Why Porn is Bad for the Natives

In Defense of Whataboutism and Christian Missions

I first encountered pornography when I was nine years old. I was living in a small town called Dédougou in the Sahel region of Burkina Faso in West Africa.¹ My parents were missionaries, and I had made some friends up the street. We played soccer, brewed green tea, and hunted West African basan, or “rainbow lizards,” with our slingshots. One day my friend Ali brought a cahier—a grade school notebook—that had Arabian-style portraits of nude women spliced randomly into the ruled pages.

It was 1995, before the internet. A good portion of the town didn’t even have electricity. I’m somewhat astounded that without smart phones—let alone the World Wide Web—pornography found me. And I really do mean that pornography found me. As any teen boy will tell you, not an ounce of effort needs to be put into coming across explicit images even without modern technologies. It’s predatory.

My liberal arts education, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, taught me to bemoan the erosion and erasure of indigenous cultures by the hand of predatory imperialist powers. Post-colonial criticism, as the discipline calls it, takes an evaluative look at the effects of Western colonial powers on the global south. It’s a criticism because colonialism did a lot of evil, and the discipline seeks to deconstruct triumphalist narratives about Western supremacy. The West African transatlantic slave trade is a worthy and obvious example of the criticism’s method: Enslaving Western powers might have been militarily superior, but not morally so.

Within the field of theological studies, the critique has been extended to the ways that Christian missions has occasioned the erosion of indigenous culture and replaced it with Western values. The accusation is that Christianity was and is complicit in the colonial endeavor, when it should have either encouraged indigenous forms of the faith or (if you’re a most liberal critic) stayed away from indigenous peoples all together.

There’s a lot to say about the complicated relationship Western missionaries have had with Western politics, economics, and military power. Missiologists spend careers analyzing the unique entanglements and disentanglements of Christian missions and colonial powers in particular places and among particular populations. If you’re interested in the topic, former Yale professor and African scholar Lamin Sanneh is a great place to start. His book, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, was an enormous help to me as I reappraised my own missionary experience in view of post-colonial critique.

Some scholars, including my Pentecostal colleague, Ekaputra Tupamahu, suggest that Christian missions, at least as it is conceived by the Western church, is an intrinsically corrupt enterprise. I don’t think that’s quite right. But I’m also not one to massage the truth about racist missionaries. They exist.

However one might criticize Western Christian missions, I believe it's necessary to engage in an even more thorough critique of the Western pornographic industry.

I recently read a Daily Mail article (based on a NY Times report) about the culturally erosive effects of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet coming to a remote group of villages in the Amazon basin. The result has been the westernization of the indigenous populations: social media scrolling, smart phone obsession, and consumption of pornography on a level that has disrupted the common cultural life of this particular people group. According to the article, young people are derelict in their hunting and foraging duties because they’re too preoccupied with porn, group chats, and money-making Ponzi schemes. Adults have evidently noted higher (and worrying) levels of sexual aggression amongst the young men.

A follow-up NY Times piece claims that the original article overstated the detrimental effects of the Internet, which is entirely believable. But there’s still something to be said here: Whatever the cultural effects of Christianity on indigenous populations and cultures, access to the internet is disrupting, eroding, and erasing indigenous cultures at a faster rate than humanity has ever seen. And this particular disruption is emphatically and self-evidently evil. Pornography is good for no one, and it’s bad for everyone.

“Whataboutism” can be a dangerous game, but every once in a while it’s worth playing. Again, I don’t pretend as if Christian missionaries from the West haven’t ever been complicit in their home countries’ colonizing efforts over the last 200+ years. But if we’re going to discuss the ways the West continues to destroy the global south, that conversation has to start with how modern technologies have introduced a culture of sexual consumption—and consumption generally—that is eroding and erasing indigenous populations’ traditional ways of life in ways that no one anticipated, but that no one can deny.

It’s likely that most post-colonial critics won’t take my point seriously. They often make the opposite argument: Sexual liberation (as they call it) is the solution to colonialism, not its greatest champion. Scholars like Kwok Pui Lan and Marcella Althus-Reid come to mind. Colonialism is linked with heteronormativity, so the undoing of colonialism must come with the proliferation and celebration of alternative sexualities. Again, I’m not convinced.

Pastorally, I’m concerned about the colonizing power of the pornography industry in the community I serve in Iowa. It’s not simply that kids are learning about sex from curated and plasticized sexual violence on screen. It’s that pornographic consumption is the bedrock of the consumeristic affliction we all experience on a daily basis. Most local Western communities don’t have the artifacts of culture anymore—local dance, music, farming habits, artistic representation, and culinary arts—because the only culture left is an anti-culture of staring at a screen that provides endless pornography and pornography-proximate content. Think about that next time you scroll through Instagram.

Pornography is predatory. It hunted nine year-old me down without technology, and now it has wings. It flies through the air via wifi and satellites to make of us a global consumeristic anti-culture. Jonathan Haidt’s recent work, The Anxious Generation, is a wake-up call to the dominating power of our new techno-colonists.

I was introduced to pornography about 20 feet from our front porch in Dédougou. My father used to routinely sit there with African pastors imploring them to preach the gospel in the vernacular. Christianity had taken deepest root in the Mossi plateau around the capital city of Burkina Faso. Dédougou was a Djula-majority area. Mossi pastors would come to Djula territory and preach either in their native tongue, or in the tongue of their French colonizers. My father, a white anglophone missionary, wanted the gospel to be preached in the local language because he was convinced (as am I) that one does not need to be French or Mossi to be a Christian. He was convinced that preaching in the vernacular would mean cultural renewal, not obliteration.

Yet we’re constantly told that cultural renewal through encounter with the world will be the fruit of introducing the internet in every corner of the world. I don’t think anyone can claim that’s what’s actually happening. Surely Elon Musk’s apostles are not sitting down with Amazonian leaders trying to convince them to resist the hegemony by preserving the vernacular and with it their local culture.

1. My good friend Brett Erickson told me to write about this, so I have.