The blog begins with a startling confession:
Hi, my name is John, and I was a sex addict. I’m also a believer in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and am married to an amazing and beautiful woman of God.
Church leaders have long struggled talking about sex, much less pornography. But Relevant magazine made a daring move this month when it printed a blogger’s confession about how his addiction to pornography affected his marriage.
The blogger is John Buckingham, and he is an English teacher, Relevant says. Buckingham said in the story that his addiction to pornography started when he was 12. He thought it would end after his girlfriend accepted his marriage proposal in early 2010.
Yet four months after getting married, Buckingham says he succumbed. He started watching pornography again. Burdened by guilt, Buckingham said he told his wife what he had done.
She was devastated. All the love and trust and intimacy we had worked so hard to build for the last four months was called into question and our marriage was shaken to its very core. I feared it wouldn’t stand, and I wouldn’t have blamed her in the least for walking out altogether. She had every right to do so.
She didn’t, and as Buckingham suggests later in his article, he didn’t give up either. He says he talked with other Christian men about their struggles but felt that they were using “softening rhetoric” (“I messed up;’ “I stumbled”) to minimize what they were doing.
He writes:
The sin of lust isn’t just a mistake, a mess-up or a problem…it is no less than an act of sin that is reprehensible to God and nothing short of honestly confessing and repenting of that sins is good enough for God.
Rachel Buckingham, John’s wife, writes a follow-up blog explaining how she felt after hearing her husband’s confession.
I no longer felt safe or loved. I was suddenly bombarded with lies—he doesn’t find me attractive; it’s my fault he strayed; I’m not beautiful; I’m not sexy; I am a horrible wife; I’m a failure; he is stuck with me; he doesn’t love me …
Buckingham writes more about his struggle. I’ll leave it to readers to decide if they think he has overcome his addiction.
But his confession left me with two questions:
Is pornography now such a pervasive problem in the church that leaders need to talk more openly about?
And can people of faith like Buckingham actually learn how to overcome their struggles while living in a sexually-charged culture where lurid images are just a mouse-click away?
