Repentance In The Age Of OnlyFans

Over the last few weeks, a fair amount of hubbub has surfaced on Twitter (still not calling it X) about an OnlyFans model who has found Jesus.

You'll note I did not add any qualifiers to that "found". No apparently’s or evidently’s or other questioning of what might be the Holy Ghost's work in the young woman's life.

And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Ephesians 4:30 KJV

I believed Ye when he did this, and I believe Nala the Ninja too. This post is not about the legitimacy of confessions. That's the easy part. Reformed guys like me all know this. We contribute nothing to our salvation save the sin that made it necessary. And all Edwardian gusto. That doesn’t mean I don’t have reservation's and a fair idea of what she should be doing now that she’s found Jesus. It means I’ll leave her spiritual formation and discipleship up to her pastor and not Twitter, (Still not calling it X).

My issue, and what this blog post will cover, are the myriad of unique problems a technologically enabled adulterer or whore brings to the communion table, not the baptistry. Because they are problems of the communion table not the baptistry.

When a man sleeps with another mans wife, instead of his wife, a particular type of scenario forms. The man is separated from his wife by sin, and also separates the other mans wife from him by sin as well. And vice versa. The way this set of separations gets fixed is Jesus dying on a cross and some very tough conversations between the parties involved and a pastor or two. The wife must forgive the husband who cheated, the husband must forgive the husband who cheated, the wife must forgive the wife that cheated and the husband must forgive the wife that cheated. An intricate and delicate web of brokenness forms between the four souls, from even a single incident of sexual impropriety.

How big does that web get when there's more than one husband committing adultery with the wife in question. When a married woman allows, even encourages, hundreds of married men to sleep with her. Or since Jesus apparently lowered the bar so much, to look at her lustfully. (Matthew 5:27) He lowered that bar but we’re the ones lowering the bar from married people to the vast swaths of singles in the church with a porn problem. What then?

In Christ's time, this meant a literal crowd gawking at a woman with less than manly intent for her body. Hence why Jesus asked for the sinless to step forward when he was present with this exact problem in John 8:1-11

What does this look like when the looking isn’t exactly direct, and the body isn’t exactly a body. And how far or closely do we stray from the Bible when we teach about what to do with porn addiction, now that we have porn actresses finding Jesus on the other end of their webcams.

For years, in response to the problem of porn, The church has instructed and taught that this is a sin the husband commits against the wife. And rightly so. He is sinning against her by looking at pictures and videos of naked people on the internet instead of being sexually fulfilled and devoted to his wife. But here’s the problem. Something we’ve been fine to avoid so long as we had a boy to whip when confronted with the friction between the online “world” and the real one. The Bible doesn't speak about any kind of visual media when it talks about lust. Instead, it talks about people. Jesus' clarification that to look upon a woman lustfully meant adultery in the heart, was talking about a real life woman. Not the image of one. And Nala the Ninja’s conversion is going to try to force that issue if everyone at her church reads their bible enough.

Because, while possible there is no practical or meaningful way Nala can be reconciled to all the girlfriends and fiancés and wives that she’s sinned against, and conversely no way all those boyfriends and fiancés and husbands could come clean either. Commentators on this verse make a fuss about the missing man adulterer in John 8:1-11. What on earth are we going to do with this cloud of witnesses. Nala has likely not actually slept with almost all of the people who used her pornographic content. But all of them, according to the church, have committed adultery with her by using said content. 

That is unless they haven’t. Because they’ve never actually seen her, just her content.

The problem with converting porn stars is that you gain a follower of Christ who can’t rightly be admitted to the communion table because of the lingering past self that remains on the internet. Because we treat the internet as a place those images and videos of the sinful woman are still sinning on her behalf as people. There's no reliable way to remove anything from the internet once posted. It’s too easy to repost and download and the type of image becomes too wide spread. If Nala is any kind of famous or well known, like she is, then even her conversion will drive searches for her past self which she has put to death to follow Jesus. Copies of her indiscriminate past will live along side her new life even as she grows in faith and closeness with the Lord. Hell, since I've typed her name in a few times now. how many of you have searched for her content. The Barna Group did the stats on this and it’s North of 50% for the pastorate, let alone the laity. Does a youth pastor staying up to date on Twitter, (still not calling it X) who peeks, make this woman an adulterer again, even with weeks of a porn free production schedule on her docket?

