In just the last few years, some of our most popular fantasy stories include material that at one time would have been considered porn.

These include films such as Passengers, Blade Runner 2049, and The Shape of Water, as well as TV shows such as Game of Thrones, Westworld, and Altered Carbon.¹

Concerns about content like this are often raised in relation to children and teens, whose emotional and physical development make them more impressionable. When it comes to adults, however, we find little concern expressed.

In fact, a lot of people claim to have no issues watching films with explicit sexual content. The material doesn’t affect them—or so they say.

But is this true? And if so, should it be true?

Let’s give a little pushback and look at four considerations. (This article will conclude in part 2.)

By many accounts, Blade Runner 2049 was brilliant–and yet bristled with images of undressed persons.

1. Criticism of fantasy porn from inside the church

If you asked a fish to describe what it’s like being wet, what would happen? Provided that you could actually speak fish, the answer might be unhelpful. After all, everything about a fish’s life involves water. The inability to detach itself from an aquatic existence would severely limit, if not eliminate, its ability to answer your question with any real accuracy or objectivity.

We need to acknowledge at least the possibility that we are in a similar situation.

After all, ethnocentrism (using the customs of one’s own culture as the standard by which to evaluate all others) and chronological snobbery (asserting that beliefs held by previous peoples are inferior simply because they are older) are temptations for most any given person in any given culture and time period. That our culture is now more lenient toward explicit sexuality only proves that social and moral standards have changed, not necessarily that they have gotten better (or, for that matter, worse).

Westworld season 2 is currently airing. Like many other “prestige drama” shows, the series features human nudity.

It would be wise for us to ask if we have progressed or regressed as a culture: why exactly is it now considered normal, and possibly even defensible, for there to be graphic nudity and simulated sex scenes in our entertainment?

Are we considering other cultures and time periods in evaluating answers to questions like that?

And for Christians, what does the wisdom of ages past have to say about where we are now?

When it comes to entertainment, we have no church fathers commenting on film and television, for these mediums are fairly new. What we do have, however, is thousands of years of commentary on the theatrical arts, and much of that commentary can apply, at least in principle, to the visual arts of our day. If the concerns of men like Tertullian, Lactantius, Richard Baxter, Pascal, and William Wilberforce seem legalistic and archaic, we need to ask ourselves why these giants of the faith were horrified by certain types of entertainment that we find permissible.²

Is it not at least possible that we, as ambassadors from another kingdom, have grown so comfortable with this culture’s norms that we have lost sight of the standards from the eternal and heavenly culture we are called to represent? I would argue that, to a certain degree, we have. To quote author Joe Rigney:

Cultural engagement (and enjoyment) can easily become a cover-up for indulging sinful desires, an excuse to watch trashy movies. We must never forget that worldliness is easy, that plundering the Egyptians is hard, and that many an Israelite has convinced himself that he is absconding with the world’s wealth when he’s merely in the process of going native.³

2. Criticism of fantasy porn from outside the church

Porn is losing much of its original stigma.

In fact, terms like “food porn,” “word porn,” “car porn,” and even “wedding porn” show just how normalized—and even standard-setting—porn consumption has become. It is safe to say that ours is a porn-ified culture. And within this environment, some people, deeply entrenched within our culture, are raising red flags—or, at the very least, pointing out some inconvenient truths.

Consider the responses to various sexual acts portrayed in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Each time the show pushes the envelope a little more, there’s a backlash of some sort, with cultural commentators asking some form of the question, “Has the show gone too far?”

What I have found interesting—or, more like disturbing—is that most of the genuine and intelligent critiques of Game of Thrones have come, not from Christian sources (those ostensibly “in the world but not of it”), but from within the culture itself (those ostensibly just “of the world”).

Sure, conservatives and Christians have criticized the show, but often with a poorly constructed, knee-jerk reaction that unconvincingly communicates any real depth of thought.

Meanwhile, in articles I read and conversations I participate in, I see and hear Christians excusing and defending Game of Thrones’ sexual content.

Expanding our focus, observers outside religious circles freely admit the gratuitousness of much of the sex and nudity utilized in popular culture today—groups like Beauty Redefined, Collective Shout, and Feminist Current. They have brought pointed, thoughtful, and specific critiques of the sexualization and objectification on display all around us.

In the realm of film and television specifically, here is what Richard Brody, movie-listings editor for The New Yorker, has to say:

I think that very few sex scenes…are ever of use in movies. Most sex scenes simply check boxes for viewers, providing visual confirmation that a relationship has been consummated; the pneumatic heaving and thrusting has no additional dramatic or emotional significance.⁴

None of the above critiques are coming from those with a strict, let alone a Christian, sexual ethic. Still, they are pointing out what is obvious to them.

So why is this not as obvious to followers of Christ? When Scripture tells us not to be like those in the world, I don’t think the implication is that our standards should be lower than those who profess no love for God’s truth. Should we, as those who have been rescued out of darkness to “walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8) and to no longer “live according to the flesh” (Romans 8:4), exhibit standards of moral decency that are more lenient than those who are still conformed to the “elemental spirits of the world” (Colossians 2:8)?

Of course, to ask the question is to answer it. Light should not succumb to darkness—especially in ways that the darkness itself would criticize.

Next week, we’ll look at two other possible answers to the excuse that “explicit sexual content in media doesn’t bother me.”