Some years ago, I watched a documentary about the massive increase in pornography usage within the past generation. The Internet, of course, has helped super charge pornography’s reach throughout the world. And not only is pornography now mainstream on the Internet, it has also revealed just how far people will go to seek out sexual desires and share them with the entire world.
Porn sites have shameless enabled a wide range of fantasies, fetishes, and obsessions – whether that be hyper-focusing on specific body parts, pushing the boundaries of hardcore porn (or whatever that even means at this point), normalizing forced sexual encounters, exploring incest related fantasies, or promoting sex chat and encounters online. But the examples do not stop there – Pornography gets even more disturbing, the more immersed a person becomes.
Yet is pornography really a root problem in this age of clinging to our smart phones, trumpeting our lives and opinions on social media, and living in a Western society now largely based on rights and privileges and identity politics?
I would argue that pornography is a symptom of a much larger problem: a world of broken relationships, broken families, and broken souls. The short answer is we need God back in our lives. The longer answer is the proverbial elephant in the room: We have created a culture of self-absorbed selfie-takers armed with the latest self-help diatribe on self-love.
Those of us in the Generation X category had parents and grandparents who held to their vows as if they had signed them in blood. Even if your grandparents nearly hated each other to the end, they stuck through it all together. We Gen-Xers studied this behavior carefully; we learned how the 60’s and 70’s pioneered major movements in civil rights; we watched movies and TV that showed both the light and dark sides of status-quo, wholesome, religiously inclined nuclear families; we’ve exchanged stories with our friends about our rough upbringings, the many times our parents gave us a good beating with a wooden spoon, a belt, or a shoe. And we now share memes on social media about how we survived a strict family life, and that the “kids today are snowflakes” compared to how we grew up.
Yet we also found it necessary to be helicopter parents. To treat everyone as equal. To make sure that our friends and family are not marginalized because of varying beliefs or opinions. To give everyone a trophy, win or lose.
Meanwhile, our experiment in rights and privileges, now over 50 years in-progress, has spawned a rocketed increase in divorces, single parenthood, mixed narratives about men’s and women’s roles in society, and a hookup culture filled with disillusionment about long-term relationships.
Which leads to why I think every adult human being on this planet needs to read Confession All: A Humiliating, Tormented Pilgrimage to God’s Will. That is, while Eddie gives a raw, unflinching, often heart-wrenching account of his struggle with pornography, other sexual perversions, and being a master manipulator, this book really boils down to a conversation that we ALL should be having – everyday — right now: How exactly can we create and sustain healthy, lasting relationships?
Keeping that in mind, Confession All is just that: It is a book about a now brave soul who not only spills his guts to the world, but also shows the reality of most modern relationships: Two people who often have both an “inside personality” and “outside personality” — and the deeply disturbing, vitriolic, vile, shameful, sinful thoughts that go through our minds. We ALL are guilty of this. And ironically enough, in a world where we constantly preach to each other the crucial importance of honesty, trust, and communication, are we ever 100% forthcoming with each other?
Confession All shows that many of us, if not all of us, are not so forthcoming. Worse, aren’t we inundated with mixed signals about what is or what is not appropriate to say in everyday conversation? Instead, don’t we hashtag it with #TMI or #creeper alert? Or with the recent, rather bizarre rise of “woke” culture here in the West, isn’t the problem now even more compounded and, dare I say, at risk of being “cancelled” ? Or what about the clear divide here in the U.S. about what is or isn’t politically correct? And what about the growing emphasis in the corporate world on transparency, diversity, inclusion, and equity?
In other words, we have the epitome of communication problems on our hands. So much is the case that we are now even having heated debates about the definitions of reality and truth. Just this year alone, I have lost count of how many articles I have read, or videos I have watched, that go in painstaking detail about objective truth versus subjective truth.
And this problem is at the core of our relationships. If we have a hard time dealing with reality, how can we ever have healthy relationships that are based on real transparency and objective morality?
Confession All faces this question head-on: Eddie shows us our shared dark sides. He shows us the conversations that couples absolutely must have, no matter how uncomfortable the topic. He shows that relationships are much more about the “inside personality” than the “outside personality”. And above all, he shows that having a broken relationship with God will inevitably break other areas of life.
Are YOU ready to face your dark side and be fully forthcoming about it? Confession All may help you take that first big step.