Does God hate porn?

I’m catching up with Kanye West, the new convert to Christianity, saying how God got him off porn. Now he’s letting the world know how bad it is! “And it just presents itself in the open like it’s okay, and I stand up and say, ‘No, it’s not okay.’”

But I’m trying to find where God the Ultimate Creator of Everything says: Stop looking at each other.

Is it in the Bible? Can you tell me where?

“You have eyes — can’t you see?” Jesus says.

Let’s go over some basic biblical facts?

All humans are loved by God (cf. 1 Jn 4:8; Mt 5:44).

The “commandment” of Jesus is to “love one another” (John 13:34; cf. Gal 5:6; 1 Jn 3:11, 3:23, 4:7, 4:11, 4:12; 2 Jn 6).

The only comment that Jesus seems to make on clothes is not to ‘worry’ about them (Lk 12:22; Mt 6:25).

What we call “porn” — as a theological situation — seems to be one loved person looking at another, and expressing feeling toward them that may or may not be loving.

Could porn use be humans not treating each other lovingly? Maybe so. But that is not a restriction of sexual display. The human body is never bad. And men, in Kanye West’s example, are not given any power to compel women to be clothed so his fantasies don’t run wild.

Now, I grew up in Evangelical Christianity, and know about the effort to measure goodness by how well the body is covered, and how few people you touch, look at, or think about in sexual terms.

It’s not in the Bible anywhere. We find, instead, a God who created humans and loves humans! That love includes human sexuality, which is often praised. “The curves of your thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a master craftsman,” says the man in the Song of Songs (7:1).

I’m not married to the woman in the Song, and the man isn’t either. They like each other. In the Bible, liking each other is fine.

The long Christian war against the body and sexuality is actually weirdly detached from the book they say contains it. The Bible starts out with naked people in a garden! “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” That is always the desired state.

When the snake, in Eden, looks at the naked humans, he moves to try to harm them. That’s the problem — not the humans being naked.

How we treat each other is the point.

The Christian idea is that God hates sex, but it’s never the case. Even the laws of the Old Testament aren’t really focused on sexual restriction.

Sex, unmarried or married, is “very good” in the Bible (cf. Genesis 1:31). “For everything God created is good,” Paul affirms in 1 Timothy 4:4.

If there’s a problem with porn, maybe it’s using, fantasy, or manipulation. These are symptoms of solitude. The Bible can help with that.

“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them,” he says in Matthew 18:20.

Connection is always prompted. “But how can one keep warm alone?” asks Ecclesiastes 4:11.

No good is ever assigned to not looking at people, which of course God does. “His eyes are on the ways of mortals,” says Job 34:21 (cf. Proverbs 5:21; Jeremiah 16:17, etc.).

The divine gaze isn’t sexual, you might say? But God is often understood as a groom to humans who are the ‘bride’. How does a husband look at a wife?

There is no prompt anywhere in the Bible to conceal sex acts. When Isaac and Rebecca, in Genesis 26:8, are sexual in some public way, they’re not critiqued even though they’re seen.

For Christian tradition, yes, the body was evil and ugly. There is something so unaccountably shameful in the nakedness of man,” John Calvin says, “that scarcely anyone dares to look upon himself, even when no witness is present.”

I prefer Ecclesiastes 3:11: “He has made everything beautiful in its time.”

As far as I can tell, Kanye West’s use of porn seems to have worked out great for him. He has a remarkable visual sense, as manifests now in fashion and his other pursuits. Is that not a result of the stimulation of porn?

He clearly developed a very fine taste in women, and the ability to convince them to be around him.

He seems to be developing a power problem. Maybe that was the problem when he looked at porn—feeling like he could control people?

But typically, porn is just interest in the form God made. It’s psychosexual and aesthetic development. Those are all good.

There might be mental manipulation, avoidance of real people, fantasy, etc. Those aren’t great, but they’re also part of the journey that every person makes. And they’re found in everything, not just porn.

In the Bible, the beauty of sexuality is always a transcendent good, as in the ‘Song of Songs’ — which means, the most important song.

