normal,” she said. “Sexual feelings are normal, but with those feelings comes the responsibility to treat others with dignity and humanity.”
That’s where the Church has a chance to be countercultural in the best way. The wider world talks about porn consumption as harmless self-expression. The Church too often talks about it as irredeemable sin. But somewhere between apathy and panic lies a third way: acknowledging human sexuality as good, but pornography as a distortion of it.
That requires leaders brave enough to speak openly without resorting to cliché or condemnation. It requires communities that respond to confession with grace, not gossip. It requires men and women both recognizing they are whole people with sexual desires—and whole people in Christ, not defined by them.
And here’s the encouraging twist: Gen Z and millennials aren’t disappearing from the pews. They’re showing up. Barna and Gloo’s latest State of the Church report found that Gen Z Christians now attend church about 1.9 weekends per month, and millennials about 1.8—both higher than boomers. These are the generations who grew up with the internet in their pocket, the easiest access to porn in human history. If they’re still showing up to church, then there’s a massive opportunity for the Church to show up for them.
Imagine a church that could look a teenager in the eye and say: Yes, we know what you’re facing. You are not alone. And there’s grace big enough for this too. That kind of church could be worth staying for.
But it won’t happen by default. It will take pastors willing to admit they don’t have all the answers. Parents willing to have messy conversations without collapsing into panic. Small groups where people can actually confess what’s real, not what sounds spiritual.
Repentance, Gregoire and her team argue, is required—not just for individual porn users, but for the entire evangelical framework that gendered lust, silenced women and shackled men. That means apologizing for the damage, dismantling toxic teaching and rebuilding something rooted in grace and truth.
It won’t be neat. It won’t be easy. But it will be holy. Because the silence isn’t working. And the longer we keep pretending, the deeper the shame burrows. The Church has a choice: keep doubling down on fear and shame, or start becoming the place where people can finally speak the thing they’re most afraid to say.
