This postThe hosts of Mordor are on the march, flooding every city and town and hamlet where man can be found. Like a massive wall of evil, an avalanche of destruction, an explosion of bile, they storm our defenses, blasting down doors when they can and seeping in through the cracks when they can’t.
I’m talking about pornographers. According to this Daily Universe article, a new pornographic website is created every 39 seconds. That’s over two thousand new sites a day, around 800,000 new sites a year. And that’s just the Internet — similar garbage permeates movies, TV, music, books, and any other form of media you can imagine. It’s everywhere.
But let’s just focus on the Internet, since that’s probably the easiest access point for most people. The pornographers are having a heyday; in the past they were restricted to the adult sections of bookstores and Blockbusters, but now they’re just a click away from shoving their excrement down our throats. People used to have to actively seek it out, but now it’s chasing us down, haunting us at every turn, popping up everywhere.
I worry. I worry not just about the brethren of the Church, but also about my own future children. What kind of a world are they going to inherit? How am I going to keep them from being poisoned by this filth? I can’t just ban them from ever using the Internet — in the twenty-first century, it would be almost impossible to keep them away even in their childhood years, let alone their whole lives. And the web itself isn’t evil, anymore than a television set is.
No, they’ll grow up in a world dominated by the Internet, and there’s no way around it. Considering that filters are largely inadequate (they can’t keep up with the growth of the industry, and the pornography peddlers aren’t stupid, either), right now the only thing we can do is teach correct principles, make sure the computer’s out in the open, have the sort of relationship with our children where they’ll tell us if they run into pornography, and pray, pray, pray like the hurricane of hell is towering over us. Because it is.
Satan’s smart, you know. With a minimum effort he gets maximum reach. Not every man has a weakness toward alcoholism, or theft, or murder. But every man has hormones. (Yes, I realize that women can become addicted to pornography as well, but the real problem is among the men. After all, you don’t see a predominance of female rapists.) And it doesn’t take much exposure for a man (or boy) to become addicted. Imagine a world where looking at a sign or a magazine could somehow inject heroin into your bloodstream. Pornography’s like that. It’s like the sick, twisted inverse of Moses’ brass serpent. Look and die. (Spiritually.)
That brings up another deadliness that flies in on pornography’s coattails: like a clear poison, there aren’t any real physical signs. No smell of alcohol, no tipsiness, no scars on the forearm, nothing. It’s a spiritual disease, albeit one that leeches off the body. The signs are much, much harder to detect.
And so it silently spreads, ruining lives, twisting men into animals, enslaving them to their passions. Joseph Smith once said that carnality and lust would be the greatest trial for the elders in the latter days, or something along those lines. Like the plague it eats away at our strength. It’s a hellish anesthetic, one that is neutralizing the priesthood left and right.
Because so many lives have been messed up already, a lot of focus is on repair, on healing, on saving those who are lost. But that’s just putting a bandaid on a cancer. (Make no mistake: it’s important for those people, immeasurably so. But we’ve got to keep striking at the source.) Yes, we will never fully extinguish pornography, but if we can just get it out of our faces and back into the slimy sewers whence it came, we’ll be able to deal with this epidemic. And if not? One by one the elders of Israel will fall. Not all, of course, but too many will. It’s heartbreaking and at times painfully depressing. When I realize how extensive its reach is, I feel like Frodo at the Black Gate looking on as the armies of Mordor march. Darkness is enshrouding the world.
But, as with Frodo, there is hope. Efforts like CP80 can do a lot of good (and I hope it passes). And filters will keep out a lot of the filth, which is better than nothing. In the end, though, the only real solution is the gospel. Evil will be there no matter what; the only real way to be safe is to cling to Christ with all our strength, to put on the whole armor of God, and to use the Atonement if we fall. Without that inner strength, we all are vulnerable. But with God all things are possible.
