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How Dennis Prager, Jordan Peterson, and Protestants Get Porn Wrong

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In this episode, Trent examines some recent comments from Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson that argue for pornography in moderation and compare them to Protestants who condemn porn but defend masturbation.


Narrator:

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Trent Horn:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And content warning for today’s episode, I’ll be talking about mature, explicit subject matter. So, if you normally let your kids or teenagers listen to my episodes, it might be a good idea to watch this first to see if it’s appropriate for them based on their age and emotional maturity. All right.

So, Jordan Peterson has been doing a video series where he goes through the book of Exodus in a roundtable format with other well-known authors, speakers, pastors. Last week, he posted a clip from their discussion on the sixth commandment, thou shall not commit adultery. The title of the clip was, Is Lust Adultery. Now, there actually should not be any debate on this issue because Jesus gives us the answer to that question in Matthew 5:27 to 28. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

But in this clip, one of the roundtable guests, the Jewish commenter Dennis Prager, you probably know him from the Prager University, says The Old Testament does not condemn lust and Christians are just wrong about this and Jordan Peterson’s somewhat agrees with Dennis Prager’s argument about pornography. So, I’m going to talk about that but then I want to talk about how some Protestants have an error related to pornography that is the mirror image of Dennis Prager’s argument. So, let’s first start with Prager’s argument on lust.

Dennis Prager:

Obviously, Christianity and Judaism are not identical religions and we have no equivalent that, if you look upon another woman with lust, it’s as if you have committed adultery with your heart. There’s only one way to commit adultery in Judaism and it’s with a different organ. And I’m not being cute, I’m being very realistic. Looking with lust is not a sin in Judaism.

Speaker 4:

You could expound everything Jesus said from thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife or another woman you’re not, whatever.

Dennis Prager:

Well, okay.

Speaker 4:

The whole point of coveting it begins in the heart and I understand your Hebrew word for covet is the desire doesn’t stop halfway-

Dennis Prager:

Right. To take.

Speaker 4:

… it takes action.

Dennis Prager:

It’s to take.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Dennis Prager:

There’s no ban in the 613 laws of the Torah on lusting.

Trent Horn:

Prager’s opinion seems to match other Jewish commenters who say the Hebrew word for covet in the Old Testament, at least in the Hebrew text, refers to a desire of a person who is actively trying to acquire something. The catechism, however, lists under the sin of coveting, not just desires that are attached to evil plans, but the willed evil desires themselves. Just having a desire for something is not the sin of coveting. We naturally have desires towards things that are good or have some goodness attached to them, even if it’s just the good of pleasure. However, dwelling on a desire for something you have no right to possess or a desire that contradicts reason is coveting.

So, even if Dennis Prager is right that coveting had a more limited definition for Jews in the Old Testament, the fact is that, through Christ and his church, we now understand the full meaning of this commandment. In some cases, the commands of the Old Testament are relaxed in the new covenant such as the kosher food laws or laws against creating images of God. But in other cases, the commands are strengthened and believers are held to a higher moral standard such as being pure of heart when it comes to anger or lust and not just refraining from external actions.

The law of the old covenant was never meant to be the permanent moral guide for humanity. Parts of it were given to accommodate God’s people but the law itself was not the most perfect expression of God’s desires for human beings. That’s why Jesus said, for example, that the book of Deuteronomy allowed divorce because of the people’s hard hearts but this was not God’s original plan for marriage.

However, now, since we’re under the law of Christ, it is an act of adultery to remarry after civilly divorcing a spouse. Likewise, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes the old law and perfects it so that we can become clean through our behavior and our motivations. It’s why Jesus says vengeful anger is as bad as murder and that lust is a kind of adultery you commit in your heart. Lust is not the exact same thing as adultery but, according to Jesus, it is a kind of adultery. The catechism says in paragraph 581, in Jesus, the same word of God that had resounded on Mount Sinai to give the written law to Moses made itself heard anew on the Mount of the Beatitudes. Jesus did not abolish the law but fulfilled it by giving its ultimate interpretation in a divine way. You have heard that it was said to the men of old but I say to you.

So, even if Prager is correct about the Old Testament, this only shows why we need God’s complete revelation in Jesus Christ so that we can attain the complete happiness and holiness that God desires for every single human being.

