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Is the Evangelical Church A Sex Addict? What No One Wants to Admit

• Tabitha • Season 2 • Episode 3

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What if the church's problem isn't ignoring sex, but being obsessed with it in all the wrong ways? Does the Church really function like a sex addict? This provocative question frames our exploration into how evangelical Christianity's approach to sexuality has created environments where abuse thrives and healthy intimacy struggles to exist.

The fingerprints of this unhealthy fixation appear everywhere—from crude pulpit talk to the hyper-focus on female modesty while neglecting male accountability. Purity culture has left countless believers without the language to identify abuse or the tools to build truly intimate relationships. 

Behind church doors, pornography use among leadership is stunningly prevalent. A recent Barna study commissioned by Pure Desire Ministries reveals just how common this struggle is, raising serious questions about how consumption of increasingly violent content shapes attitudes toward women. This isn't merely a personal struggle—it's reshaping how entire congregations understand gender, power, and sexuality. 

The path forward requires courage and honesty. We must expand our understanding of intimacy beyond sexual intercourse, recognizing the beautiful complexity of human connection God designed. From youth ministry to premarital counseling, we need meaningful conversations that prepare believers for the realities they'll face while offering a truly counter-cultural vision of sexuality, one marked not by obsession or shame, but by wholeness and genuine intimacy. 

Ready to join this crucial conversation? Share your thoughts and experiences as we work toward healthier approaches to sexuality in our faith communities.

Pure Desire Ministries - https://puredesire.org/
Beyond the Porn Phenomenon - Pure Desire/Barna Study - https://puredesire.org/shop/beyond-the-porn-phenomenon/

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Speaker 1:

Is the modern evangelical church a sex addict? What if the problem isn't that the church ignores sex, but actually that it's obsessed with it, but in all the wrong ways? In today's episode, we are going to talk about this exact topic. We are going to talk about the impact of purity culture and how it has harmed both men and women. We are going to talk about pornography, use and secrecy amongst church leaders. We're going to talk about the hyper focus of female modesty and female sexual activity to the exclusion of men, and we are going to talk about the abuse, scandals and cover-ups as well and how that has impacted how we see all of these things. Finally, we're going to close by talking about how the church has really distilled down physical intimacy to nothing more than sexual intercourse.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to this week's episode. I'm glad that you're here. Welcome to hey Tabby, the podcast where we talk about the hard things out loud, with our actual lips. We'll cover all kinds of topics across the mental health spectrum, including how it intersects with the Christian faith. Nothing is off limits here and we are not. Take two verses and call me in the morning. I'm Tabitha Westbrook and I'm a licensed trauma therapist, but I'm not your trauma therapist, I'm an expert in domestic abuse and coercive control and how complex trauma impacts our health and well-being. Our focus here is knowledge and healing. Trauma doesn't have to eat your lunch forever. There is hope. Now let's get going.

Speaker 1:

So I know I started off this episode with a pretty strong statement asking whether or not today's evangelical church is sex addicted, and I know that that can be pretty polarizing, so I'll just acknowledge that right out of the gate. But I think that it's a really valid question to ask, especially looking at all of the scandals that have been coming to light. And it has really felt like, maybe in the past five years or so, that every single day we hear another story about a leader falling a church, covering something up, things that have been hidden for maybe even 40, 50 years coming to light where minors were being assaulted and abused, and that is something that I feel like we should never hear in the church. And my question then becomes well, how did we get here, how did we get to this place where we have such a distorted idea of healthy sexuality that we are seeing this play out in these ways? Now look, no matter how healthy a church is, we are people and people do things sometimes that are horrific, and I don't think that we can ever completely eradicate this from society or even from the church. I do think there are way better ways to deal with it. I think there are ways to get ahead of it in a lot of different areas, and I think that there are things that should be happening that don't currently happen in the church that can prevent it. So we're going to talk about all of those things today within this context, and I do want to start off with I have a hopeful feeling for this, but I also don't think we should minimize things that are going wrong, and if we're not talking about them, then we can't fix them. We can't fix what we don't talk about. So we're just going to start there.

