What Church and Porn Have in Common

Imagine yourself walking through two thresholds. The first threshold is into church. How do you enter? Do you enter as your full self?  Or do you pause and think, “Wait, will they accept me if they knew this about me? I will leave this part of myself here.”

Now imagine another threshold. This one is into a bedroom where you decided to consensually partake in an intimate act with another person. Do you enter as your full self?  Or do you pause and think, “Wait, will they accept me if they knew this about me? I will leave this part of myself here.”

Why am I asking these questions? It has become clear to me in my work that there are two places that are particularly different, but yet have the same effect on many of us in our relationship with ourselves and those who we are intimate with. These two places are church and porn. 

I am sure there might have been a bit of a gasp and maybe a feeling of disgust from what I just said, but please stay with me. 

There is this saying, “Be on your Sunday best.” When I heard this in my childhood before we went to church or in the movies, this was the indication that you put on your nice clothes and “button up” for God. Entering the place of worship means you bring with it reverence, respect, and a sense of dignity. I get it. That is important, especially the dignity piece. However, what it also brought with it was a sense of judgement too. There is a tendency to observe how people are behaving in these spaces and what kind of human they are being. We feel this in these spaces and that’s why many of us when asked how we are doing say, “I’m fine.” There are many cases though when the “I’m fine.” is a lie that we just don’t want to go into detail about, because we are afraid of what we would be met with if we told the truth. 

From the stories I have heard from others many of us feel like if we are our full selves at church we won’t be accepted. If people knew who we are behind closed doors or the thoughts we have from time to time, surely we would be looked down upon. The church can give way to perfectionism, and since none of us really are perfect, we pretend. As humans we can fall into the trap of comparison especially around sinning and who is the most morally sound. Which one of us deserves God’s love more? The idea that God loves us all confuses us, and so we set up guidelines around who we actually believe belongs to our community and who doesn’t. This premise causes us to internalize that we are not “good enough” to be ourselves in such a reverent place that we shape-shift to belong. This is how perfectionism and pretending get us. If we keep acting in these ways where we are not our authentic selves then how are we able to fully be present in our relationships with one another? 

Many individuals coming from conservative religious spaces have spoken to me about the way they felt in church was immediately transferred over to the bedroom. There was an element of performance they needed to live up to in order to feel a sense or worth and that they mattered. A lot of this came down to ignoring their own needs and a sense of what felt comfortable in order to provide a “pleasurable” experience even if they themselves weren't experiencing any pleasure. You can imagine that this is a more gendered and cishetero narrative for women in partnered relationships with men, but it also has also been experienced by men and those in the queer community. 

This relates to porn, the other place we take on perfectionism and performance.  In 2024 it was reported that around 40 million Americans regularly watch porn. In America, because we don’t value comprehensive sexual health education, porn becomes, by default, our number one sex educator. Porn comes in many different shapes and sizes. There is some porn that is created in an ethical manner where everyone is paid well, has consented to be there, and represents different bodies and demographics of people, but most often, you need to pay for that kind of porn. Many will seek out free porn and that isn’t always a good representation of what is real in today’s world. We see a certain way of being in these interactions on how we are “supposed” to experience intimacy and what it “should” look like and what we “should” look like. There are also assumptions we create as well on what we “should” enjoy sexually with another person. We then feel we need to be a certain way.  So, when we are in an intimate encounter we tend to be more in our brains trying on a role we think we need to play in order to appeal to the other person instead of being fully present with the person.  Performing. We perfect an idea instead of experiencing and learning about what we actually enjoy, how we want to be treated, and what we need to feel safe and secure in an intimate experience. We act out with the hope we are good enough to receive attention and the love we crave. 

The main ideas at play here is our need for a sense of belonging and secure attachment. We most certainly want to feel those in a space that represents our creator and in a space where we experience sexual intimacy with another person. 

Most of us feel like we may not measure up and so we hide ourselves. We become a package of secrets. We know that if we truly show who we are, then we too may be met with ridicule, blame, judgement, and therefore shame. This leads to rejection. Rejection is one of the major issues I see that plagues us as a society. Because we have set up a quest for perfectionism and performance, our baseline may just be a sense of internalized rejection. In today’s modern society we know that if we are not always showing the best sides of ourselves then we risk public mockery. This is clear from the recent “kiss cam affair” from the Cold Play concert. Granted, the two individuals who were in public having an affair didn’t make the best choice for themselves and they hurt others. However, the part that was equally as concerning for me was how we decided as a society to shame them relentlessly. No one learns from being shamed. We all know this. We as humans apparently like to throw stones, which goes back to, who is more morally sound? Who is more perfect? It can feel in this tech obsessed society that anyone being human is at risk of being made a fool. I do believe this is what is causing us to be the most isolated and lonely demographic to date. 

Church and porn represent to me the two different ends of a pendulum. Each can be very extreme in their own way and each holds great power in their influence over our sense of worth and value. They each in their severity are telling us that we don’t measure up as we are and so we do drastic things to find ways to find our worth. This could look like excluding people, telling people they don’t deserve the same rights and dignity as others, enduring pain with the idea that it will bring pleasure eventually, and or continuing in relationships that don’t suit us, to just name a few. When the pendulum stops swinging it stops in the middle. I believe the middle ground is recognizing that humans in general are messy. We will never be perfect. We need boundaries and a space that holds us in a loving way to care for us and where we can find support. We need open communication where we can practice being vulnerable without the fear of constant rejection and possible ridicule. These things can help us lean away from the need to be perfect and hopefully stop pretending all the time.They can help us to embrace the present and the idea that all of us just need to feel like we matter. When we learn how to do these things we open up our chance to create a community that is deeply rooted in comfort and care and we have more chances at experiencing pleasure and joy.