Dennis Prager:

I always ask, if a wife calls me and says my husband looks at pornography I found on his computer, I have one question. How is your life of intimacy with your husband? Is it good? In other words, is the pornography in lieu of you or in addition to you?

Trent Horn:

Yeesh. Oh, I do not like this at all because it sounds like Prager is saying, “Well, maybe you just aren’t satisfying your husband and it’s your fault he looks at porn.” Now, perhaps Prager doesn’t mean that but it sounds like it. The first question should be does your husband know you know and, if so, was he sorry that he did something that hurt and betrayed you?

Dennis Prager:

Looking with lust is not a sin in Judaism.

Jordan Peterson:

What’s the stance on-

Speaker 4:

But Dennis, you’re making-

Jordan Peterson:

What’s the stance on pornography?

Dennis Prager:

So, pornography, when I’m asked this question, you-

Jordan Peterson:

Just to put you on the spot, by the way.

Dennis Prager:

You did indeed. And I know this is not a religious answer and I’m not even giving a religious answer, I’m giving what I think is a moral and realistic answer. Men want variety and, if pornography is a substitute for one’s wife, it’s awful. If it’s a substitute for adultery, it’s not awful. That is my unpredictable answer.

Jordan Peterson:

Well, there is a clinical rule of thumb that’s akin to that, I would say. If you’re trying to decide clinically whether someone’s partaking in a habit, say use of alcohol, has reached the threshold of clinical significance, one of the things you do is ask the person you’re assessing, now, is it interfering with your employment, has it got you in trouble with the law, is your family complaining, does it stop you from doing other things that you should be doing. And so, the judgment isn’t the use of the forbidden substance itself, it is, in some sense, consequentialist. And I’m not saying that that’s an absolute but it is a hallmark of clinical judgment.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, that’s right.

Dennis Prager:

So, I would just ask, you asked me about pornography. So, this man was faithful to a wife with whom he could not have relations, obviously, for a decade or more. I think it went to 15 years. Would he have been wrong in relieving his sexual tension with a photograph?

Trent Horn:

I have six things I need to mention. First, I just need to say this, where did Jordan Peterson get a half red, half blue suit that looks like something the Batman villain Two-Face would wear because I want one. Second, what Prager is doing with the Alzheimer’s story is no different than what pro-choice advocates do when they bring up abortion in the case of rape. You pick a very difficult situation and then use that as a wedge to justify all kinds of behaviors. Why can’t a guy pleasure himself if his wife won’t sleep with him because they had a big fight? Where do you draw the line? The answer is you can’t.

The problem with Prager’s argument is that it assumes the purpose of a man’s ejaculation is primarily for his benefit to relieve sexual tension but that’s gross. If it were, then this would turn your wife into a sperm dumpster. I’m sorry for being crude but, just as we should strip away the euphemisms when it comes to things like abortion, we need to strip away the euphemisms when it comes to sexual sin. If you treat sexual stimulation and release as primarily about satisfying urges, then you end up turning the marital act into something whose primary purpose is to just satisfy urges which is an inhuman thing to do.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to get married knowing that the marital act satisfies sexual urges and it helps the person be less sexually frustrated. St. Paul even said it is better to marry than to be a flame with passion in First Corinthians 7:9 but we should not treat marriage as primarily being for these secondary goods. It’s nice that, in marriage, you’re less lonely but it’d be wrong to get married just because you don’t want to be lonely. And it’s nice, in marriage, that sexual frustration is reduced but it’d be wrong to get married just to ease sexual tension. You get married because you want to express marital love to another person which is consummated in the sexual act.

And so, if this good is sought in masturbation, it perverts what marriage is even for. That’s important because, sometimes in marriage, we experience loneliness or we experience sexual frustration like after childbirth when a wife can’t have intercourse for six to eight weeks. But if we see sex as a way of expressing marital love, then this helps us better love our spouse during these difficult periods instead of just fleeing to somebody else in person or virtually in order to satisfy our urges.

Number three. I strongly disagree with Prager and Peterson’s take that pornography is fine in moderation and it’s only excess porn consumption that’s the problem. Alcohol is a morally neutral substance, it only becomes evil when you have too much of it and it causes us to act against reason like by being drunk. But pornography is not morally neutral, it’s morally evil. It always acts against reason, it directs our sexual powers to something that is outside of the marital act which is always wrong to do.