What we’re presented here is the concept of a created thing causing our sin for us. While small digital pictures and videos are still things. Consisting of electrons held between resistors to make up to code of the actual file of the image or video. These electrons have mass, not lots but enough to call them matter. Every time a digital camera is set upon a scene or a person wanting the product of of that camera, those electrons are organized to tell the rest of the computer what to show on the screen on demand. like tiny parts of a pervert Ikea cabinet. These are things we are talking about. Pornography is not objectifying people conceptually, they are objectifying themselves, literally. They make little versions of themselves for their audience to use and consume on their computers and we copy them on our computers, even temporarily while viewing these things online. Do the little versions of Nala still running truant across the internet have the ability to cause sin that Nala is responsible for, on her behalf, even while Nala is in a state of repentance?

A lot of churches would say yes, and I know why and I don’t blame them. Pastors are not the media savvy midwits they claim to be, on average. They know the Bible doesn’t speak on the topic of high speed internet porn and E-girls so they apply what the Bible does say about similar women and find a heuristic, broad enough to keep the wolves at bay with, if swung that is. The church has never had a problem with its understanding or teaching about lust.

But what if this isn’t just a lust problem? What if how we’ve been teaching about pornography is the right tool for a different job. A stick for the wolves that leads us to forego watering the sheep. What's happening here in principle is not men and women in throes of lust. which requires them to be in proximity to each other, biblically. It’s men in women in the motions of idolatry. Which requires that they fashion articles of worship out of physical materials.

What was it that Nala did as a pornstar?

Nala crafted idols of herself in digital likeness to give to her adoring devotee’s and her followers have dutifully sacrificed their time, money, and sensual energy, to pay tribute to their object of affection.

The sin of online pornography then, isn’t Lust, it’s Idolatry.

When that particular monster is slain, Nala can know redemption and sanctification, even with a host of digital versions of her sinful deeds colouring the past she left behind. Because they are no longer part of who she is. They are who she was. Copies of the idol of her own sexuality that was smashed when she declared Jesus as Lord. She can stop sinning like Jesus wants her to, and the lingering pornographic images that will taint the internet for decades after will be the sole problem of their idol worshiping users.

Nala will be free and free indeed the second she professes a faith in Christ, and no part of her sinful past will drag her back to an earthly death. Because she will be free. Her sins forgiven even covering the making of sexual idols still worshipped by the left handed masses of OnlyFans. She will not be held liable for those images because those using them are the ones creating them by copying the pictures and videos to proliferate their sin. They are still idol worshipers looking to plant their idols of sexual desire where ever they can. Building them out of new pixels and megabytes every time they enter her name in the search bar or look for her name in a list of her former peers.

When we come to terms with what the internet is actually doing instead of what it looks like it's doing we can start to see how the unique sins of the internet work. It is easy to look at pornography as an outcropping of lust and treat it as such. But if it’s more than that. If it’s different than that. Then what we do in regards to our personal righteousness, might be misplaced.

We are taught in the scriptures to flee and resist Lust in our lives.

Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. 2 Timothy 2:22 KJV

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; 1 Peter 2:11 KJV

What are we taught in the scriptures concerning idols and what to do with them?

But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. Deuteronomy 7:5

But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves. Exodus 34:13

Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord God; Repent, and turn yourselves from your idols; and turn away your faces from all your abominations. Ezekiel 14:6

Nala has turned from her idol making. She hopefully, as far as it’s up to her control, smashed her copies of the idols she produced and is not walking in obedience towards a relationship with Jesus. And if Her pastor did not insist on this before admitting her to their baptism tank, he’s a fool. But if he did he’s likely wiser than most guys teaching bible studies on lust, without a grasp of how the internet works in the first place. Nala is forgiven and is tasked with sinning no more.

