A creepy software app lets evangelical Christians out themselves as porn “addicts” to their own church leaders and friends. The app, Covenant Eyes, uses artificial intelligence to recognize when a user is viewing a porn site.
The app then takes a screen shot of the site and emails it to a list of acquaintances, clergy, and anyone else the user has designated as someone willing to “help” with that person’s porn “addiction.”
The concept of porn “addiction” is scientifically dubious and unsupported by evidence. But as AVN.com reported, there is one group that may actually be susceptible to a form of addiction to porn: deeply religious people whose beliefs include a moral objection to porn. The study found that the “moral incongruence” experienced by such deeply religious individuals—not porn itself—can drive mental health issues associated with their porn use.
The Covenant Eyes app gained a degree of notoriety earlier this year when fundamentalist Christian reality TV star Jill Duggar and her husband Derrick Dillard revealed that they use the app, which also filters and blocks porn sites, to maintain “accountability” to each other, in case either one views porn.
In his new book, Addicted to Lust, sociologist Samuel L. Perry argues that for fundamentalist Christians, their own beliefs about porn, “create a context in which those who use pornography are often overwhelmed with shame and discouragement,” often leading to depression and related, serious mental health issues.
This shame and disgrace-based approach to porn, coupled with the fact that, according to Perry’s research, porn viewing among conservative Christians is on the rise, has given rise to what the University of Oklahoma professor has termed the “purity-industrial complex”—a growing network of profit-making products and services designed to stem the so-called “addiction” to porn among evangelicals.
“Somewhere in there, someone is making a lot of money,” Perry said, as quoted by the political site Roll Call. “There’s a market for people who want to protect themselves from the dangers of porn.”
But according to a recent survey cited by Roll Call, only about about half of all adults age 25 and over consider watching porn to be “wrong,” and Americans between the ages of 13 and 24 see porn viewing as, at worst, a minor misdeed, with most saying that failure to recycle was a greater moral wrong than porn.
Photo By Covenant Eyes promotional video screen capture
