This week we welcome to the podcast parenting guru Ted Tripp as our guest on the podcast. Dr. Tripp is the author of two bestselling books, Shepherding a Child's Heart and Instructing a Child's Heart. Dr. Tripp, I want to ask you, when you look around the church today and the condition of families, what do you think is right now the single greatest threat to the Christian home?

Well, I think a huge issue really has to be confronted and the elephant in the room that we're not talking about nearly enough and that is we have an awful lot of men who are Christian men with wives and children who are addicted to porn. And they're going on the websites, they're going places they shouldn't go, work, they sit at the computer all day, they have these periodic dalliances with porn or maybe even just dive wholesale into it.

But the fact is that that stuff is deadening to their souls. And so you have a guy that shows up at church, he's, you know, the hymns are being projected, you know, on the screen, the family is singing, he's singing, he's trying to sing, he wants to be drawn into this worship, but his soul is so dead inside him because he has titillated himself all week and the things about God seem fairy-tale-ish and unreal to him and they're not compelling.

And I think that that's a huge issue that is confronting a lot of Christian families. I think a lot of times, now sometimes wives know about it, sometimes they don't, a lot of times wives don't know and they're confused, they can't understand why is this guy so disconnected, so disjointed because, you know, pornography just feeds a whole private world of my personal, you know, it's all about me and it's like any addiction, it's all about me.

You know, I think there's an interesting, you know, biblical take on addiction. I don't like the language of alcoholism and so forth, and, you know, sometimes people think of addictions as though they're medical conditions and then you remove the ethical and moral aspect of it. But I think Proverbs, at the end of Proverbs chapter 5, I think it's verse 21, it says, "The wicked deeds of an evil man ensnare him and the cords of his sin hold him fast." That's really a biblical take on addiction.

People make choices that are choices that lock them in and ensnare them and they become bound in the cords of that sin. And you know, I think there's some wonderful resources for helping yourself, you know, and wonderful online resources for getting help and counseling and so forth, but I think, you know, men need to face that problem head on and churches need to be speaking to that issue far more clearly than we are, I think.

So very true. And I mean, this sin disrupts a man from engaging God at church. So explain how this problem then manifests itself inside the home. Well, I think it's on various levels, because on one level, he feels hypocritical when he steps up as a spiritual leader in the home, obviously, because his loyalties are divided.

And because of that, he is reluctant to step up and be a spiritual leader in the home. He feels, you know, like he doesn't have the right to speak. And even if his wife has no idea, because this goes on at work and she never knows about it, or he does it secretively and she doesn't know, he still is a reluctant and non-participating spiritual leader because he is compromised by his porn addiction.

Now if the wife knows about it, that even in some ways makes it worse, not worse that she knows, but it increases that sense of impotence to speak the truth into any situation of life, because not only is he a hypocrite, she knows he's a hypocrite and his hypocrisy has been exposed.

So I think the implications, and the implications for kids, you know, I cannot tell you the number of times, Tony, when I've been involved in counseling with families where a young teenager discovered what dad's been doing on the internet, or walked in on dad and he quickly slammed the computer shut, but the kid knew what was going on.

And then, you know, that just undermines any spiritual leadership, obviously. You know, it is just a terribly, terribly destructive thing. Unfortunately, I think it's just far more common than we're willing to acknowledge. I saw a survey recently, I think just in the past week or so, that porn addiction is actually a greater problem amongst Christian men than it is amongst secular men.

I didn't drill into that to see why they had drawn that conclusion, but I thought it was an interesting observation. Tragic. It is. Thank you, Dr. Tripp. And in fact, that survey was released by Proven Men Ministries in the Barna Group in August. You can find it with a Google search.

The title is "Pornography, Use, and Addiction." And of course, this episode was merely analytical, not intended to get into the strategies for combating lust. If you need help to address a porn addiction in your life, please see several episodes that we recorded in this podcast series, specifically episodes number 304, 291, 165, 60, and 18.

And you can find all those episodes and 400 others in our free app for the iPhone and the Android. Check your app store to find it. Dr. Tripp joins us again tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Aspester John Podcast. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Edited by https://otter.ai © The Aspester John Podcast.

All rights reserved. The Aspester John Podcast is a production of the National Public Radio and Television Commission, in association with the National Council on the Arts and the National Gallery of Congress. © The Aspester John Podcast. All rights reserved.