What’s left is for the rest of the internet to do the same.

This is only going to be more and more of a internet specific problem the church faces. As the throngs of young women using sites like OnlyFans to make a living, find their life choices empty and Jesus, ready and willing to forgive them. It will be up to the church thereafter to disciple these women in sanctified living, not apart from sins they have been forgiven for, but from sins that they have left at the cross. That can only happen if the church recognizes and teaches about what the internet is and isn’t. So long as we treat it as a place, we will inevitably treat the files and media in that place as people, so long as they look like people. When those people actually show up to our church doors, we will be confronted with the reality that there is a soul seeking communion with God and his church, that we might very well refuse because we didn’t know how online pornography worked, just that we liked it enough to use. 

Today, thankfully, we celebrate the actions of Jesus fixing all of this mess. May we join Him in that restoration and share in his life that was also in close proximity to women, exactly like Nala. 

Happy Easter Everyone.

To A Chainsaw, Every Problem Looks Like A Massacre.

The adage goes, guns don't kill people, people kill people. And as a pro-gun person, I used to blindly accept this statement. I knew my gun safety basics, and intermediates, and knew that it takes a person to kill another person, via negligent or nefarious actions, and not via the gun. The gun does the dirty work but it's the person who brings the dirty.

But then I saw footage from the war in Ukraine. Saw Russian soldiers chased down by Ukrainian drones strapped to grenades and realized that what I was watching was also being filmed by a Ukranian drone. That men were no longer using guns to kill people. They were using remote controls.

Casey Neistat may have made the quadcopter drone famous. But Zelenski is making them infamous right now.

The question posed then, is if there is any difference between death by trigger or death by joystick. I imagine one is more fun for the sinner. And also less fun for the sinner. And I also imagine this is what it's meant when we're told war is hell. Sinners sinning against each other. The Ukrainians are embodying our much-praised value of innovation. They are exhibiting our much sought-after virtue of resourcefulness. But most of all, I think, they get what technology is and what technology does. They understand the difference between precept and concept, as it comes to drones. And it's exactly that which robbed them of their honour and courage. Even if it gives them a remote control edge on the battlefield. To be clear I have no dog in this fight. Both sides are bad guys by this point. And if you don't see that, you're drone footage needs to be a bit more clear.

When we look at tech as the church, we need to look at it as it actually is. Not how we think it will only get used. Calling virtual services, A.I., even smoke machines, tools as if that's all they are, is naive and a great example of conceptualization. We get enough of a grasp of the thing to use it without handling it long enough to understand it.

Most kids have this with video games. They have a concept of what it means to drive and jump and shoot. But have them attempt those things in the real world, doing real jumping and driving and shooting and a very different sort of thing happens. Kids who can ace a platform game like Mario can't get close to the rim of a basketball net, even when the court is as platformed as it can be, being the ground. Kids who have top scores on any given track in Grand Turismo, stall a standard transmission on their 1st through 20th time behind the wheel. And kids who fire a real gun, get a real level of respect for the destructive power that a firearm has when nefarious or negligent kids get behind them. Technological reality splits from technological use. And they learn to perceive the things they only have conceptions about from behind the controller.

We praise every online platform we can get our hands on, because of their innate ability to reach people. Oblivious that their creators don't use them and won't let their children use them either. That is like a gun maker raising pacifists but recording record sales in the Donbas.

"Don't worry too much. We know how this works, we're going to use this gun to do some non-gun things. I'm sure no one will get hurt. Now hand me that box of hollow points will you? We have missionary work to do."

Did that last bit of fiction have more kick than expected.

