The elders here at North Second Street have asked me to focus my preaching and teaching on the subjects of pornography and gambling during November. These two sins are far from new but they are transmitted at light speed by today’s technology and our young men are struggling to keep their eyes trained away from these destroyers of worlds. Online porn is uniquely destructive. The men and women (and let’s be honest often boys and girls or worse) involved in its production are destroyed. The person who views is broken. The spouse of a porn addict is objectified. The family can be broken completely by the lights and motion whirling toward the flesh to fuel it and destroy any fruit the Spirit would produce.
A Christian with a smart phone and a gambling or porn addiction is in Satan’s grasp and needs deliverance. But my research into these issues kept shining a light on the base of the problem. In 2012, an unsuspecting world was attacked by a tool which we were unprepared to wield without terrible mistakes. The internet had been around since the 1990’s. Facebook was nearly a decade into its quest for world dominance. But nothing had combined and unleashed the destructive power of the smartphone until the iPhone met high speed internet and unlimited data plans.
Sports gambling and pornography are huge problems across the globe. But they have been fueled by the ability to access them instantly and privately on someone’s smartphone. We will have an entire article on porn and gambling next week. But I could not walk by the issue of the digital destroyer without some comment and hopefully an effective warning.
Do not give your middle school or elementary school student a smartphone with access to apps and an unlimited and unfettered data plan. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote a book entitled, “The Anxious Generation. How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” In it, Haidt traces many of this generations problems to two things that happened in the nineties and exploded in 2012. Parents began to “overprotect our children in the real world, and under protect them online1.”
At the same time as the children of baby boomers began to limit children’s play outside, young people found a willing companion in their phone. How big a deal was the year 2012? That was the year Apple introduced the IPhone.
Before that most or our on-line communication was limited to email, calls, and this new thing called a text message. Phone plans were so restrictive, it was difficult to get lost in an online world which came to you in black and white and where texts cost 50-cents to a dollar a piece. I remember well many of the adults I worked with during the 90’s whose kids ran up phone bills in the thousands because they gave their kids phones with texting plans.
How big a deal was 2012? Pre-teen girls suicide rates went up 67-percent between 2012 and 2013. That number has only increased since then. The same predator who is watching porn on his phone can literally masquerade as a fellow teenager and lure our children into a life we hesitate to think exists.
In one very simple case, a young man convinced the daughter of a dear friend of ours to take an inappropriate photo. He threatened and controlled this young lady with black mail until she finally confessed the issue to her parents. A moment in her life had nearly destroyed her future.
Is Haidt on to something? If anyone knows anything about the internet, it would be Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder felt compelled to promote Haidt’s book and wonder what would have happened to him, if he had not been left alone as a child to think, read, and design without the interruption of his phone, “If every time I was alone in my room as a kid, there was a distracting app I could scroll through? If every time I sat down to tackle a programming problem as a teenager, four new messages popped up? I don’t have the answers—but these are questions that everyone who cares about how young minds develop should be asking2.”
Great question. We will pick up this thread next week.
Editor’s Note: This is part one of a series of bulletin articles. Please find the link to the second article below. Thanks!-JS
A Life Lived One Byte At A Time (2of2) pornography and gambling
1 Haidt, Johnathan. “The Anxious Generation.” New York. Penguin Press, 2024
2 Gates, Bill. “The Cost Of Growing Up Online.” gatesnotes.com. Dec. 3, 2024, Accessed Oct. 31, 2025
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