Number four. Prager and Peterson are always talking about how people need to be virtuous, take the hard path in life. But why not say that in this case? Imagine if someone liked to beat up a dummy dressed as Jordan Peterson, I’m sure Jordan Peterson would say, “What are you doing? Clean your room.” He’d say it’s bad for that person even if it’s meant to control their urges because that behavior doesn’t actually help them become a better person. But the same is true of pornography and how it deforms our moral character.

Number five. If you watch pornography, you are contributing to an industry that brutalizes men and women physically, emotionally and spiritually and is often connected to rape, sex trafficking, including of children. Some of the descriptions of what happens to porn star’s bodies that are described in Matt Fradd’s book, The Porn Myth, some of those descriptions made me almost throw up when I read them. But if you watch porn, you’re partly responsible for your cooperating with these evils.

Finally, Prager says that adultery only happens with another organ or your genitals. All right, what about a guy who pays a girl on OnlyFans to strip for him? Is that adultery or is it a substitute for adultery because it’s just on a screen? Well, maybe it’s not adultery under Prager’s view or a strict definition but I sure as hell am going to call it adultery. And the church would say that behavior or looking at porn or even just masturbating, and we’ll get to that shortly, that’s all condemned under the six commandment. The problem though is that people can always say, well, this or that behavior doesn’t really fall under the sixth commandment which is why God’s revelation is perfected in the incarnation and the establishment of Christ one holy Catholic and apostolic church.

I also want to say that I found Jonathan Pageau’s response wanting on this issue. He’s an Eastern Orthodox iconographer and here is what he said about all of this.

Jonathan Pageau:

At least for me, when I hear all of this from my own Orthodox perspective, it’s bewildering because, at least, from the tradition in which I am, it’s not a morality question. Even the word morality, it bothers me. In the Christian tradition that I participated in, the call is to be transformed, the call is to be free. That’s the call. Christ is calling us to be free. And so, the idea of can you lust or can’t you lust or can you do this or not this, the answer is we have desires in us and these desires tend to enslave us, they tend to pull us into themselves. And these laws are exterior ways for you to understand how it is that you can now be free from these desires.

None of the desires are wrong, sexual desire isn’t wrong, desire to eat isn’t wrong, none of these things are wrong. The problem is when they capture you.

Jordan Peterson:

Mm-hmm, subordination, yeah.

Jonathan Pageau:

Right. And so, it’s not about trying to figure out if I’m sinning or not sinning. If I go to confession, I ask forgiveness for all the sins I’ve done voluntary and involuntary. I’m sinning all the time, if you want to know. All day long, I’m sinning. But the idea-

Jordan Peterson:

That’s why you’re so much fun.

Jonathan Pageau:

That’s right, I’m so much fun. But the idea is rather to attend to my desires in the sense so that I’m not captured by them, so I don’t become obsessed, so I don’t fall into that. So, to me, the question of legally trying to figure out where I’m sinning or where I’m not, it pulls me into a world that I-

Trent Horn:

In one sense, I do agree with him that our Christian life is not reducible to following rules. It’s about theosis or in the West you’d say divinization. It’s about becoming holy just as God is holy. And when we grow in virtue, we find ourselves less enslaved by sin. That’s great. What I don’t like is him making it sound like all sins are equally grave because they’re not. For example, a husband being flirtatious with other women, that would probably be a venial sin, at least in many cases. A husband having sex with those women, that would probably be a mortal sin. And remember, for something to be mortal, it has to be grave matter and you have to have full knowledge and full consent. But in many of those cases, I’d say, it’s a mortal sin, not a venial sin.

I also don’t like how his answer seems to reinforce Prager and Peterson’s view that pornography is just something that’s bad because it might enslave our passions. Because I’m sure there are people who can occasionally watch pornography in the same way they can occasionally drink alcohol. But unlike alcohol, watching pornography even occasionally is gravely sinful. What I want to hear a Christian or even a Jew like Prager say is that, “No, this is evil. It’s harmful to your wife, it’s harmful to your marriage. You love your wife.” And I’m not saying women don’t struggle with pornography, some do but often it’s men. You love your wife, you love God, God can strengthen you to love Him and to love your wife more than this stuff that will never truly satisfy you.