Speaker 1:

When we talk about things like sex addiction or compulsive sexual behavior, these are things that often are sitting on top of trauma responses. But when I'm talking about it in the church, it's really more of that obsession of sexuality and sexual activity that I see, and it gets languaged often from the pulpit in ways that are destructive and unhelpful. So from pastors talking about their smoking hot wives and things of that nature, we are languaging sex in a very crude and unhealthy, unbiblical way. In my opinion, and I think that that really sets the stage right. Sex is an incredibly beautiful part of intimate relationships, and I'm talking about sexual intercourse, but intimacy in general is meant to be a picture of God toward us and his heart toward us. When it gets to still down to just sexuality intercourse, physical contact we're missing such a big piece of what beautiful intimacy is, and I do think that, in an effort to be other than society, to have a different outlook on sex, that is really where purity culture started. I've said that a lot before.

Speaker 1:

I talked about that in Body and Soul, healed and Whole, that these things were meant to be good things, but then they became these ultimate things and also started hiding things that were really problematic under the guise of purity culture and saying oh, we're, you know, not going to talk about sex, we're not going to have sex. Meanwhile, it's pushing assaults and abuse into secrecy. Essentially right. If you're not giving people language and education around what healthy sex is, what God's design for sexuality is, and healthy sexual relationships, then you're not giving people language so that when things are going wrong, they can say this isn't the way it's supposed to be, and then that does keep abuse hidden and that's deeply problematic, obviously. So when we look at that, we've got this compulsivity here of well, we want to be different and so we're going to act as if we celebrate sex, but we're going to talk about it in these crude ways like smoking hot wife, and oh, I can't wait for your wedding night.

Speaker 1:

I cannot tell you how many weddings I went to when I was younger where the bride and groom had waited until their wedding night and everybody was talking about what they were going to be doing. Oh, I bet you guys are going to do XYZ or have so much fun or whatever, or lingerie parties and things like that that I've been to and you know there's nothing inherently wrong in some ways about a lingerie party or whatever, but the focus on your wedding night is going to be this thing and the teaching that purity culture has of if you just wait, then you will fulfill each other's sexual desires for now and forever and it'll be just the best thing ever. When that doesn't take into consideration needing to learn each other's patterns and preferences and bodies and all of these things, and if there's any trauma that is showing up, which happens for so many people very rarely do. I hear that the wedding night was like the thing of fireworks and amazement or whatever. It was awkward and fumbly and challenging and still good. And so I think that we set people up for failure when we go into that direction, and that is one of the things that purity culture did.

Speaker 1:

We go into that direction, and that is one of the things that purity culture did. That is such a disservice to both men and women as they enter into what we hope is a lifelong relationship with each other. And so the church saying, oh, modest is hottest and you're no good if you don't marry as a virgin, and all of these things that ended up being languaged in that place ended up really not helping people have language that they needed, didn't help people learn how to walk into challenging situations. There are so many challenging situations that can take place in the bedroom, even in the healthiest of situations. Right, there's two people trying to figure stuff out, and so I think it's really important for us to go. How did purity culture not help us and how can we move toward better languaging, better honesty, more authenticity? In this space we can say, hey, here's why God designed sexuality in this way and how we can come together in relationships in this way, and here's some things that might be a challenge and here are some things that you might need to work through and ways that you'll need to learn to talk to each other and things that you'll need to be able to say and that sort of stuff.

Speaker 1:

When I look at premarital counseling, some of the stuff I've seen over the years is just absolute trash, if I'm being honest. It covers who's going to like, wash the dishes and stuff and like that's not unimportant, it's important but it's not penultimate, right? How are we going to work through difficult things? How are we going to give each other the benefit of the doubt? How are we going to handle it when someone betrays us? Because, look, even in a marriage that is healthy, where there's not like an intimate betrayal, like infidelity or things like that, we hurt each other. There are going to be times we don't show up for each other when we should and when we needed to, and that does lead to betrayal maybe not on the scale of an infidelity, but it is definitely still betrayal and so I think it's really important for us to have much better premarital counseling for people that is more robust and really covers a wider gamut of things, especially as people are getting married a bit older. You're bringing stuff in right. You may bring all kinds of life experiences in that you need to really be able to work through, and I think that we can definitely do a better job when we pull out of just purity, culture, vernacular and get into here's what we can do together and how can we actually do this and have a relationship that is strong and healthy and good, and I think we would see a lot different stuff.

