The Downwind Generation

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," recited nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer as he recalled the first atomic bomb flaming up near Socorro, New Mexico. Several observers of the explosion, comically in hindsight, wore suntan lotion and oven mitts and welding goggles. Only recently has the National Cancer Institute concluded that some of the people downwind of the explosion got cancer from the radioactive fallout. An exact number is unknown, but cancer deaths are higher for the downwinders. The desert for the Trinity test site is named the Jornada del Muerto — Dead Man's Journey. It is a parched, inhospitable scrubland rimmed by waterless mountains.

If you ask many of the students I teach, the destroyer of worlds is not the atom bomb. At least not yet. It is pornography. Porn is the bomb that went off in our culture sometime before they were born, and they are living downwind of the fallout. They are the hapless generation that is absorbing the shock and the radioactivity of obscenity's big bang. They are living with the malignancies that come from exposure to it. They are taking their own dead man's journey through infertile and spiritually dry wastelands. Musician Billie Eilish's recent confession, "I think [porn] really destroyed my brain," is the cry of a multitude.

My nephew is 24 years old. On his left forearm grins a tattoo of an infuriatingly smug skull. Nails have been pounded into its cranium. Its eyes, abysmally hollow, nonetheless bleed through layers of badly wrapped bandages.

This is a design my nephew created for himself. It was inspired, in part, by metalcore band Silent Planet and lyrics for the track XX (City Graves), which deals with sex trafficking and the porn made from it. The line that sticks most with him? "I'll climb through your screen and bleed out the image you left in me."

Any stranger who sees the ink on his arm may suspect that my nephew is somehow morbidly obsessed, and it is disturbing, he'll grant you. As a reminder of how far he's come, of what he's escaped, the ink is still worth the wearing.

In his own words, the skull represents pornography, deadness to intimacy, spiritual distance from God, and loss of innocence. It has a double meaning, however. In the culture of metal music, skulls can be "badass" and victorious. So, for my nephew, the skull is also a symbol of overcoming old habits and entrenched ways of thinking. The nails represent his hatred of porn, his attempt to kill the beast, his striving to be like a hammer, a tool in God's hands. The eyes are bleeding as a result of overexposure to the internet, to videos and movies streaming on TV, to the excesses of our culture writ large.

My nephew flaunts this indelible, discomfiting tattoo because he must remember the true face of porn. He must remember how it atrophies healthy desire and promotes a subterranean cult of dangerous misogyny. The demon-possessed man in the Book of Mark tells Christ that his name is Legion, "for we are many." Among the legion of devilries brought about by porn, the one that troubles my nephew the most is its degradation of the image of God. "Your body and the bodies of others belong to no one but the loving Creator," he tells me. "God has claims on our bodies that porn tries to obliterate."

Porn exploded with the internet and the mobile revolution. Before the 1990s, young people had to go out of their way to find it and, once found, transgress societal disapproval and a nagging conscience.

I remember discovering Playboy in a seedy gas station when I was maybe ten or eleven. As I stood there gawking at the centerfold, an old lady came up behind me and slapped the magazine shut. She then replaced it solemnly on the shelf and coolly breezed away, then gave a tongue-lashing to the attendant. That's how it worked in those days — you took care of kids, even if they weren't yours.

A friend of mine, call him Kevin, decided to go out looking for trouble. In high school, he and some buddies took a night cruise to a porn theater on the wrong side of the tracks — literally. It stood next to a railroad crossing, and the rumblings of frequent trains could be felt like quakes of conscience under the sticky seats. When the interminable movie finally reached its eros-killing anti-climax, Kevin and his pals shuffled sheepishly out — only to be met by the glare of a host of heavenly headlights. A train was going by, and autos were sitting in a tidy line behind the barrier, idling along the sidewalk Kevin had to traverse to get to his car. It was an intense walk of shame past what seemed like his entire town, "a great cloud of witnesses" never to be forgotten.

Would that every young person taking steps on the Dead Man's Journey be stopped so short!

The pornification of Western culture has quickened since the '90s. It has become so pervasive across the mass psyche that desensitized people take it as their due, from oral sex in a Netflix Regency drama, to "sex weeks" at colleges, to "leather sex festivals" in Antwerp and San Francisco. The collective conscience is so eroded that many people have no desire to be pulled out of the morass they're in.

