[Note: Every Friday we post a new rant from one of our writers, edited only for typos and spelling. This new series is not for those easily offended or for those who only like to play nice. So read this before you start posting your comments.]
If you’ve been following XXXchurch around for a while you might remember such classics as our Kitten Masturbation campaign or the time we flew a 25 foot penis outside churches to get people’s attention.
Or how about when we enlisted our good friend Ron Jeremy to educate parents on internet safety?
And who can forget the technological marvel that is the No Porn Phone?
We’re not afraid to test the waters with the ways we approach porn addiction, and so if you’re easily offended, XXXchurch may not always be the best place for you.
Porn is still definitely a very taboo topic in churches in general, which means there can be a lot of tension around it and people can get very serious very quickly. If we don’t talk about something, it creates shame, and if it creates shame, it creates a thick wall of protection where we don’t address the issue.
One of the most powerful ways to break down that wall is by using humor. If you can make fun of yourself, it puts everyone at ease, but if you take yourself way too seriously, you’re just bumming everyone out. No one likes or wants that.
The same is true with porn addiction. Yes, porn addiction is a very serious issue, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t use humor to lighten the mood a little.
Or to start a conversation.
Comedians understand this better than any of us. They use comedy to talk about things that no one else will dare touch. They take the darkest things we deal with like depression, suicide, addiction, and mental illness and reveal something important about that thing with humor that allows the audience to breathe. Laughing immediately breaks down the wall between the audience and the thing that nobody wants to talk about but EVERYONE is thinking.
That’s why we laugh. It’s the relief. It’s the release of tension. They said it. Thank God. Now I can relax.
I wrote a blog post for our Friday Rant series about masturbation and among the comments that I read were that I shouldn’t make fun of some things. Why not? Because it makes you uncomfortable? Because we’re afraid that if we laugh about something like porn that means we’re not taking it seriously?
It’s actually the complete opposite. We take it so seriously that we decide that we need to talk about it, and humor is a great tool to start the conversation.
[shortcode-variables slug=”mypilgrimage-inline”]If you don’t think this is funny then maybe this post isn’t for you. That’s ok. Don’t read it. There are plenty of places you can go if you don’t like to laugh. But for those of us who find freedom in the irreverence not just the reverence, it’s ok to laugh about porn.
Then again, if you are offended by humor being used, then maybe that’s actually a really healthy thing. It means that something has stirred in you, made you angry, and that probably reveals a lot about your own fear of the topic.
You’re not offended because someone is making light of the topic, you’re offended because you don’t really want to deal with the issue and are attempting to bury your own pain around porn. Topics like porn and sex create so much anxiety in many Christians that of course we don’t want to deal with those things. When someone gets offended at humor being used, they’re really just trying to protect the anxiety that they feel deep down.
And the rest of us who want to deal with it suffer as a result. The other reason that we should use humor to talk about difficult topics is because it allows us to remember the authority we have over it.
We’re told in church every week that as Christians we are free in Christ but how many of us actually feel free? Very few, and so when we use comedy, we immediately give ourselves permission to treat the darkest parts of ourselves with the contempt they deserve.
Think about the classic scene in a movie where the nerd kid gets bullied and beat up every day. Then at the end of the movie, the nerd has turned into the wise-cracking cool kid. They take the bully down with a witty retort or two and immediately the bully is on the back foot, retreats and ends up looking stupid.
The fear is gone. The anxiety is gone.
This is what humor can do for us when we talk about porn.
We’ve never shied away from using humor to talk about porn here at XXXchurch but that doesn’t mean we don’t take it seriously.
So let’s lighten up people and begin to enjoy freedom.
(Disclaimer: The other complaint from my blog was that I didn’t use any scripture in my rant, so here’s some scripture to keep everyone happy:)
The hand of the LORD was against the city with a very great destruction; and He smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had hemorrhoids in their secret parts. – 1 Samuel 5:9
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