Failure to honor God leads to mental darkness, which leads to idolatry, which leads to a debased mind, which leads to corrupt actions, which leads to a disordered moral vision, and so on. Do people behave like beasts because they treat God like a creature, or do they treat God like a creature because they want to behave like beasts? Yes.

Earlier this week, I attended a summit at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation on the upcoming Supreme Court case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which could determine the future of any efforts to regulate children’s access to hardcore pornography. One of the presenters, Lisa Thompson, shared the results of a recent study that demonstrated that teens who regularly watched pornography were more likely to (1) have much worse relationships with their parents, (2) have poorer academic achievement, and (3) show a propensity to acts of sexual harassment or violence. Today, another of our collaborators in this battle, Michael Toscano of the Institute of Family Studies, published an article at the IFS blog documenting a recent survey that showed that frequent porn consumption doubles the risk of feeling depressed or lonely.

When hearing Lisa’s numbers, I couldn’t help hearing the voice of a devil’s advocate (in this case, it really is the devil’s advocate!) in my head: “correlation doesn’t imply causation.” The porn industry will tell us that of course, teens who are lonely and depressed and have bad relationships with their parents are more likely to take refuge in porn, and that those who have a sexually predatory streak will be more apt to want to watch porn too. They might even suggest that lazy, unfocused students are going to be the ones with more time for watching porn anyway. Now of course, none of these retorts place their industry in a very good flattering light—“So what you’re saying is that your product is best suited for depressed, anti-social, predatory drop-outs?”—but at least it gets them off the hook for causing the anti-social behaviors.

In following Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, I’ve noticed a similar theme. For the past couple of years, he’s been playing whack-a-mole with more tech-friendly sociologists who insist that the connections he’s documented between social media use and poor mental health don’t tell us anything about causation—maybe it’s just that otherwise unhappy, unstable people are just more likely to binge on X or Instagram? And indeed, they probably are!

Read More