(Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash)
(Photo by Zulfugar Karimov on Unsplash)
In October 2025, the BBC reported that UK visitors to the online pornography website Pornhub had fallen by 77% in the three months since age checks were introduced. These came after the Online Safety Act placed a legal requirement on such sites to ensure the protection of children and young people. One presumption drawn from this announcement, therefore, is that most if not all of that reduction involved under-18s. What is less clear, though, is whether those young people were being dissuaded from watching porn or whether they were moving to other sites with laxer restrictions.
This is a subject we rarely talk about in Church. Indeed, sex is something that has had a chequered past in Christian thought, which a lot of people trace back to St. Augustine and his belief that original sin was passed down the generations through procreation and birth.
Today, I am inviting you to consider such things by way of three simple points. Firstly, to confirm that sexual acts between consenting adults should be enjoyable. You only need to read the Biblical book of Song of Songs to see erotic love being celebrated as a pleasurable thing and, given Song of Songs is there in the Bible, we should rightfully see that pleasure as a gift from God rather than something to be disdained.
But, and here’s my second point, the Bible also makes it crystal clear that sexual intimacy is designed to work best when there is respect, love, and faithful commitment between two people. If any of those are missing it becomes a recipe for potential disaster.
Thirdly, let’s turn to something Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount. He suggested that if anyone looks upon another lustfully it is as though they have committed adultery with that person in their heart. In Jesus’ day, the legal judgment on anyone caught in adultery was death by stoning. I haven’t met anyone who thinks that Jesus was advocating the death penalty for ‘adultery of the heart’ but he was making an extremely serious point and it’s one that gets to the heart of the problem of pornography. Pornography invites the viewer to become personally invested in the scenes it depicts. It encourages exactly the kind of lust that Jesus warned against and has scant regard for love or commitment nor, in a lot of cases, for respect either. It’s a million miles from the kind of sexual experience and pleasure that God intends for us as part of a ‘til death do us part’ relationship.
Returning to the Online Safety Act, I’m all for anything that protects our young people but how much better if we could find a way, alongside the legislation, to really instil those values of respect, love and faithfulness in order to demonstrate that sex is always worth waiting for and best when practised within the channels and boundaries that God intends for us.
Prayer: Lord God, thank you for the gift of sexual intimacy. Please help our world – particularly our young people – to approach it in the right way and to embrace the values of love, respect and faithful commitment. May that begin with me. Amen.