The Politics of Pornography

This article is from Law and Liberty, Chapter 4, by Rousas John Rushdoony, a Reformed scholar and brilliant writer of the last century. Dr. Rushdoony was the founder of Chalcedon Foundation, an educational organization devoted to research, publishing, and to cogent communication of a distinctively Christian scholarship to the world at large. His son Mark continues to publicize and distribute Rushdoony’s work through Chalcedon. We are grateful to Chalcedon for permission to publish this book serially, chapter by chapter. Visit Chalcedon’s website here.In order to understand some of the major currents of our day, it is necessary to recognize that one of the central purposes of pornography is political. An analysis of the politics of pornography is therefore essential.

Pornography and Obscenity

Before doing so, it is necessary to call attention to a distinction made between pornography and obscenity. The novelist, Henry Miller, has said, “Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk…Wherever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something revitalizing.” Miller is by his own statement a champion of obscenity, but hostile to pornography. What is the distinction, if there is one? Basically, Miller’s distinction is this: pornography is dirt for dirt’s sake, whereas obscenity has as its purpose the systematic destruction of law and moral order, a revolutionary reordering of society. This distinction is only partially true. Obscenity does have this revolutionary purpose, consciously and openly. Pornography is more exploitive, but it has nonetheless an implicit or explicit revolutionary purpose. It is hostile to morality and law, and it encourages and favors rebellion against morality. As a result, it has political implications no less than Millers’ obscenity. In discussing the politics of pornography, we are therefore analyzing the basic position of the whole field, pornography and obscenity. While there are differences in emphasis, the essential position is the same.

Hatred of Morality

Now the first thing which is apparent in pornography is its obvious hatred of morality, its marked distaste for Biblical faith and morals. Moral restraint is seen as bondage for man, a slavery which must be destroyed. As a result, pornography indulges endlessly in long, tasteless, and highly emotional attacks on morality, on the sanctity of marriage, on monogamy, and on every kind of moral inhibition. It seeks to fan the flames of moral rebellion, to see morality as dull and restrictive, and immorality and perversion as exciting and liberating. Although people will attempt to prove almost anything these days it would be an impossibility to prove that pornography is not hostile to Biblical faith and morality, because it so obviously reeks with hatred and hostility.

Evil is Life

A second observation is equally obvious: pornography sees a tremendous appeal in moral evil. Morality is seen as tedious and confining, as utterly boring and restrictive, whereas evil is portrayed as man’s liberation. Evil has the potency of a magnetic force for the pornographer. The vitality, potency, and possibility of life are wrapped up in evil. Truly to live means for him evil, a commitment to and an involvement in moral evil. Man is not really alive, we are told, if he lives morally; life means evil; it means what is called sin and perversion. Only the person who sins is truly alive, it is held. Evil, for these people, is life.

Morality is Death

Third, it can be further stated that for the pornographer morality is death. To confine men and women to the prison house of morality, marriage, law, and order is seen as equivalent to a sentence of death. Since evil is life, morality is logically death, and this is the religious faith of pornography. The gospel for man is thus evil; sin is the way of salvation, and the way to life and liberty. This faith is insistently presented, and with a religious fervor, and with good reason, because its roots are in an ancient religious faith, Manichaeanism, and also in various cults of chaos. For this faith, sin is life. Researchers a few years ago found that many people commit adultery, not because of any desire for the other person, but because of a fear that they will miss out on life if they do not sin. This is in essence the position of pornography—it offers sin and evil, and it declares it to be true life precisely because it is sin and evil.

Hostility to the Idea of Morality

Fourth, pornography manifests a hostility to the very idea of law and morality. Law means for it something inhibiting and stultifying, a deadening restraint upon man. Morality is held to be the dead hand of the past, the fearful and death-oriented will of men bound to superstition and fear. The destiny of man is to be free from law, according to these men, and the way to be free is to begin by breaking the law, by violating morality. Man’s freedom is to be free from law, free to do as one pleases, and the mark of this freedom is the deliberate violation of all law and order. Very briefly, this position is one of moral anarchism. Man’s greatest enemy is religion, morality, and law. Eliminate religious and moral law, and all the evils of human life will disappear. Man and the state can then reconstruct society in terms of man’s liberation from God and create a truly human order, the great society of humanism, the city of man.