I'm convinced that pornography is the muse critical to many of our current cultural fixations. Hooking up. Sexting and camming. Adultery. Partner swapping. Porn stars. Polyamory. Sex raves. Bondage fetishes. Child predation. The list goes on, and it feeds on itself.

Of course, porn is not a passive experience. Of course, it doesn't leave a person unchanged. Of course, it reshapes desires and infantilizes sexuality. Brains latch onto novel experiences, especially when associated with pleasure. Knowing that sexuality is malleable when battered by perversion, especially among young people, pornographers steer users down fetid new neural pathways.

Ours is a culture that should be stuffed, glutted, surfeited with sex and yet it hungers for more. C.S. Lewis puts it best in Mere Christianity:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

We are dribbling and smacking our lips over sex, gulping and guttling like starving creatures. Porn creates people in its own image, individuals whose main pursuit in life is sexual novelty. For those individuals who revel in carnal chaos — the adherents of the so-called sex-positive movement — it's all well and good. Never has there been a time in history when sexual rapacity can be gratified with so little cost to life and reputation. The piper will be paid in the end — the obsessed are ever enslaved by their obsessions. But for the downwind generation, the kids who find it hard to achieve relational trust and satisfaction, even to achieve an erection, porn is the destroying angel.

Being a poetic man, Robert Oppenheimer named the nuclear test Trinity after vivid imagery created by preacher and poet John Donne. He was possibly thinking of Holy Sonnet XIV ("Batter my heart, three-personed God"). In the poem, Donne sees himself as "a usurp'd town to another due," laboring to admit God. When I consider what this downwind generation faces, it is exactly this:

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy.

So, what's to be done?

The answer is also found in Holy Sonnet XIV. Families and churches and fellow travelers must call upon the One who has the power to break every unhealthy habituation:

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The ravishment of God is violent imagery, but the principle of substitution is at work here — ravishing obsessions that harm relationship must be replaced with ravishing beauty and truth. We must be "imprisoned" by the goodness of God rather than by disordered desires.

On a family level, parents must engage with schools (where kids spend most of their lives) and be active listeners when children open up about their interior lives. Above all, internet-linked devices must be disconnected or filtered. Does that sound unreasonable? I would ask: what is reasonable about a society where adults are preoccupied with sexualizing your kids? If you want to preserve the beauty of childhood innocence, you must kneecap the influencers who are eager to distort sexual curiosity. Use dumb phones. Cut the streaming services.

There's life and healing in nature and gardens, in swimming, boating, camping and hiking, in books, in music, painting and photography, in cooking and sharing a meal, in dance and athletics, in play-acting, in solitude, and in family devotion. These are some of the ravishments of God.

The Church also has some work to do. According to the Barna Group, a majority of pastors "have struggled with porn, either currently or in the past." We are weakly protected and guided when our shepherds themselves are straying like sheep. Men especially seek to comfort themselves and mitigate emotional pain through orgasm. Porn is often a symptom of the underlying problem of stress and worry, of loneliness and isolation. Our leaders must seek fellowship and accountability. They can only lead their flocks away from sexual desolation when they are actively seeking the things of greater beauty. The Church can no longer afford to genteelly avoid porn's cultural demolition. Those churches with resources must host conferences and retreats that address sexuality, and they must also provide counseling services.

To create a viable counter-culture, our churches and synagogues must be a place of ravishing beauty that draws in people from the shadowlands. Religion must again patronize its artists — painters, writers, dancers, sculptors, actors, musicians, and movie makers. At the same time, it must remove the blinkers to the imagination that have caused so many Christian artists to create pabulum instead of true art. It's a gritty world out there, and sometimes artists need to fight grit with grit. Youth leaders need to knock off the hype and games and get to the heart of the struggles our young people face.

In the end, we have been sending our children into radioactive schools and online culture with suntan lotion, oven mitts, and welding goggles, just as ill-equipped as the first observers of the Trinity test. The fallout in their lives is real. The way out of this poisonous desert landscape is to reclaim the green uplands of divine beauty.