Imagine your child being completely unimpressed with porn… disinterested… unaffected by its allure… is that even possible?

Yes, it is.

Bear in mind, however, that we told you MCAG is Radical and Revolutionary… you may be surprised by what you read here. And if you haven’t read the main series of articles on the MCAG site, you should probably do that first.

It Starts at Home

When I was barely five, I remember being in my mother’s bedroom and seeing her naked pregnant body as she dressed. When she let me put my ear to her belly, I recall saying, “Hello in there!” After she gave birth to my youngest sister, I often saw her breasts as she nursed. Not until years later did I see those breasts again, when I did an EKG on my mom in the ER where I was an RN. Finally, caring for her at home as she died of a brain tumor, I saw her fully naked several times. How beautiful her body was, even at age seventy-five.

Self-Fulfilling Assumption

Here in modern America, most of our parents stopped letting us see family nakedness early in childhood. The assumption behind this restriction is that, after “the age of innocence,” the naked body becomes a sexual temptation. Unfortunately, that assumption itself plants the seed of such a temptation, the restriction inevitably cultivates it, and society reaps the harvest of a pornographic view of the body.

I’m not blaming my parents or yours. They were misled by the prevailing culture, just as their parents were before them. But I do blame the church, not just for its past and present leadership in promoting a sexualized view of the body, but for its negligence in theologically correcting this error through a mature, realistic, incarnational view of human embodiment.

The Assumption is False

Missionaries and cross-cultural workers living among naked people groups get to see what happens when this aversion to nudity is absent. They themselves quickly become accustomed to seeing nakedness everywhere. Although they learned the body taboo just as we did, they soon stop experiencing the sexual temptation it preaches. This alone should cause church leaders to tremble and ask, “What have I been teaching?” But culture is blinding. Its authority can render normally intelligent minds oblivious to the obvious.

What If…?

But stop and think. What would it be like to grow up in a naked culture? What if the bare bodies of friends, neighbors, and family members became a daily sight? Bodily growth from infancy to old age would be routinely visible. Adolescent emotional worries about the physical changes of puberty would be replaced by realistic expectations. Young people would grow up with total visual knowledge of the opposite sex, thus eliminating any prurient curiosity about body parts and their functions. Pornography could gain no foothold in such an environment, because a pornographic view of the body would be nonexistent.

In the next blog post I will discuss some practical ways to teach and practice a non-pornographic view of the body as a means to porn-proofing our kids.

Pastor David L. Hatton