Speaker 1:

I've always wanted to do a booth at a bridal show and have parents and family members buy counseling for their future children and children's in-law, because it's always a helpful thing, right? Well, not always, hopefully, a good counselor is a helpful thing, but it can be such a gift because it's like, hey, you are going to encounter some struggles and that's okay, and when you do, here is a resource for you. Or even just setting aside a fund and saying, hey, here's like a gift certificate that when the time comes and it will come that you guys need a little extra support. That is outside of just mom, dad, your community. What have you here is, you know, 10 sessions to a counselor of your choosing and then you just pay for it for them, and I think that is something that would be such a beautiful wedding gift that if we really leaned into that, we might really see people take advantage of that, especially, I think, the younger generations, who are much more open to therapy now.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to transition us now into the use of pornography, and this is definitely one of the things that, in premarital counseling and just in the church in general, we need to be talking about. It is so prevalent, so incredibly prevalent in the church and it is prevalent amongst church leaders. There's a study that Pure Desire commissioned through the Barna organization that came out at the end of 2024. And it has some really profound data in it that I think we need to really be paying attention to, and that is just how common pornography use is among practicing Christians, and it is stunningly high. So when you take a survey, we know that some people are going to be honest and some people are not going to be as honest, and we don't always know if we've gotten all the data, but this is a pretty robust survey and there is a lot of pornography use in the pulpit Now a lot of the pastors that answered said that they used to have a problem with it and they don't anymore, but I can tell you from being a therapist that I am not sure how true that is. To be honest, I think that there can be some significant struggles.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that this survey doesn't cover is how has pornography use impacted how you see women and vice versa? Right, so there are women as well that struggle with pornography use, and it's much higher that, I think, than people realize, because women are also accessing pornography. It's maybe a little different than men at times, but it can be through erotic fiction and things of that nature. So the smut novels, and I think that my question there is also then how are you learning to view men? Right? So how are we viewing the opposite sex because of the use of pornography in our lives, and I think that that then increases incidences of abuse. There's a lot of research out there that pornography use increases domestic abuse because of how violent pornography often is, and it is very rare that pornography use stays simple heterosexual pornographic viewing, if you will and that is still not simple at all, like in any way, but it ends up honestly getting much darker, much more violent, typically, and that is a progression that happens over time frequently.

Speaker 1:

So if someone's been using pornography since they were a teenager, what are they consuming? And that, I think, is a very interesting question, and I didn't see that represented in this particular survey, but I'd be very curious about the nature of it. This is one of the things that I ask people when they come to me for compulsive sexual behavior treatment or problematic sexual behavior treatment is what are you watching, how often are you watching it and what is the content? Now, like I don't want the salacious detail by detail, but I do need to know the overall content of what is being consumed because I can't just assume it's one thing, and you would be surprised at how often it is that it is much darker and much more. It is much darker and much more. Oh gosh, the word I guess I'm looking for is terrifying in some ways than you would expect. And nobody I've ever spoken with said yeah, this is exactly how I wanted my addiction and my compulsion to play out. They said it started here and it ended up here, and I don't know what to do now. And that is very, very common because, again, it doesn't stay stagnant, it does grow.

Speaker 1:

So when we look at what is happening in the church, it's not even enough to me to just go okay, pornography is being consumed pretty regularly on a wide basis by both men and women more men than women at this time but what kind and what is it doing to how you see other people? And then how is that playing out across the church? And I think that is just a super important question that we want to ask and a super important thing that we wanna consider. And then if we're not talking about it again, if we're not talking about it in the church, then how are we letting people get help? How are we helping them really sit with the weight of what's happened and then move toward healing, because being honest is part of that I and then move toward healing, because being honest is part of that. You know, I think often about doing domestic abuse work and what my friend Chris Moles says about it. When is a thief no longer a thief? Well, it's not when they stop stealing right, it's when they become generous. So, when it is an addict or someone struggling with compulsive behavior no longer an addict? Well, it's not when they stop consuming pornography, it's when their heart changes toward it, and so I think that is something that we need to ask better questions about in the church, and if we're not, then we're leaving this big area hidden.

