Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: “Purity Industrial Complex”: Apps Tracks Porn Usage by Church Members and Passes Info to Church Leaders Amidst High Holy Roller Porn Viewing
October 1, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
If you’re old enough to remember Ronald Reagan’s administration, you might also remember The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, also known as The Meese Commission, named after the then-Attorney General Edwin Meese. The commission’s report was rather lengthy, coming in at almost 2000 pages. According to Wikipedia it “document[ed] what the committee found to be the harmful effects of pornography and connections between pornographers and organized crime. The report was criticized by many inside and outside the pornography industry, calling it biased, not credible, and inaccurate.”
In 1986, the time of te Meese Commission, porn hunters might find themselves in a back room at an adult bookstore or at some sleazy movie house. Little did commission members anticipate that thanks in large part to the Internet, pornography would become a multi-billion-dollar industry. Even more surprising; that evangelical Christians would become keen users.
In a 2019 New Yorker piece titled “A Sociologist of Religion on Protestants, Porn, and the ‘Purity Industrial Complex’,” Isaac Chotiner discusses “Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants,” a book by Samuel L. Perry that “draws on interviews and survey data to show how the availability of Internet porn is affecting traditional, religious Christians. Focusing on America’s Protestant majority, and specifically its pious members, Perry finds that pornography is leading to depression and unhappiness, and it’s disrupting marriages and communities.”
In an interview, Perry told Chotiner that “with conservative Protestants, you have this fascinating paradox of a group of people who hate pornography morally. They want to eradicate it from the world. And yet, statistically, they will view it slightly less often than your average American. And so you have this paradoxical situation of a group of people who collectively hate it, and yet, as individuals, they semi-regularly watch it” (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/q-and-a/a-sociologist-of-religion-on-protestants-porn-and-the-purity-industrial-complex).
For decades, evangelical church leaders have been declaring that the church has a pornography problem. There is no doubt that in the age of the Internet and social media, pornography is more prevalent than ever. The conservative Christian war on pornography has always been an arrow in the quiver of culture war issues, including abortion, same-sex marriage, prayer in the schools. There have been many attempts at dealing with evangelicals’ porn problem: one-on-one counseling, conferences, men’s groups, on-line teach-ins, books, videos and power point presentations.
In a January 2021 Baptist News Global story (https://baptistnews.com/article/the-ongoing-epidemic-of-pornography-in-the-church/), Michael Chancellor, who served 33 years as pastor of four Baptist churches in Texas, seven years as a mental health manager in a maximum-security Texas prison and now is a therapist in private practice in Round Rock, Texas.ites some statistics:
68% of churchgoing men and more than 50% of pastors view porn on a regular basis. Of young Christian adults 18-24 years old, 76% actively search for porn.
59% of pastors said married men seek their help for porn use.
Only 13% of self-identified Christian women say they never watch porn — 87% of Christian women have watched porn.
57% of pastors say porn addiction is the most damaging issue in their congregation. And 69% say porn has adversely impacted the church.
Only 7% of pastors say their church has a program to help people struggling with pornography.
Now, a phone app called Covenant Eyes is offering a solution. At its website (https://www.covenanteyes.com/), Covenant Eyes declares: “Struggling to quit watching porn? YOU'RE NOT ALONE -- Join over 1.5 million people who've used Covenant Eyes to experience victory over porn.” Visitors can select from: “I’m a man who wants to quite porn,” “I’m a woman who wants to quit porn,” “I want to help a friend live porn-free,” “I want to help my spouse live porn-free,” or “I want to help my child live porn-free.”
According to WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra, an investigative data journalist, “Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps that are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity. For a monthly fee, some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an ‘accountability partner,’ in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountability2You—violate its policies.”
Mehrotra reported (https://www.wired.com/story/covenant-eyes-anti-porn-accountability-monitoring-apps/) that “The current iteration of the Covenant Eyes app was developed by Michael Holm, a former NSA mathematician who now serves as a data scientist for the company.” It “is allegedly capable of distinguishing between pornographic and non-pornographic images. … captur[ing] everything visible on a device’s screen, analyzing the images locally before slightly blurring them and sending them to a server to be saved. ‘Image-based pornography detection was a huge conceptual change for Covenant Eyes,’ Holm told The Christian Post, an evangelical Christian news outlet, in 2019. ‘While I didn’t yet know it, God had put me in that place at that time for a purpose higher than myself, just as I and others had desired and prayed for.’”
Covenant Eyes, a major player in the accountability ecosphere, is named for a verse in the Book of Job: “I have made a covenant with mine eyes. Why then should I think upon a maid?” It addition to its app, it organizes conferences “that are attended by thousands of people and dedicated to educating attendees about the dangers of pornography while pitching the company’s product as an urgent solution to what it characterizes as a growing moral crisis,” Mehrotra noted. “According to the app analytics firm AppFigures , in the past year more than 50,000 people have downloaded Covenant Eyes. Rocketreach estimates that the company has an annual revenue of $26 million.”
Covenant Eyes is not the only app tracking behavior that parents and/or religious leaders “deem unhealthy or immoral,” writes Mehrotra. In his story titled “The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps,” Mehrotra reported that “Fortify, for instance, was developed by the founder of an anti-pornography nonprofit called Fight the New Drug and tracks how often an individual masturbates in order to help them overcome ‘sexual compulsivity.’ The app has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has thousands of reviews on the Google Play store.”
Writing for Religion News Service, Jacob Lupfer recently reported that “In response to Mehrotra’s reporting, Google removed Accountable2You and Covenant Eyes from its Play store for ‘exploiting Android’s accessibility permissions to monitor almost everything someone does on their phone.’”