The Addiction Destroying the Church Made Kidnapped Elizabeth Smart’s ‘Living Hell Worse’
Kidnapped Elizabeth Smart was forced to watch her captor view pornography and then re-enact the horrors on her.
“He would just sit and look at it and stare at it, and he would just talk about these women, and then when he was done, he would turn and look at me, and he would be like, ‘Now we’re going to do this,'” Smart says of her convicted abductor, Brian David Mitchell, in a new video for Fight the New Drug.
But pornography is far from a secular issue.
What many people don’t realize is pornography feeds the sex trafficking industry—and many Christians are feeding the slavery beast. According to Barna Group, 77 percent of Christian men aged 18 to 30 look at pornography at least monthly, 36 percent view pornography on a daily basis, and 32 percent admit being addicted to porn.
To break the bondage of this atrocity, many believers, including former prostitutes and sex-trafficking survivors are begging the church to talk about the reality of pornography.
“Pornography is one of the largest epidemics our culture faces—it is a silent killer and the church has stayed too quiet on this issue,” says trafficking survivor Rebecca Bender. “The younger generations are completely at risk both boys and girls. We cannot expect to raise her little children in a culture where main stream media is ‘soft-core’ porn and not have long-term consequence.”
Earlier in the year, Josh McDowell who commissioned the research revealed that “Of young adults 18-24 years old, 76 percent actively—and these are Christians—actively seek out porn.”
“We are the first generation in the history of the world to face the issue of pornography to this intensity and scale. We’re also the first generation with a scientific, fact-based understanding of the harm pornography can do. With that knowledge, we feel the responsibility to share with others that porn harms the brain, damages relationships and affects society as a whole. Our movement uses nothing but science, research and personal accounts to bring this issue out into the open and get people talking about something that has previously been considered taboo,” FTND says on their website.
“By choosing to fight pornography, FTND followers can help shape their own lives for the better. By spreading this message to others however, they hold the power to shape history. From that simple idea, Fight the New Drug and the ‘Porn Kills Love’ movement was born.”
Pornography led to Mitchell raping Smart “more than he already did,” and made her “living hell worse.”
Watch the video to see her story.