Now, I want to say that I’ve been firm in how I’ve talked about this and it does make me angry to see how Prager and Peterson and others are talking about this. But I want to say I wouldn’t have the same tone if just a guy came up to me and said, “Trent, I feel awful, I feel trapped. I always end up watching porn. I don’t really want to. I want help to get out of this.” That’s a different attitude. That’s an attitude that grace can work through in order to build virtue and help someone reject the devil in his temptations. So, if you do struggle with pornography or masturbation, the fact that you recognize it’s wrong and you want to fight, that’s already the majority of the battle. That’s good, don’t give up.

My main concern to express in this video is when people that Catholics might look up to as moral examples downplay this kind of stuff. It sets the bar so low that you trip over it into grave sin. And, of course, you also have to remember that, just because you look up to someone because they say things you agree with, there are things Dennis Prager says and Jordan Peterson says that I do agree with or I think are very insightful but there are also things they say that I disagree with. And that’s important that, if there are people you agree with, just because you say, “Hey, they’re really good on A, B and C,” that doesn’t mean that they’re always right on everything. They’re not right on A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, H J, K, on everything else.

There are things that you might like that I say but guess what? That doesn’t mean that I’m right about everything. I can be wrong about stuff, I’m only human. So, it’s important that, when we listen to people we look up to, we should always compare what they say just as human beings to what God has revealed to us and given to us through sacred scripture, sacred tradition and the teaching office of the church Christ established.

All right, so for anyone who’s struggling then with pornography or masturbation, I’d recommend checking out Matt Fradd’s resources on the subject. This would include his books The Porn Myth, Delivered and Covenant Eyes software so you can have accountability and just help you to not get into these bad situations. All right, before I move on though, I need to say that I’ve seen this dismissive attitude towards lust from Dennis Prager before. He put out a weird video several years ago where Prager says that, if a man looks at women in bikinis on the beach, the man’s wife shouldn’t get mad at him. So, here’s summary from that video.

Dennis Prager:

In sum then, when your man looks at these other, perhaps even more attractive women, he is, A, not comparing you to them, B, not in any way becoming dissatisfied with you and, C, certainly not thinking of them later. He looks at them because they are other women whether they are more attractive, just as attractive or less attractive. They are women in bikinis so he looks.

Trent Horn:

If my wife were here, she would simply say …

Laura Horn:

Okay, creepo.

Trent Horn:

And by the way, please subscribe to Too Far with Laura Horn on YouTube if you want more great content from my wife. Now, Prager is correct that most men have probably seen thousands of immodest women, either in person or on TV or the internet, and they probably can’t recall 99.9% of them. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong to stare at them in the first place, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t encourage men to fight for custody of the eyes so that they could be better equipped to have custody over their heart and its desires. My main problem with Prager on these issues is that he seems to be looking for excuses to commit vice instead of opportunities to grow in virtue.

In fact, keep an eye out here on how Prager splits theological hairs in this next clip because you’ll see that same kind of theological hair-splitting to justify sin in the clips of Protestants I’ll show you here in a little bit.

Dennis Prager:

But what about a single woman? I asked one of the great Protestant thinkers of our generation in a public debate in Phoenix, I asked them, so can a single Christian male look upon a single woman with lust? He can’t be committing adultery. He’s not married and she’s not married. So, is the real ban lust or is the ban on adultery?

Trent Horn:

All right, so now I want to talk about where Protestants err when it comes to pornography. Thankfully, most Protestants I know would say that watching pornography or anything that causes you to lust after another person is sinful, at least a person you’re not married to. All right, well, that’s good but the error that Protestants make is the reverse or the inverse of Prager’s error. Prager says that the intentions don’t matter, only the outward physical behavior. Protestants rightly say in response that Jesus told us lustful intentions are a kind of adultery, they do matter. The Protestant error occurs when you say that it is only the intentions that matter and not the outward physical behavior itself.

So, what I’m going to do now is show you five well-known Protestant apologists and speakers and you’ll see how, because of their reliance on sola scriptura, they aren’t able to simply condemn masturbation, they have to leave all of these exceptions. But why should we think that the physical act of masturbation is wrong? What reasons do we have to think that? Well, first, we can know from reason that we should not pervert our bodily organs. If digestive organs are for eating, then it’s disordered to use them to taste food but then vomit the food back up again. If genital organs are for union between a man and a woman, then it’s disordered to use them to experience orgasm apart from any union. Even if masturbation is common in some cultures, deep down, we know it’s disordered because we don’t celebrate it. We recognize it’s a sign of immaturity for someone to overcome.