Speaker 1:

I will encourage churches to make acquaintances with your local pastoral sex addiction professionals or your local certified sex addiction therapists. We can be really big help in these areas in helping you understand the nature of compulsive sexual behavior and things of that nature that you can then put programs in to get help with. One of the bigger ones is Pure Desire Ministries. They have programs for both men and women and for betrayed partners and for both females that struggle with compulsive sexual behavior and men. So I would just commend you to look at some of their resources. They are run by lay people, so it may or may not be robust enough for your situation, but it can be a program that churches offer that can be really helpful. And again, there are a variety of things that churches can do to really help not only their leadership but their parishioners as well. And I will say, if a church doesn't have space for leadership to say I'm in trouble here, then we are again keeping things hidden.

Speaker 1:

With Dr David Pooler on the podcast a while back. He and I talked about one of the things that pastors said initially when they would get caught committing adult clergy sexual abuse was I'm going to lose my job and if we can get ahead of addiction and compulsion before it even gets to that place, and that the fear isn't, if I disclose that I'm having this struggle or these thoughts, I'm automatically going to get fired. Now, sometimes that's appropriate. There are consequences for things that we do. Sometimes that's appropriate. However, if we can help people get ahead of it before it becomes problematic, then maybe the job loss issue isn't penultimate in this case.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that we often see is high control religious environments that then push this narrative Again. We talked about from the pulpit talking inappropriately about sex, inappropriately about women, making comments that are inaccurate, untrue and demeaning and that sort of thing that happens, sadly, way too often in the evangelical church. In the evangelical church Also then, using scripture to harm, and we've talked quite a bit on this podcast about spiritual abuse because it is so insidious and wicked and is so harmful. So if you're saying submit at all costs and God wants you to submit, then you're using that to abuse or you're using that to allow someone else to abuse and exploit, then you are and this is what I truly believe means taking the Lord's name in vain. I'm telling you that God says this is okay, when the Bible literally does not, and I think that's a huge issue.

Speaker 1:

So we want to look at the elements of coercive control and it's always interesting to me because a lot of times people will think, okay, well, sexual addiction and sexual abuse are completely separate from domestic abuse and coercive control, and I'm going to tell you, as somebody who works in both sides of this absolutely not. They are very tied together. First of all, sexual abuse plays out in the bedroom, in coercive controlling relationships all the time, and so to say that they are separate and we don't need to deal with them together is actually completely inaccurate, and I would just really encourage churches to think that through, particularly amongst leadership. Really think it through and say what are we doing? What are we doing, and look at how that is playing out. Again, this really is a place to dial into your own theology, what is your theology of men and women, and we can come to different places, whether that's complementarian, egalitarian, whatever etarian you might be and look at those things and still come to healthy places Because, no matter who I've ever met, whether they're complementarian or egalitarian, if they are a true Christ follower who values people, they are honoring both sexes well. They are honoring both men and women well. No one is being demeaned. So I would just encourage you, really look at those things and really examine maybe even programs languaging, all of those things about what's happening, and really look at the interplay between coercive control any high control area or individual with sex abuse, because they happen together so frequently.

Speaker 1:

I'll also say that one of the things that I have heard frequently, just being in the church. My entire life I have been a part of the church. I literally was practically birthed at the altar. I am the daughter of a pastor and I have been in church my entire life, so I've seen multiple denominations. I've been doing this for a while and I think that there is an over-focus on sexual intercourse versus true intimacy and like.

Speaker 1:

Sexual intercourse is wonderful. As I've said before, orgasms are fun. I definitely enjoy them. I think most people do.