Michael Kaufman explains: “Unlike classical Christian belief, the sexual act is not, in Judaism, understood to be a debasing experience from which holy people abstain. Judaism recognizes that sensual desire stems from the same divine source as do man’s most ethereal and spiritual components. Bearing God’s seal, it is meant, like everything else with which God endowed man, to be pressed into His service.”

There is no biblical teaching that sex acts embarrass or horrify God. No spiritual good is assigned to humans concealing their bodies.

No good comes from stopping yourself from being sexual when conditions are otherwise loving. All biblical heroes have sex.

Sarai, Rachel, Jacob, Moses, Saul, David. God’s favorite humans are often described as especially beautiful, and vulnerable to sexual attack because of it. That doesn’t make their beauty bad.

Rather, people have to learn to see them as God does. The Philistine commander, looking at David in 1 Samuel 29:9, says: “I know that you have been as pleasing in my eyes as an angel of God…”

To please the eyes is the function of an agent of God. Note David is the “apple of God’s eye” (Psalm 17:8).

The scene of David dancing all but naked in 2 Samuel 6:14 may be the closest scene in the Bible to the modern idea of pornography, if that means looking at someone with a desire that is sexually hopeful.

The servant girls who see him, in 2 Samuel 6:20–22, with sexual interest telegraphed, are not in violation.

Jesus is also perceived in very sexually enticing terms.

Youthful in beauty you are, beyond the sons of men;
grace was poured on your lips; therefore God blessed you forever.
Gird your sword on your thigh, O powerful one,
in your bloom and beauty . . .

In the messianic Psalm 45:2, we take in sexual details: lips, ‘sword’, ‘bloom and beauty’. This seems to focus on erotic appeal.

What about Matthew 5:28? — where Jesus says: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

The word ‘lust’, as Jason Staples details, is simply the word ‘covet’—a desire to take what isn’t yours, with no focus on sex. In the Ten Commandments, ‘lust’ or ‘coveting’ refers to houses, animals, servants (cf. Exo 20:17).

The same word is often used positively of really wanting something. Jesus “lusts” in Luke 22:15, and church leaders, says Paul in 1 Timothy 3:1, must “lust” for that position.

The idea of a sexual “lust” as as a special theological problem of human feelings out of control . . . has been an incredible scam.

Try this? Porn is the human, like an awkward teenager, allowing itself to look at the body for the first time in two thousand years, after a body-punishing false religious system weakened in its grip.

Suddenly, humans can look at each other—and like each other. They can begin to imagine being free and un-shamed.

We can begin to learn to acknowledge each other’s freedom (1 Cor 6:12).

We can begin to learn to not quarrel, attack, or judge.

We can — lovingly — guide each other to a higher consciousness? Not predicated on shaming the body.

Maybe porn is the baptism of the human race. “The act of stripping symbolized the removal of the ‘old self’ and the transition to the new,” suggests Robin M. Jensen in Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity.

Cyril of Jerusalem (313–386 A.D.), recording baptismal instructions, exclaims to the newly baptized, dripping-wet naked person: “Marvelous! You were naked in the sight of all and not ashamed! Truly you bore the image of the first-formed Adam, who was naked in the garden and was not ashamed.”

In Col. 3:8–9, Paul seems to be telling the same story.

But now, put off all such things as anger, rage, malice, slander, abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another since you have put off the old man with its practices and have been clothed with the new man that is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the one who created it.

They stand there, naked, dripping wet, and try to begin working on their speech toward each other. That’s the teachings.

We might even have a side-eye at the Gospel of Thomas, saying 37, where the disciples ask Jesus when he’ll return.

He replies: “When you strip naked without being ashamed and take your clothes and put them under your feet like small children and trample them, then you will see the child of the living one and you will not be afraid.”

Better than porn, one might suggest, is a mode of sexual exchange in which real people are loved for their fullest selves, physical, mental, spiritual.

Children, and everyone, should understand their whole person matters! Life is not about carefully arranging our exterior, with cosmetic enhancements, like a form of theater.

We’re here to be spiritual, which maybe means: to be whole.

To be our whole selves with each other.

Perhaps an important Christian project, now, is learning how to be sexual in a loving and complete way, and showing that to the world?

And indeed, I am not sure how we learn to “love one another” (John 13:34) without appreciating each other’s sexual appeal. To remove someone’s sexuality from them . . . doesn’t seem that loving?