Worlds Apart: Pornography polling results of Canadian Christians
Last year I got a grant to put up a site to begin to poll Canadian Christians on different topics (click here for poll & look for “Survey Project”). For the first year I decided to poll people on the topic of pornography as I had a new talk on this topic called The Porn Project. We have been polling people for around 6 months and I thought I would release the current statistics. I think that the stats show what we already know about our Christian community: many of us are struggling with pornography. At the time of this blog there have been 532 people polled from nearly every Province in Canada and from over 20 denominations.
I you want to take the poll please click here http://stats.worldsapart.org/
Note: I am not a statistician. I had help designing the questions from a number of counsellors, sex therapists and statistics majors from a few Universities. The goal of this ongoing survey is to help identify areas that we (as parents, christian leaders and pastors) might need to address in our homes and churches.
Below are some of the questions from the survey.
Question #2: What is your gender?
Question #3: What is your age?
Question #6: How often would you view pornography
36% I don’t watch pornography
10% Daily
16% Weekly
14% Few times a month
11% Monthly
13% Yearly
Question #7: Do you think you have an addiction to Pornography?
Takeaway: Roughly 25% of our Christian Community is saying they think they have an addiction to pornography. This is just addiction not people who struggle or dabble in this issue.
Question #10: My current church does an adequate job addressing this issue.
Takeaway: For people in leadership over 50% of people polled say that their church is not addressing the issue of pornography. How can we do a better job at this?
Question #12: Would you feel comfortable approaching any member of your current church leadership for support if you are struggling with pornography use?
Takeaway: If you are in a position of church leadership how might your congregation respond to this? Do you address this issue with a conversation of shame and guilt or freedom and grace? Are we helping empower and equip people to deal with pornography in our own lives as well as in the lives of our children?
Question #13: Did you parents ever openly talk about pornography in your home?
Takeaway: 89% of people say that their parents did not. We as parents need to step up and have these tough conversations on our homes even if it makes us very uncomfortable.
So where do we go from here?
The way to make your church a relevant, accepting place for those people struggling with pornography is to talk openly about these conversations from the pulpit and in all other areas.
In my talk The Porn Project I have tons of great resources for you. Click here for the resources.
If you would like to poll your church, youth group, camp etc on the topic of pornography I can give you a link specific to your group for this. You then just send around the link and all the data is collected from your group. If you are interested send me a message.
If you have any any links or resources I am missing please let me know.