That’s why, deep down, everyone really knows this is disordered because they either hide it or they make fun of it. As I said earlier, it’s not something they celebrate. Even secular people will try to give up masturbation in monthly challenges because they know it’s bad for them. At the very least, people recognize it’s not good or even bad because it deforms your character and habits and, from there, we can reason that it’s immoral. If it’s disordered to find sexual release on non-human things, animals, objects, who knows because sex is for union with another person, then it would be disordered to find sexual release through our own actions apart from any sexual union.

Number two, scripture implicitly teaches this is wrong through its teachings on lust and the overall purpose of our sexuality. But because this is only implicitly taught in scripture, you’ll see Protestants to simply deny scripture says anything about this at all. And finally, we can look to Christian tradition. When this subject has been discussed among past Christians, it was always condemned. The second century church father Clement of Alexandria, for example, said, because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther said the devil slandered marriage in order to, quote, frighten men away from this godly life and entangle them in a web of fornication and secret sins which is a reference to masturbation.

Now, this doesn’t mean every person who engages in masturbation commits a grave sin. There are factors that lessen culpability like a person’s immaturity, for example, but it’s still a disordered act that is evil because it misuses our sexuality. This is a point that Protestants seem to miss that I’ll share with you right now. So, I want to just hear what they have to say. So, I’m just going to share these five Protestant views, we’ll hear what they have to say in light of the evidence I’ve given against the physical act of masturbation and then I’ll offer some thoughts. So, here’s what they have to say and some of it is pretty gross.

Speaker 9:

I think we can all agree that lust in masturbation is wrong but let’s look at a few more particular scenarios. What about with spouses? I think most Christians would say masturbation in a marriage, if there’s a loving commitment between them and no pressure between spouses, doesn’t involve a third party, would be fine.

Trent Horn:

What?

Speaker 9:

Some would even argue that masturbation for somebody, if it doesn’t involve lust and just is a biological physical release for a person, would be fine. But here’s my concern with that that a lot of people don’t really think about and process and, when it’s experienced that way, it can very often become addictive.

Trent Horn:

So, according to McDowell, masturbation is wrong if you lust after someone you’re not married to but not if you’re just using your own spouse for sexual release. And the only problem with masturbation, apart from lustful thoughts, is it might cause you to have bad habits. All right, next up is Mike Winger.

Mike Winger:

Your sexual desires belong to your spouse, they belong to that person. Okay, so as a single person, it’s one thing to say, “Okay, hypothetically, I could see there’s a case for this. That I’m engaging in this” … I’m married, guys. Hypothetically, I engage in this behavior on rare occasions, it helps to calm me down and I don’t do it lustfully, I could see a place for that, I wouldn’t rebuke a person for that. But in marriage, I feel like it’s different. I think that this behavior in marriage, masturbation takes away your sexual commitment to your spouse. Again, to summarize, I don’t think the Bible clearly talks about the issue directly so I’m applying biblical principles that seem to fairly simply apply to the topic of masturbation and I am open to the idea that there can be, among single people, a degree of masturbation that is not sinful.

Trent Horn:

Earlier in his video, Winger says it’s wrong to lust after people or to excessively desire anything, whether it’s food or orgasm, and your sexual desire should only be for your spouse. But as we see in this clip, Winger says that, if single people need to masturbate every now and then, he sees how that could be okay. All right, here’s Allen Parr.

Allen Parr:

Is this wise? Paul says that all things are lawful for me but not all things are beneficial or expedient. In other words, what he’s saying is there’s a lot of things that the Bible doesn’t say this is wrong or this is a sin. We can smoke crack, we can snip cocaine, we can text while driving. It doesn’t even say that, if you’re single and you’re dating somebody, that you can’t spend the night with them. But are any of those things that I just mentioned wise, will they get us closer to God and the answer is no and I would put masturbation in that same category.

Trent Horn:

Parr also says that lust is wrong but masturbation, apart from lust, well, that just might be a bad idea like texting while driving. But here’s my question for Parr, Winger and McDowell, is it wrong to lust after someone who’s not real? What if you masturbate to a fictional person like some immodest animated character? Or what if you masturbate to a virtual pornography, an image that’s a composite of lots of different photographs and so, the person, the woman in it, is not a real woman? So, it’s not a person that you’re lusting after, it’s just an image. This takes us back to Prager’s question. Is lust wrong because it’s an act of adultery? If so, then what would be wrong with an unmarried man lusting after an object that is not another person because, if he had sexual behavior with that object, it wouldn’t be adultery.

