A Christian Strategy for the Internet
Technology is a double-edged sword. Though breakthrough inventions like the printing press, the camera, radio and television, have all transformed the world in their own time, users of new technologies are simultaneously presented with wonderful opportunities and enormous dangers.
Let there be no doubt: the internet is a wonderful tool with many profitable uses from research to business to evangelism. There is, however, an incredibly dark side to the internet: so dark, in fact, that in the opinion of many Christian leaders, 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. Who would ever have thought that the computer would eventually bring all of us within easy 24/7 reach of the most abominable pornographic images ever seen by human eyes in living, moving colour. A study by the London School of Economics found 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. That’s how pervasive it is.
Thousands of new porn sites are being added to the internet monthly. In fact, a huge percentage of total internet traffic is porn related. In checking the words being accessed in one particular search engine 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’ had been requested up to a maximum of about 100,000 times each. Other words were tried but a frequency of 100,000 was rarely exceeded. When the words ‘sex’ and ‘porn’ were checked, the numbers came back in the millions. Add to this all the websites that feature witchcraft, the occult, violence, racism, Satanism and the cults, and one can begin to appreciate the enormity and seriousness of the problem.
Email
As if all of this were not bad enough, there is the added danger of email spam. Once a person’s email number has been found by a marketing outfit, 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 through to a particular porn site. At the bottom of such emails the recipient is asked to reply if they want to be ‘removed’ from the mailing list. This is usually a ploy to encourage the recipient to actually confirm that he exists so that his email address can then sold on to other unscrupulous email spammers, resulting in even more unsolicited email arriving.
Chat Rooms
Another danger lies in internet chat rooms. Many 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 or instant 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 records of the names of 7,000 British people who had paid over the internet to view child pornography on one American web site alone. Numerous children and young people are disappearing annually, never to be seen again, as a direct result of meeting evil predators through internet chat. This is not a conspiracy scare story. These are cold hard facts that can be confirmed by any Police agency. Such tragedies are occurring even in solid Christian families who never thought it would happen to them.
Social Networking
Yet more danger is posed by social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo where users can upload profiles of themselves, complete with videos, photographs, music and more. These sites are filled with moral dangers and are interconnected by an almost infinite number of links to other harmful sites such as YouTube and Google video. A cursory look around any of these popular sites will quickly reveal that they are not suitable for Christians, young or old. Words like worldly, frivolous, mindless, defiling, unsafe, unnecessary and harmful spring to mind.
Results
The fallout from the internet has been devastating. Thousands of professing Christians have become addicted to internet porn since its arrival in the 1990’s. Focus on the Family, a Christian Ministry 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 due to internet porn. The enemy is subtle and ruthless. 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 you try to close a page own, up pops another one automatically. The porn purveyors are simply trying to keep the images coming until something appears that hooks you.
Why has the internet succeeded in trapping so many people? Quite simply, in the old days, if a man wanted to access filth he had to leave his 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 than even cable TV, the internet has now sucked large numbers of Christian men back into a sin from which they had been free since being saved. Accessibility, affordability and anonymity. These are the keys. In the quietness of one’s own home, in total secrecy, anyone can watch and even interact with prostitutes for hours at a time, night after night. Unbelievable but true.
Detection
The symptoms of internet porn addiction are obvious once you know what to look for. Perhaps 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 some work to do on the PC.’’ A family member may become furtive when anyone approaches them while on the internet. (All it usually takes is a quick click of the mouse to remove pornography from the screen). To preserve your family 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.
Here is how to check what’s coming through an internet connection on a computer that uses Windows XP. 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 you should take action to deal with the problem and prevent it recurring in the future. If you find there’s no history, it may be because the user is trying to cover his or her tracks. It is very easy to delete one’s internet history from within Windows XP. In fact, Google’s Chrome browser allows you to surf the net in ‘incognito mode’, known widely as ‘porn mode’, where no history is recorded. If the history is non-existent, perhaps you need to ask why.
How to protect yourself
Secondly, introduce a total ban on chat rooms. There is very 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? That is exactly what you are doing if you allow your children the use of chat rooms. Chat rooms are not needed to communicate with friends. A programme like Skype is much easier and is totally free. The same warning applies to social networking and video sharing sites. Proceed with extreme caution and active parental supervision at all times.
Thirdly, subscribe to a filter and accountability service like Covenant Eyes (www.covenanteyes.com) or American Family Online (www.afo.net). This is the single most important step you can take, and it only costs a few pounds each month. This will protect you from pornography and spam email as well as giving you a large measure of control over who can see what on the internet. Through AFO and Covenant Eyes’s accountability programme a list of every site you look at can be emailed weekly to an accountability friend. (Remember, it is practically impossible to break a pornography addiction alone).
If you have children at School, check up on their School’s internet protection policy. Beware: pornography is more addictive than cocaine. Dr. James Dobson warns that just one serious exposure to pornography by your pre-adolescent child is enough to hook him for life. Consequently parents simply have to be proactively involved if they want to see their children preserved in this wicked world.
For any reader who is dabbling in internet porn, be warned that persistent involvement will eventually lead to other sins and may end up ruining your family and your marriage. Next in importance to resisting temptation is avoiding temptation, and in light of the propensity to evil latent within fallen human nature, surfing the internet without rigorous protection has to be one of the most reckless actions a Christian can take.
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)
