By Jim Harden
Via the Christian Post:
“For at the window of my house, I looked out … and I saw among the naïve … a young man lacking sense, passing through the street near her corner; and he takes the way to her house…in the middle of the night and in the darkness. And behold, a woman comes to meet him” (Prov. 7:6-10).
Instead of walking the streets the modern man is surfing the internet. And the new street corner is a porn site.
Pornography is a moral virus spread in the new public square called the internet. And now that 91% of Americans have a smartphone, the potential for geometric spread of the virus across all generations is a clear and present danger to stable, civil, and polite society. In the digital age the following Scriptural observation has never been more accurate, “She … lurks by every corner” (Prov. 7:12).
And while the internet has been and, in many ways, continues to be a miraculous fountain of productivity, journalism, and oratory, hiding under the cover of freedom of expression, purveyors of pornography are using the publication power as a sewage line, piping noxious moral sludge into our hearts and minds, poisoning the body politic.
If America fails to repent of our addiction to the evil that is pornography, not only will we sear our conscience and lose our soul but Scripture warns we will lose our nation: “Numerous are all her slain. Her house is the way to Sheol, descending to the chambers of death” (Prov. 7:26-27). As Theodore Roosevelt concluded, “…in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.”
Civil society, especially those with a claim to self-government, must be informed. And that requires vehicles to communicate ideas, ideas that help us imagine what kind of society we want to be and ideas that create a road map for the journey. Formerly pulpits, soap boxes, newspapers, radio and television, the vast majority of public discourse is now digital, reaching billions of people globally any given minute in the new public square called the internet.
Those digital companies that control this unprecedented “power of oratory,” the ideas and means to communicate them effectively, have a responsibility to use it responsibly. Theodore Roosevelt asserted that those who wield this power to debauch the citizenry claiming “the public demands it and that the demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.”
Read the entire commentary at Christian Post
