A Christian Strategy for the Internet

Michael J. Penfold

Technology is never neutral. Breakthrough inventions like the printing press, camera, telephone, radio and TV, have each transformed the world in their own time. However, new technology is often a double-edged sword. Users are simultaneously presented with wonderful opportunities and enormous dangers. Let there be no doubt about it - the internet is a wonderful tool with many profitable uses (including reading articles!). Missionaries’ lives are daily enhanced by being able to contact family and friends at the speed of light. Matters for urgent prayer are being spread to thousands of people at the ‘click of a mouse’. Many people have been saved through reading the message of the gospel on the web.

 

However, there is an incredibly dark side to the Internet. In fact, it is so dark, that, in the opinion of many Christian authors, leaders and researchers, the internet represents the most dangerous phenomenon ever to be let loose on an often unsuspecting Christian public. It is the 21st century’s greatest threat to the purity and testimony of Christians and churches.

 

Within two or three clicks of a mouse and by typing a few letters on a keyboard, anybody - male or female, adult or child - can find the most abominable pornographic images ever seen by human eyes. This filth, which includes pictures of rape, bestiality, sodomy, paedophilia and sexual violence to women, comes in the form of still images, video footage or live ‘web cam’ action. A study by the London School of Economics states that as many as 90% of children aged between 8 and 16 viewed pornography online during 2001, despite the fact that most of them did not go looking for it. Porn sites commonly include child friendly terms such as ‘Disney’ and ‘Barbie’ in hidden web page code to trick search engines. A child could type in ‘girls’, ‘boys’ or ‘dogs’ and might be presented with more porn sites than legitimate sites. Add to this all the witchcraft, occult, violence orientated, racist, Satanic, New Age and cult web sites that are just as readily accessible, and you can begin to appreciate the enormity and seriousness of the problem.

 

Email

 

As if this weren’t bad enough, there is the added danger of ‘spam’ email. Once a person’s email number has been found by a marketing company or even an individual, it can be ruthlessly sold around the globe resulting in unsolicited emails appearing in his or her ‘inbox’ every day of the week. Many of these, if they don’t contain pornographic images themselves, are deliberate attempts to get the recipient to click their mouse a couple of times and log onto a particular porn site. At the bottom of such emails the recipient is asked to reply to a certain email address if they want to be ‘removed’ from the mailing list. It is well known that this is usually a lie, told so that by replying, the recipient merely ends up confirming that he ‘exists’ and his email address can then sold on to further unscrupulous email spammers, resulting in even more unsolicited email arriving.

 

Chat Rooms

 

Another danger is posed by what are known as ‘Internet Chat Rooms’. Certain internet providers make ‘rooms’ available for their members to engage in ‘gay chat’, ‘New Age chat’, ‘Muslim chat’ and, of course, not to discriminate, ‘Christian chat’. However, lurking around the world’s many chat rooms are literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles, appearing under deliberately deceptive ‘profiles’, ready to send a personal message to anyone who they fancy they might be able to seduce (there are 110,000 known paedophiles in Great Britain alone). In Jan 2003, UK Police revealed that they had the names of 7,000 British people who had paid, by credit card over the internet, to view child pornography on one American web site alone. Hundreds of children and young people are literally disappearing annually, never to be seen again, as a direct result of internet chat. This is not a conspiracy scare story. These are cold hard facts that can be confirmed by any Police agency - and this is happening to solid Christian families who attend evangelical churches - who never thought it would happen to them.

 

Pornography

 

Equally tragic is the fact that thousands of Christian leaders, as well as thousands more ‘lay Christians’, have fallen into pornography addiction since the internet’s arrival on the scene in the 1990’s. Focus on the Family, a Christian Ministry to families based in Colorado, USA, receives about 300 ‘crisis’ calls a month from Pastors who are at the end of their rope, about to lose their family and church, through falling into sin - frequently involving, among other things, addiction to internet pornography.

 

Thousands of new pornography sites are being added to the internet each month. In fact, a huge percentage of total internet traffic is pornography related. In checking the words being accessed in one particular search engine (not one of the big three) during one month of the year, it was found that words such as ‘God’, ‘religion’ and ‘Jesus’, as well as secular words such as ‘politics’, ‘jokes’ and ‘Nostradamus’, were requested up to a maximum of about 100,000 times each. Other words were tried but a frequency of 100,000 was very rarely exceeded. When the words ‘sex’ and ‘porn’ were checked, the numbers come back in the millions, literally. While you are reading this article, millions of people are browsing through the most abominable pornography available, right in the comfort of their own homes on the internet - tragically, among them are many professing born again believers.