I'm sure DJI and GoPro are confident their flying cameras have found their intended market. What with the billions of dollars being spent on them in the Ukraine right now. And just like it would be absurd to think a gun made to kill people could bring them to new life in Christ, so is the idea that drones made for B-roll footage couldn't be used to send people to heaven. Technology is not neutral, because technology is only ever used by sinners. In some cases, in narrow and difficult circumstances, non-neutral technology is used for good. But it is always used by sinners. Sinners outright or sinners saved by grace. There are no innocent or pure people with tech at their disposal. The best we can hope for is sinners washed in the blood of the lamb before they end up shedding the blood of their neighbours. 

So if your church uses technology, nay, depends on it for its operation, maybe it's time to take a good hard look at its faux neutrality.

Are the projectors and lights and sound system helping your congregation grow in worship. Or are they performative outcroppings of a neutral view of tech? Because by that same neutral standard, we could turn every karaoke bar into a church plant. With only a few willing missionaries and a proper view of alcohol in the laity. All I did there was take your church's worship standard and their technological standard and remove the couch cushion reserved for the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit getting sidestepped by the emotional manipulation of a dark room and bright lights. But if I know that this is what gets asses in the seat, why wouldn't I pray at that church.

That by all means I might save some, right?

What we are rubbing up against is the chain of technology's saw. Do yourself a favour and look up why chainsaws were made, and what for. And that rub is only there because of the design of the thing. Turns out, it is the perfect instrument for a completely unrelated field. Forestry. One as distant from breached births as the east as is from the west. And I would argue that much of tech is actually not meant for church in the very same way. Designed for, sure. Intended for sure. But actually at home in drastically different settings. Worship and concerts shouldn't be as similar as they are. But when your songs are written with click tracks and light cues in mind, they don't lend themselves to other uses unless we shove them there. It's the shoving that does the damage. Especially with chainsaws.

How many choir lofts got the proverbial axe (read Gibson guitar), so that congregations could get worse at singing in church? How many baptistries got inserted into a sound stage so we can hide what was no longer important to liturgies of our faith. Because inflatable pools and cow troughs do the trick. 

Technology isn't neutral. And you can see that by looking around most churches using technology, to keep up with churches who use technology. There are pieces of this body lying everywhere. Blown off as old fashioned and backward as if it stopped working. Well, the truth is it was stopped from working. That moving a goalpost from filled pews to dynamic views on a live stream, changes the proverbial battlefield. You may think door-to-door evangelism is a dead idea. But statistically, it's not. You just can't use what it does for TikTok material. Basic, exegetical, through the books of the bible preaching is called boring but for some strange reason, everywhere Mark Driscoll does it, his church grows. Hard to repackage ad absurdum into 4-week bible study guides you can sell on Right Now Media. But great for the tithe.

Technology isn't neutral. It's actually more like a reverse gear in a standard. If you put it into place when a vehicle of faith is making good enough progress forward, it can kill the transmission of the gospel. The engine of the thing gets torn to pieces and the whole thing needs to be rebuilt. Don't worry. I hear you can find a YouTube video for that kind of automotive work. Why take an evangelical K-car to the dealership these days. 

Technology isn't neutral.

And neither are the people who use it.

On Cool Church Music And Drug Dealers.

The technology we use to make things cool will make things uncool with time as the only variable. That's because technology only makes things cool by connecting the desired product with the desires of the consumer. In short, technology is a means to fulfilment that otherwise would have to come from one's self. 

McLuhan talks about this as technology is the extension of our nervous system into reality. That's all well and good when we're talking about how an eye needs to see more clearly or farther but that same nervous system is why you cry during certain songs. The golden ticket of any worship leader's career. 

So for today's experiment and demonstration, we're going to show you how cool, as a concept, fades. And why that's important to know, and what happens when it's not known. We'll then end on a dystopian nightmare for the church and worship leaders at large. 

Ready.

The link below is for a band named Sonseed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-NOZU2iPA8

Now the kind of recording and clothing worn by the band might give it away, but this band is a little old. They sing a catchy if not simple song about Jesus that for all intents and purposes is theologically correct. We could dissect the lyrics, but I think it might be more fun to dissect the aesthetic. Aesthetic is something we are obsessed with these days in the church. Our websites need to look like they belong to churches who know how to run websites, to the point where we will put stock images of people who do not attend our church, or even of people not at our church but others, on that website. When people find our website, they can then see who we aren't but want to be. That's an aesthetic decision and one too common not to mention.

