Not Practicing What You Preach: Religion and Incongruence Between Pornography Beliefs and Usage

Abstract

Religious Americans, and conservative Protestants in particular, have historically been the most ardent opponents of pornography’s production, dissemination, and use. Yet while religiously committed and theologically conservative Americans are generally less likely to view pornography than others, the difference is often not as great or consistent as one might suppose given their strong moral stance. Drawing on insights from religious incongruence theory, this study considered whether religious commitment and theological conservatism predicted a greater incongruence between what Americans say they believe about pornography morally and whether they actually watch it. Data are taken from the nationally representative 2006 Portraits of American Life Study (N = 2,279). Analyses show that greater religious service attendance and prayer frequency are predictive of American men (not women) affirming that viewing pornography is “always morally wrong” while still viewing it in the previous year. Evangelicalism and other sectarian Protestantism are also the religious traditions most likely to believe pornography is always morally wrong while also viewing it. Findings ultimately suggest that religious commitment and affiliation with theological conservatism may influence Americans (primarily men) to oppose pornography more strongly in principle than reflected in actual practice. Data limitations and implications for future research are discussed.

Notes

¹ The term pornography can carry moral connotations that are unintended here. The term is used to be consistent with religious discourses on this type of media that oppose “pornography” by name, as well as with the data set used for this study. Throughout, the term pornography or porn will refer to any sexually explicit visual material (websites, videos, magazines) created with the intention of stimulating sexual arousal.

² I put this term in quotes to indicate that I am not referring to pornography addiction in a clinical sense, which is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Rather, I am merely indicating that conservative Christians frequently use the term.

³ Analyses were run with the attendance and prayer frequency standardized and summed into a scale. The results were substantively the same as when attendance is included on its own, but this hides important variation in the way the two measures are related to porn viewing and incongruence between porn beliefs and use. Thus, the two measures are kept separate in analysis. Collinearity diagnostics showed that tolerance levels were all well within acceptable ranges.

⁴ In the PALS data, adherence to the original RELTRAD scheme would have required that “other Protestants” be included in the residual “other religions” category. The current study demonstrates that these two groups differ in terms of the outcome variable and thus they were kept analytically separate. The original RELTRAD scheme also kept Jews as a separate category, but their numbers in this sample (N < 40) are too small to conduct a meaningful analysis on them alone and so they are included in the “other religion” category.

⁵ While there are different camps of scriptural interpretation among conservative Christians, Hempel and Bartkowski (2008) argued that belief in full inspiration unites all of the camps including those who believe the Bible to be inerrant, infallible, and/or interpreted literally (see also Perry, 2015).

⁶ To explore this possibility empirically, regression models (available upon request) were estimated predicting porn use on believing porn is always wrong, religious measures, and controls. Believing porn use is immoral was negatively associated with watching porn, as was prayer frequency and belief in full inspiration. Worship attendance and religious tradition were not significant predictors of porn use, net of controls. Interaction terms were included for religious measures × believing porn is always wrong, but none approached statistical significance. Three-way interaction terms were also run with gender; none were significant. These null effects, however, may be due to overfitting. Other models were estimated predicting porn use with the subsample restricted to those who felt porn was always wrong (N = 1,236). In these models, worship attendance was a positive predictor of viewing porn, though with the restricted sample it did not attain statistical significance (p < .10). Interaction terms also showed a positive interaction between worship attendance and being male, though again, just beyond statistical significance (p < .10). Though marginal, these results are suggestive that, for men who already believe porn use is morally wrong, worship attendance predicts that they will violate their moral beliefs by watching porn.