Well, if you rely on the Bible alone to give you an answer, you’re not going to find one or at least you’re not going to find one explicit enough that other people won’t deny it. Next, I want to share this from James Dobson. He’s the founder of Focus on the Family. First, here is where he qualifies the issue. This is in a talk that he gave in 1987.

James Dobson:

I really don’t think that it’s right for me to tell you what I think because I don’t know what God thinks. It is very dangerous to put words in the mouth of the Lord. And on the moral issues of this, the Bible is just about silent. There are obviously many places in the Bible where it talks about lusting. He that loooketh on the body of a woman to lust after her have committed adultery with her in his heart already, that relates perhaps. We’ll have to define what Jesus meant by lust.

Trent Horn:

And here is what he writes in a 2014 book Bringing up Boys. What should parents say to their kids about this subject? Masturbation is a highly controversial subject and Christian leaders differ widely in their perspectives on it. I will answer your question but hope you understand that some Bible scholars will disagree emphatically with what I will say. My advice is to say nothing after puberty has occurred, you will only cause embarrassment and discomfort. Dobson then tells a story about what his father said to him about masturbation when he was a boy. What is in the book is also contained in that 1987 talk that he gave. So, here’s what his dad told him.

James Dobson:

But he said I have drawn a conclusion that, if it happens to you, I really wouldn’t worry very much about it because I don’t think it has much to do with your relationship with God. And he lifted that off me.

Trent Horn:

Finally, here’s Steve Hayes, a prominent Protestant apologist who passed away in 2020 and blog at a website called Tria Blog where you can find a decent amount of criticisms of Catholic theology. Now, I assume his fellow bloggers hold Hayes in high esteem even if they disagree with him theologically on some issues. I doubt they thought that Hayes minimized grave evils but I certainly think that he did because he repeatedly used sola scriptura as a way to argue that masturbation is not inherently sinful. Here’s what Hayes wrote.

It is striking that the Bible is silent on the subject of masturbation. Striking both because the Bible is quite specific and explicit about a number of other sexual sins and because masturbation is extremely widespread. The argument from silence is always a bit tricky but, if masturbation were intrinsically evil, you’d expect to find a warning to that effect somewhere in scripture. Since the Bible doesn’t address the question, either directly or by necessary inference, we cannot be dogmatic one way or another.

All of these prominent Protestants are wishy-washy on the morality of masturbation because scripture does not have an explicit teaching on the subject. There are passages you can cite that make sense in relation to the subject of masturbation but there aren’t any that clearly and explicitly reference the issue. The subject of masturbation really shows that most Protestants practice what is called solo scriptura. You see, some Protestants say we don’t think scripture is the only rule of faith, that’s a caricature of sola scriptura, they say. Scripture is just the only infallible rule of faith. We also think the church is a rule and tradition is a rule for Christians. But then these same protestants just ignore what the church and the Protestant reformers and basically all Christians have said on this issue in the past.

So, it turns out, the Bible really does become their sole entire authority on doctrine and morality. Also, think about how dangerous it is to restrict the rules we follow in our moral life to only what is directly described in scripture. This is why Southern Baptists, for example, were pro-choice during the 1970s because the Bible didn’t directly condemn abortion and they thought abortion was, because of that, more of a Catholic issue. And what about newer evils like surrogacy or gender reassignment surgery that the Bible says nothing about? And what about ancient evils that aren’t mentioned in the Bible like barrier methods of contraception or masturbation? Where can a Christian go if he wants to know whether these acts can cause someone to lose his salvation or are incompatible with the Christian life?

The answer can’t be found in the Bible, they can’t go to the Bible because Protestants disagree on what the Bible says about these issues or if it says anything at all. Now, gee, it would be great if God gave us something like a living authority to answer these questions? A church that’s a pillar and foundation of the truth as First Timothy 3:15 says? Now, this also shows that Protestants don’t agree on the essential teachings of the Christian faith. This is especially true when we look at morality. If an essential teaching is at least something that I need to know in order to get to heaven, then the essential teachings of Christianity must include a list of moral acts that can cause me to lose my salvation.