Speaker 1:

However, when we distill down intimacy to nothing more than sexual intercourse, we are missing so much and we do such a disservice to the men and women in our churches because we're telling them that this is where you need to get. But there are physical issues, there are mental health issues, there are trauma issues, there are all kinds of issues that make it not look like what someone might say is typical, right, right. And so if we're focusing only on that is what healthy sex is and healthy intimacy is, then we are literally shorting people out and in the worst possible ways, and we're narrowing this wide, beautiful expanse down to this sliver, and I think that that is unfair, it's unkind and it's not helpful. And then again it puts that focus on let me get my physical release, let me do this. And again it's exploitive, it's consumptive, it's using someone else, and that puts us in that same space, as I would classify someone who's struggling with compulsive sexual behavior or problematic sexual behavior or addiction. Right, I need to go get what I need to go get. That's the heart of how we see addictive behaviors play out, for whatever reason, whether it's comfort, whether it's who knows what.

Speaker 1:

And when we are saying, well, intercourse is the penultimate, it is what we need to have as our benchmark for intimacy and marriage, then we're out of balance. We're out of balance and I think that then we do again a disservice and we are functioning as the church as if we are sex addicted. So what can we do better? I'm glad you asked what we can do better is really start talking about this and really start as the body of Christ. And it starts with the people in the pews asking what does my church believe? What do I believe? Why do I believe this? What does the Bible say about it? What do I know Because of God's beautiful common grace that we have learned about how bodies function, how men and women function? What do I know about healthy sex that I can look at? How has my own sexual trauma or harm played into what I believe or what I am comfortable with? These are things I think we can start asking, and I think it's imperative also for churches to start asking them as well, from the leadership level.

Speaker 1:

How are we languaging this? Not only how are we languaging this from the pulpit when we teach on it and you should be teaching on it properly but how are we talking about it in women's ministry, how are we talking about it in men's ministry? And how are we talking about it in youth ministry? Because we know that the first access to pornography is very often as a child, as young as like six to eight. We're all carrying these little computers around in our pockets these days and kids are getting phones and access to the internet, younger and younger. And you might be a parent who's like, oh no, my kids never, my kid would never. I will not let them have it. Well, that's fine for you, but what about little Billy down the street or Sally down the street? Their parents may not feel the same way and may not have the same restrictions. Your kids are going to access it. So what are we doing, not only as parents, to help talk about the beauty of real intimacy and what healthy sex looks like, but what are we doing, again, in youth group, from elementary age all the way up through high school and young adult? What are we doing to help start a different conversation from the beginning?

Speaker 1:

Now again, we can't eradicate everything, but we can absolutely do way better than we have been. We can have healthy, real conversations that are balanced and look a lot more like Jesus, and we can talk about God's good and beautiful design for sex and for intimacy and have it in the whole content and concept of relational intimacy. We can say, yes, this is beautiful and good and it's only one part of a relationship. Let's talk about what a lifetime relationship looks like and how they look and are healthy, and how you walk in them and walk through difficulty and all these different things. We can do a much better job and I think in that space, as we do, that the church will look markedly different than the rest of the world because we will be honest and authentic and not trying to put on a mask of holiness that is anything but holy, but we'll be honest and real, much the way that scripture is and definitely the way that Jesus is. So this was an interesting conversation for you. I do think that at times, man, the modern evangelical church, sure does look like a sex addict, but I think there are a lot of things that we can do and start to reconsider to help it not look that way and to really change the course of how we view intimacy overall.

Speaker 1:

Sexual intercourse is not the end-all, be-all of intimate behavior with somebody. There is so much more, and I think that there is so much more that's even outside of the romantic intimate relationships. If you've read Body and Soul, healed and Whole, then you know that I think healthy friendships are super important between the opposite sex. Healthy, non-sexual intimate relationships with both men and women are a beautiful thing. I hope that this is edifying to you. Reach out if you have questions and thank you, as always, for being here with me on hey Tabby, and I look forward to seeing you the next time. Thanks for joining me for today's episode of hey Tabby. If you're looking for a resource that I mentioned in the show and you want to check out the show notes, head on over to tabithawestbrookcom forward slash hey Tabby. That's H-E-Y-T-A-B-I and you can grab it there. I look forward to seeing you next time.

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