But where you find that kind of decision being made isn't the mega-church propper that would seem like the culprit of over-aestheticism. No. It's in their main consumer, the mid-sized church that is looking for the same thing that the mega-church does in its worship services. This is why you'll see a near-uniform painting of the back wall black, in churches meant to be churches and not concert halls or stadiums. They want their worship leaders to look like the worship leaders who sing the songs they play and when you google those songs you do not find them in hardwood-clad, pew-lined churches, with dated carpet and fake plants on either side of the large pulpit. You find them on black LED-lit stages or in abstract spaces lit with hanging bulbs where the band is in a circle. Neither of these places is a church, that's not the point of the worship music being produced online. No one makes a video of a worship band performing in a warehouse by themselves because that's where Jesus needed to be worshiped. They make that video there to sell you that song, which is fine, so that you'll sing that song in church, also fine. And they do so by appealing to the emotional reactions they want to get and plan to get from the video in question.

Which is exactly what Sonnseed tried to do and I would argue did, they might have been chasing different emotions. Crafted for a different time, sure, but the videos being produced for songs by Elevation Worship and Hillsong are the same thing, if not at the very least the same kind of thing. Sonseed is just after a different emotion and one I might add that no longer has the public sway as it comes to religious expression anymore. In 2023 we do not want a Jesus who is fun or friendly, we want a Jesus who can fix everything and restore our brokenness.

Enter Zach Webb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w3smtLLvC0

Whose song I enjoy. It found me, ironically, at a dark time in my life and did what it is supposed to do. To speak truths about the Christian life and lead me to worship God because of it. But again we see a music video of not a church where this worship song will be sung but a beach and twilight and melancholic wanderings of a man talking about God.

These two videos are the same thing. They are not both worship songs, though they are both worship songs. They are both not music though they are both music. They are both cool, and the fleetingness of cool is a thorn in the hamstring of modern worship. Because the plain truth is that a lot of the new contemporary worship songs are beautiful works of art, centred around the worship of our Lord. But they are sung as if songs like Sonseed's or other older worship songs aren’t also that same thing. They are sung, and more importantly sold, as cool.

What throws us for this loop is that we chase cool things on an emotional level and pursue true things on a rational level. That rationally, Sonseed sings a theologically sound enough song, as does Zach Webb, but they are in tune with different emotional values. This is not a problem. Your parents and grandparents in the 70's and 80's do not need to feel the same way you do about religious life for you to both worship Jesus. Emotional response to the divine is not uniform or rational.

This is dangerous, though, because of things like this

https://www.tiktok.com/@likethabug/video/7154535523464367406

A now broken TikTok link that featured a girl who loved going to church because of the live music and its production value, till she realized that she just like high production value live music and found the same kind of thing at a One Direction concert. 

This girl illustrates why worship has to be something we enter into logically and experience emotionally, in that order. If the emotionalism comes first, then anything that can illicit the chemical responses of emotional response can sidestep into the place we’ve reserved for religious feelings. Because they are chemical responses and religious feelings. But they are likely feelings first. Not confessions or declarations. Feelings. We can't remove the chemical nature of how the physical world we live in affects us emotionally. How those chemicals make us feel. Rollercoasters are exhilarating, not because they are an idea but because they put us on the edge of danger in a safe way. You move just as fast and get just as close to heavy steel objects on the road in your car and never once say "Weeeeeeee." That's because you step onto a roller coaster knowing you are not in control of the heavy metal objects and speed, and you feel the result of that kind of surrender. It's a rational if not laboured decision to go on a roller coaster. But everything after the restraints get locked is emotion. And we love it. More or less. 