Or, if you believe salvation cannot be lost, it’s a list of acts that would show that a person was never saved in the first place. So, if a Christian became an atheist or an abortionist or an atheistic abortionist, would that show he lost his salvation or he was never saved in the first place? So, following that, here’s my question. Is masturbation by a mature adult who is fully choosing it in order to satisfy sexual desires a grave sin? I’m not talking about teenagers or preteens or people who feel addicted to pornography and want to stop, I’m talking about Christian adults who simply see nothing wrong with this. Is their behavior compatible with the Christian life? But under Protestantism, we have to sift among different biblically informed pastors to figure out the answers to these pressing moral questions and they disagree amongst each other. Is that really how God intended the church to function for believers?

Now, a Protestant could say the following in response to this argument. So what? Catholics aren’t united on this issue either. You can find priests and Catholic high school teachers who say masturbation is moral. You can even find theologians who say masturbation is moral. Look at Sister Margaret Farley in her book Just Love: A framework for Christian Sexual Ethics where she defends the morality of masturbation but here’s the difference. Since Catholics have an authoritative magisterium, we have a mechanism so that we can formally and officially say when theologians are wrong and out of bounds. For example, here is what the congregation for the doctrine of the faith said about Sister Farley’s book on sexuality.

First, they quote from her own work, they write, Sister Farley writes, quote, masturbation usually does not raise any moral questions at all. It is surely the case that many women have found great good in self-pleasuring, perhaps especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure, something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers. In this way, it could be said that masturbation actually serves relationships rather than hindering them. My final observation is then that the norms of justice as I have presented them would seem to apply to the choice of sexual self-pleasuring only insofar as this activity may help or harm, only insofar as it supports or limits wellbeing and liberty of spirit. This remains largely an empirical question, not a moral one.

And in response, the congregation for the doctrine of the faith said this. This statement does not conform to Catholic teaching. Both the magisterium of the church in the course of a constant tradition and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action. The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason outside of marriage, is essentially contrary to its purpose. For here, sexual pleasure is sought outside of the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved. To form an equitable judgment about the subject’s moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen or even extenuate moral culpability.

So, notice here what the CDF is saying is that, even though culpability, our responsibility for committing a sin, that can differ among people when it comes to masturbation just like any other sin based on whether you’re immature, you aren’t fully consenting, you feel like you’re under a compulsion or it can extenuate it if you are a mature individual who knows this is wrong and chooses to engage in it anyways. And what the CDF says, by the way, about in marriage, it doesn’t mean just between married adults, mutual masturbation between a husband and wife would still be sinful. It’s talking about how the sexual faculty’s only appropriate place is within the marital act itself of the husband and wife fully giving themselves to one another and not using one another to merely satisfy their sexual urges.

All right, let me bring everything together. Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson are wrong if they think that porn and masturbation are only immoral when those activities become excessive. Jesus makes it clear that lust is a kind of adultery and this applies to everyone, even unmarried people that lust after other unmarried people. What is in our hearts, what are our intentions matter along with our exterior acts. However, Protestants who think that it is only lust that is immoral, because the Bible only condemns lust and doesn’t condemn masturbation specifically, they’re in error too. The essentials of the moral life and God’s revelation in general are not contained in scripture alone.

We also have to remember that our understanding of marital love comes from scripture but to try to assemble it, a full understanding of it from scripture alone, can easily lead someone to the erroneous views we’ve seen earlier. Instead, we can have confidence in the church’s teachings on these essential questions that Protestants don’t agree about and we can see the error that they have in thinking that it is only our intentions that matter and not specific physical acts themselves in this context.

Finally, if you struggle with masturbation or pornography, don’t fall into despair. God is a loving father, He’s not an overbearing boss. First Peter 5:7 says cast all your anxieties on Him for He cares about you. But the first step to trusting God to deliver us from sin is to recognize something we’re doing is a sin and that we need help. And that’s why we should not listen to Dennis Prager when it comes to the sin of lust or to these other Protestant voices when it comes to the sin of masturbation.

Now, I hope this episode was helpful for all of you. I’ll leave links in the description below to these resources if you do struggle with this. And yeah, I just hope that this is helpful and that you have a very blessed day.

Narrator:

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