At the Second Annual Conference of Socialist Scholars, one of the leading lecturers called for “the collective worker in a collective society” and for “the destruction of monogamic bourgeois family as we know it” and for “complete freedom of sexual life.”1. Human Events, September 24, 1966, 5

Totalitarian Authority: A Necessity Without Self-Government

Fifth, in other words, man’s freedom, he stated, involves being “exempt from Totalitarian worship” as well as morality, but man’s freedom also involves a Marxist state! Slavery is religion and morality, and freedom is Marxist socialism. Moral anarchism is the tool and instrument of totalitarianism, of socialism, and dictatorship. Moral anarchism is used to destroy every form of social stability and order in order to pave the way for totalitarian order. Christianity gives to man the faith and character for self-government, and morality is the essence of self-discipline and self-government. Dissolve man’s self-government and you make a totalitarian authority over him a social necessity. It becomes apparent, therefore, that the link between pornography and revolutionary totalitarianism is a necessary one. The rise of totalitarianism has always been preceded by moral anarchism, and those seeking tyrannical powers over man have always worked to reduce man to a dependent position by undercutting his moral self-government and responsibility. The rise and triumph of pornography is a prelude to totalitarianism. Moral anarchy is the seedbed of tyranny.

This then explains the relationship between pornography and totalitarianism. The champions of pornography talk loudly about liberty. Any legislation against pornography is protested as hostile to freedom of press and civil rights generally, but these same people are curiously silent about protesting the inroads of totalitarianism, of Marxism, into the social order. If they are interested in liberty, why not defend it against Marxism? The answer is that they are hostile to liberty; hence their defense of pornography is an instrument whereby man’s moral liberty can be eroded and destroyed.

Purpose: Revolution

Our sixth point is thus an obvious conclusion: the politics of pornography is a moral anarchism whose purpose is revolution, a revolution against Christian civilization. The dean of modern pornographers and a great revolutionist was the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis called for total freedom for every kind of sexual perversion. For Sade, “true wisdom” meant “not…repressing…our vice…since these vices constitute almost the only happiness in our lives…to repress them would be to become our executioners.” The Marquis called for the abolition of the death penalty, laws against theft, laws against murder, prostitution, adultery, incest, rape, sodomy, and all else. Equality required that all acts have equal standing before the law, except, of course, Christian moral laws such as monogamy, laws protecting property, and similar legislations. For Sade, Christianity and its moral laws should be abolished by law; all things else should be accepted. He defended all kinds of crimes and perversions as natural and good. “Can we possibly imagine Nature giving us the possibility of committing a crime which could offend her?…The most independent of men and those closest to Nature are savages; with impunity they devote themselves to murder every day.”

The Marquis de Sade wrote with honesty. In his books, the politics of pornography is open and obvious. The contemporary pornographers are less open about stating their revolutionary goals, but they are still very obvious. The politics of pornography is simply the politics of revolution.

The sexual aspect of pornography is the most obvious aspect. It is an excellent come-on for the stupid and immature, but the underlying purpose is far more extensive in scope. It is nothing less than revolution. It is the reordering of life and society in terms of moral anarchism.

In Esquire, June, 1963, Anthony Lewis wrote on “Sex – and the Supreme Court,” stating that after the Supreme Court’s Roth decision, “no serious literary work can now be termed constitutionally obscene.” All that a pornographer needs to do, if this be true, is to call attention to his serious purpose, namely, his revolutionary purpose, to seek to escape from prosecution. The “serious” purpose can be called sexual reform. Thus, in The New Leader for September 2, 1963, Stanley Edgar Hyman, writing on “In Defense of Pornography,” wrote, “These books may teach and encourage a wider range of heterosexual activity, oral and anal as well as genital, and should be welcomed if they do.” In other words, the increasing defense of pornography is that pornography itself is a socially redeeming activity and is therefore its own justification. In short, the plea for pornography is becoming the fact that it is pornography.

Recognition, Legislation, and Positive Actions

Many things can be said at this point. Certainly new and clearer legislation is necessary and urgently needed. Moreover, it is necessary that we recognize the radical and political implications of pornography. These things and more need to be done.

But positive actions must also accompany them—the reordering of life and society in terms of Biblical faith and standards. The basic answer to moral anarchism is the strengthening of Christian moral discipline. We need and must have sound legislations, but we must also establish the right kind of theological and moral foundations. If the foundations are destroyed, the structure will not stand. “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it” (Ps. 127:1).