 

How did all of this happen? Quite simply. In the old days, if a man wanted access to filth he had to leave the house and go to the red light district or the porn shop. But the threat of being seen acted as a powerful deterrent. The advent of cable TV changed all that. But a thousand times more dangerous even than cable TV, the internet has sucked large numbers of Christian men back into a sin from which they had been free since salvation. Ease of access and secrecy. Those are the keys. In the quietness of one’s own home, in total secrecy and anonymity, anyone can watch and interact with prostitutes for hours at a time,  night after night. Unbelievable but true.

 

Many porn sites use a method known as ‘mouse-trapping’, so that even if you or your child stumble across pornography by mistake, as soon as they try to close a page down, up pops another porn site automatically. The only way to get out is to disconnect completely at that moment. The porn purveyors are simply trying to keep the images coming until something appears that hooks the client. Internet porn sites all show a certain amount of explicit material for free in order to whet the appetite for more. If you like what you see, all you need to do is give them a small monthly fee over the web with your credit card and they’ll allow you to access loads more filth. Such are the ways in which Satan seeks to trap the unwary.

 

Detection

 

The symptoms are obvious once you know what to look for. Usually a husband will start staying up late ‘to work on the computer’. He’ll tell his wife ‘‘You just go to bed, I’ve got to do some work to do on the PC tonight.’’ Or a family member may become furtive and jumpy when anyone approaches them while on the internet (all it usually takes is a click of the mouse to remove pornography from the screen). If you have a family member who spends hours on the internet, there’s no way round it - to find out if anything untoward is occurring, you simply have to become computer savvy. Don’t live in denial, being too embarrassed or thinking to yourself it could never happen to my family.

 

How to find out

 

If your computer is a PC loaded with Windows XP, do the following. Once the computer is on, click on the START button in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Go up to INTERNET EXPLORER and click once with the mouse. A new page will open up across the computer screen. Along the top you’ll see the word TOOLS. Click on TOOLS and a drop-down box will appear. Scroll down with the mouse to the word INTERNET OPTIONS and another gray box will appear. In the centre there’s a section called TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES. Click on the word SETTINGS to the right of that and then click on VIEW FILES. On the screen you will now see a long list of websites that have been accessed by the computer user. If you discover anything pornographic or occultic and need further help, contact a trusted Christian friend who knows about computers so that you can check other things like emails and really find out what has been occurring. 

 

If you find there’s no history, it may be because the user is trying to cover his or her tracks. Software is available that deletes all of one’s internet history. It is actually marketed with the heading ‘‘Don’t lose your marriage, buy our software.’’ If the history is non-existent, perhaps you need to ask why.

 

Recovery

 

Love must be tough. For the ultimate benefit of the fallen one, you must confront them, firmly but in love. With the evidence at the ready, face them with the problem and ask for answers. If they admit to their internet pornography addiction and repent, that will be a mighty breakthrough. If they deny everything, just pull out the evidence. If they still persist in denying everything, you have a serious problem on your hands that will require church discipline for persistent ongoing immorality and lying. However, if there is repentance and a sincere desire to sort things out, here are some suggestions:

 

Evaluate if the person really needs the internet. If they just want email, there are email only services available. If they must have the internet, go through a fully protected internet add-on service such as www.characterlink.net or www.afo.net. Become accountable. Through www.covenanteyes.com a list of every site a person looks at over a week can be emailed to an accountability friend. Remember, it is practically impossible to break a pornography addiction by oneself. Make sure the vacuum is filled with the word of God and prayer, or the victory will slip away.

 

How to protect yourself

 

Firstly, our advice is to put the family computer in a public place such as the kitchen or family room. We advise strongly against allowing children and teenagers internet access in their bedrooms, and late night usage of any kind after the rest of the family has gone to bed.

 

Secondly, we advise totally banning chat room usage for children and teenagers. There is little glory for God in such places and they are extremely dangerous. If a paedophile knocked on your front door and asked for a private talk with your 11 year old daughter, would you allow him in? But that is exactly what you are doing if you allow your children the free use of chat rooms. If you use chat rooms to speak to relatives on the other side of the world and the process is open, well monitored and controlled, you may find it works OK for the adults in the home. This is a difficult issue and is easily open to abuse, so we advise extreme caution in this area.

 

Thirdly, we advise you to subscribe to a Christian internet service which will prevent access to internet pornography on your computer. Services like www.characterlink.net and www.afo.net also cut out many unsolicited emails and computer viruses.

 

If you have children at School, check up on their internet protection policy. Dr. James Dobson warns that just one serious exposure to pornography by your pre-adolescent child is enough to hook him for life because pornography is more addictive than cocaine. Persistent involvement will eventually lead to other sin and will end up ruining your family, marriage and church. Remember, next in importance to resisting temptation is avoiding temptation.    

Penfold Books offers the following resources on the above subject