Modern worship leaders sing true things in dark rooms to emotionally isolate you, they light the stage and the singers and the words on the screen because they want you to focus on what the words say, what the singers express and what the darkness and moving lights up front will evoke. Take any modern song away from that context. Perform it in a well-lit conference room with paper handouts for the words and see the magic disappear. Because it's not magic. It's tech doing its job and worship leaders doing theirs. Using emotional manipulation to lead people into worship, through feelings.

You might shrink back at the use of "manipulation" there, but I don't. Everyone manipulates everyone. I do it with words, others do it with clothes. And the church is clearly doing it with its worship music. And being blind to it just means you have a better time for the most part. No time spent dissecting a rendition of a song alongside its light cues. If worship leaders are manipulating people to confessions in Christ, praise of his name, and changing of lives for righteousness' sake, there is no good done in pointing it out just to make them stop out of principle.

But just like the nose-ringed girl lost her religion to the band One Direction, we risk losing our religion to much more theologically challenging opponents than the average boy band. This might be a fevered dream with too much REM to blame, but it is, at the very least, a possibility.

What happens when we mix more tech than just the moving lights and screen with this cocktail of emotions and Jesus? Because I wager that the only reason we have this emotional rollercoaster, at all, is because we have tech in our worship services as much as we do. And that tech use is progressing faster than the decline of said roller coaster. We are past the peak and trending downward at an accelerated rate. Everyone is having a good time 

What happens when We dabble enough with A.I. to let a robot decide what songs to play and how to play them and how to move the lights and dim the room and eventually move the people around the stage or generate them artificially. What happens when the church hands over the reins to the emotional crazy train to someone other than pastor Osbourne and we find out how black the sabbath can get? At least twice as black as the stage is now, I figure. 

Imagine a worship set tuned to its congregation, so finely, that everyone feels what our nose-ringed friend felt before she saw the boy band up close. Everyone getting locked in by the emotional manipulation because the A.I. was trained on everyone's response to the variables of modern worship's need for tech to do what it does. An A.I. hooked up to a myriad of sensors and cameras, that you'll now notice if you look close at everything but the well-lit stage in the dark room next time you go to a mid-sized mega church. You might scoff but A.I. has already begun generating worship services like these two. 

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4209626-texas-church-holds-ai-generated-service-uses-chatgpt/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/chatgpt-takes-the-pulpit-ai-leads-experimental-church-service-in-germany/

The same pastors who would tell you the dark room, and black stage, and moving lights, are only aesthetics are doing this kind of thing too.

A fundamental truth in technology is that technology progresses. No one finds a better mousetrap and then gets a cat that they're allergic to, because of its traditional aesthetic appeal. They take the mouse trap that kills mice and forego the sneezing in church. Painting it black like your sanctuary walls lets you charge a bit more for the trigger and spring. The hardwood pews you ripped out for soft seating will not be reinstalled. The choir loft you ripped out to make the front of the church a sound stage will not be built back better. We're in the thick of it now. Our choice to embrace the darkness of the modern worship big room is separate from the darkness embracing us all back. Rollercoasters don't take you along their tracks. They let you ride them. It's all momentum till someone hits the brakes.

What A.I. will do when given full control and a proper set of emotional tools to use on us, is hone the fine edge of chemical addiction and surgically keep us addicted to church services. Whether or not those services are in line with Christian worship or not. It will do it in other places for sure, it already is in fact. Dopamine is a hell of a drug. Porn is a (Hell) of an industry. That will be where A.I. gets its blueprint for hooking the modern Christian, emotionally. Because statistically, that's where over half of the modern Christians go to get their dopamine. And it, dopamine, is the reason you get the tingles across your arms and back when a good song comes on the radio that you can't help but sing along, or a well-performed worship set sends you to tears because of how loved you are in and by Christ. When those tingles are not only produced but measured by a machine instructed to evoke those responses, It will do so. With machine-like precision and efficiency. And what we have at the end of the day is a tech-enabled drug dealer for dopamine in the name of Jesus. 

And we will be nothing but happy for it. 

By design.