If people can publicly promote polyamory or whatnot, then I can promote abstaining from vice. And let’s be honest, do you want to live in a neighborhood full of tatted up potheads who spend their days watching porn, playing video games, and betting on sportsball – and who drop f-bombs every other sentence while out and about? Would America be a better or worse place if these vices didn’t exist? Would your life be better or worse if you avoided them? That’s the question you need to answer for yourself. 

In his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe wrote, “If you want to live in New York, you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate.”

Today you also need to insulate yourself if you don’t want to end up devoured by social pathologies like fentanyl or gambling addiction — or even just ending up as an under-achiever.

Much of the focus of the discussion of the Negative World focuses on sexuality and the church. But it’s much bigger than that. The emergence of a post-Christian order has also led to the metastasizing of vice in our society.

Today, many practices that used to be the province of shady characters like the mob are now fully socially legitimized big business, like bookmaking (phone betting), drugs (legal pot), and loan sharking (payday lending).

While some people can take advantage of these recreationally with no problem, many others are vulnerable to falling prey to addiction or exploitation by their purveyors.

Once, our society saw it as its responsibility to protect people from these harms through outright bans or restrictions like usury laws. Those day are long gone. In fact, our governments are now in on the action.

How should we protect ourselves from this?

Creating an Alternative Moral Ecology That Rejects Vice

A country’s wealth is ultimately in its people. A wise country builds up its people, its human capital. Ours is degrading it. There’s no better sign of that than our declining life expectancy.

You have to insulate yourself from those forces. You have to be staying healthy and actively working to develop your potentialities so that you can be a force for good in the world.

Swimming upstream against the culture is easiest when you are part of an alternative moral ecology, part of a community that lives by a different set of rules, that holds itself to a higher standard, that expects more, and elevates your aim.

A community with this moral ecology would be valuable to anyone. A logical place to create one would be the church. But I think it would be very difficult for evangelical churches to create this culture when it comes to vice. They struggle with anything they can’t describe as objectively sinful or linked to some Biblical proof text. Porn is obviously wrong. But is it a sin to buy a lottery ticket or get a tattoo? I’d say no.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise that anti-vice movements are emerging from secular society. Abstaining from alcohol is now a trendy movement. Any hip restaurant worth its salt now has an extensive – and expensive – mocktail list. It’s the online right that has made a huge push against men watching porn – often getting attacked by the media in the process.

I’m a critic of Mark Driscoll, but one of his best lines was, “Some things aren’t sinful, they’re just dumb.”*

Or, as someone more respectable put it, all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. We should avoid unprofitable activities. Vice falls into that category.

Churches should figure out how to get in the game here. But whether it’s a church, a band of brothers, or an online tribe, finding a community with a moral ecology that rejects vice is one way to insulate yourself from trouble.

What rejecting vice means to me is: no porn, no pot, no gambling, no video games, no tattoos, no profanity.

The point here is not to condemn other people for their choices – it’s a free country after all – or to argue that all of these things are objectively morally wrong. It is to say that’s not who we are and not how we choose to live. We are setting a different standard for ourselves.

No Porn

Watching porn is wrong – but it’s also pathetic.

A majority of prime age men are watching porn, usually a lot of it. It’s super easy to do – and super-addictive. It’s difficult to give it up once you’ve gotten hooked. And it seems to cause a lot of problems. There are now men in their 20s with erectile dysfunction.

I was not Christian for my early adult life and happily watched lots of porn. Today, not only do I not watch it, I don’t want to watch it. It’s not a temptation for me.

A key shift came when I was reconstructing my idea of what it meant to be a man. Like many, I went through a phase of naively trying to become an “alpha male.”

Whatever the flaws of that, one benefit was that as soon as I started thinking of myself as aspirationally high value, I no longer had any desire for things like porn.

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