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Articles

Does Viewing Pornography Diminish Religiosity Over Time? Evidence From Two-Wave Panel Data

 

Abstract

Research consistently shows a negative association between religiosity and viewing pornography. While scholars typically assume that greater religiosity leads to less frequent pornography use, none have empirically examined whether the reverse could be true: that greater pornography use may lead to lower levels of religiosity over time. I tested for this possibility using two waves of the nationally representative Portraits of American Life Study (PALS). Persons who viewed pornography at all at Wave 1 reported more religious doubt, lower religious salience, and lower prayer frequency at Wave 2 compared to those who never viewed porn. Considering the effect of porn-viewing frequency, viewing porn more often at Wave 1 corresponded to increases in religious doubt and declining religious salience at Wave 2. However, the effect of earlier pornography use on later religious service attendance and prayer was curvilinear: Religious service attendance and prayer decline to a point and then increase at higher levels of pornography viewing. Testing for interactions revealed that all effects appear to hold regardless of gender. Findings suggest that viewing pornography may lead to declines in some dimensions of religiosity but at more extreme levels may actually stimulate, or at least be conducive to, greater religiosity along other dimensions.

Supplemental Material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s web site.

Notes

1 Scholars use a variety of terms to refer to “pornography,” including “sexually explicit media/materials” or “erotica” (Carroll et al., Citation2008; Lindgren, Citation1993; Manning, Citation2006; Short, Black, Smith, Wetterneck, & Wells, Citation2012). Because a number of widely used national data sets use the term “pornography” (e.g., General Social Surveys, National Study of Youth and Religion, Portraits of American Life Study), I also use the term here. Throughout the study, “pornography” or “porn” will refer to any sexually explicit media (videos, Web sites, magazines, etc.) intended to arouse the viewer.

2 See Exodus 20.17; Matthew 5.28; Surah 79.40–41.

3 In 2012, respondents were asked about religious doubts “in the past 6 years” (i.e., between the 2012 wave and the 2006 wave), while in 2006 respondents were asked about religious doubts “in the past 3 years.” While the wording of the question is changed slightly, the coding of responses is the same.

4 Because of the obvious correlation between these controls for religious conservatism and the religiosity outcomes, models were run with and without the religious conservatism measures. In each model, the effects of earlier porn use on every religiosity outcome were stronger without these controls in place, and thus the inclusion of these controls actually made the results presented in the analysis here more conservative.

5 I include those who indicated “none” or “unaffiliated” with respect to religious tradition because these persons often hold religious beliefs and practice a religion, though they do not necessarily identify as such (Putnam & Campbell, Citation2010). For example, in Wave 2 of PALS, over 60% of “unaffiliated” persons considered God or spirituality at least somewhat important, over 50% prayed at least occasionally, and about one-third attended worship services. Moreover, supplementary analyses without these “unaffiliated” respondents included in models made the effects of pornography on religiosity outcomes stronger, and thus I present the more conservative estimates with them included.

6 I included persons who reported “never” viewing pornography in the multivariate models for and to demonstrate the full relationship between pornography-viewing frequency and religiosity over time. However, when I remove this group and look only at the effects of porn frequency on religion outcomes among those who ever view pornography (similar to the approach used by Grubbs et al., Citation2015), the results are substantively the same. This is a remarkable finding, since removing those who “never” view pornography reduces the models to less than 455 persons each, which obviously reduces the statistical significance somewhat. I have included the tables and corresponding figures for these relationships in the online supplement so that readers can compare the outcomes for themselves.

7 As I show in the online supplement, when those who “never” view pornography are excluded from the analysis, porn-viewing frequency at Wave 1 is actually positively related to prayer frequency at Wave 2. Nevertheless, viewing the trend line for this outcome suggests that the effect is substantively the same as that presented here, namely, a slightly curvilinear relationship.

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