The Rise of Violence Porn

Now, Religion in the News, a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s consists of excerpts from an article in the Reader’s Digest, August 2004 entitled “Violence Porn—Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg had three awful things in common. Both were Jewish Americans who were kidnapped by Islamic terrorists. Both were beheaded. And both had their excruciating deaths recorded and then replayed thousands, perhaps millions of times over the internet. One of the websites that featured the killing of Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted in Pakistan in 2002, was also among the first to post the footage of Berg’s execution two years later in Iraq. “Yes, we have the American beheading video,” its home page declared proudly.

“Is this web sponsored by militant Islamists? No. It’s a site based here in the United States with the sole mission of celebrating stomach-turning violence. Call it ‘violence porn,’ the latest degradation of our popular culture in which gruesome injuries and deaths are glorified and presented in wrenching detail.

“ ‘Such imagery leads to an increasing desensitization to violence, which carries over into the real world,’ says Dave Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family.

“And make no mistake, viewing true life violence is catching on. According to the operator of one of these sites, his traffic has multiplied over the last several years from a few thousand visitors a day to more than 150,000.

“ ‘I have do doubt that our culture today has a coarsening affect,’ says Joanne Cantor, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin. ‘The more you live in a world where violence and hostility are the norm, the more you adopt a hostile framework.’”

Tom: Dave, one of the reasons that I thought this would be worth discussing—we’re just shocked—we’ve been talking about the history of Islam and the atrocities and so on. It’s not news to anybody. We look at 9/11 and so on. We see these images. This is Islam, which we’ve mentioned over and over again.

Dave: This is Islam.

Tom: Right.

Dave: These are not extremists.

Tom: But these websites—this is NOT Islam. This is American, and this is a penchant for violence. You know, I know people are going to be upset, but part of the attraction of The Passion was the violence that was presented. Even though some people said, “Oh no, that turned me off.” But it doesn’t turn people off. People are attracted to that kind of thing. Isn’t that the heart of man?

Dave: It’s a horrible world that we live in. Paul said, “Evil men and seducers will wax worse and worse.” There is no way that you could imagine—you know, many sociologists and some psychologists and so forth, politicians—“Oh, the world is getting better! We’re going to solve our problems.”

When you look at the world Tom, where did the problems come from? Man. Human beings. We made the problems, didn’t we? We’re the ones that do the violence, commit the robberies and the murders and the rapes and so forth. And now somehow we think, who’s going to solve the problem? Man. We’re going to come up some new agreements, turn over a new leaf, we’ll all promise to be good boys.

It’s like Arafat. I hate to even mention his name. The worst murderer and terrorist. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed through that man. Of modern times, the worst in modern times. What does he get? The Nobel Peace Prize. Ah, because he wrote a letter to the Israeli Prime Minister saying, “Oh, well, the PLO now, we’ve renounced terrorism and murders and so forth. We’re going to be good boys.”

You can imagine if we finally caught Osama Bin Laden alive. And he stands before the judge and he says to the judge, “Oh well, I’m going to be a good boy from now on.” Oh, wonderful! We’ll give you the Nobel Prize! I mean, Tom, that is the world we live in.

Our prisons are a revolving door. We slap them on the wrist and we reward evil in this world and now here’s a unique way of rewarding it. Well, Tom, it’s like our videos and the movies. One of the most popular movies, R-rated or X-rated, is partially because of the violence, the horror.

In the United States Armed Forces discovered—I think they discovered this back in Vietnam—that a normal American, even though he’s now enlisted or has been drafted into the armed forces, he has a real reluctance to kill someone else. Many of them didn’t even fire their rifles out there in the jungles supposedly chasing the Viet Cong. They couldn’t bring themselves to do it. But they discovered you get them on these video games and that becomes a part of the way they think, and they have no reluctance anymore to pull that trigger. And Tom, I see young kids, and they’re into these violent video games. We’ve got some real problems in our society.

Tom: Dave, it says right here. This website, which is “Gore”, “violence porn,” as they describe it—they get more than 150,000 hits a day!

Dave: Wow! I don’t think The Berean Call gets that in a year, do we?

Tom: Well—

Dave: Well, Tom, it’s a violent world, it’s an evil world, and what are we going to do? We’re going to be seeker-friendly now. And we don’t want to offend people. Give them some of this video stuff to attract them. Give them some movies like that, and so forth. We’re going to attract our young people into church. This is the culture that we’re living in, and instead of standing against it, we’re going to sort of go along with it, modify it a bit.

Well, it’s exactly what the Bible said.

Tom: But there’s deliverance from this, isn’t there, Dave?

Dave: Absolutely.

Tom: A heart for the Lord; a desire for the things of Him?

Dave: Well, we have to be convicted that something is wrong before we repent; before we turn from it. I have to acknowledge that it is sin. And that’s a forbidden word in the seeker-friendly churches. You wouldn’t say that. Robert Schuller, of course, says we want to build up their self-esteem, make them feel good about themselves, don’t be negative, just be positive, and so forth. I don’t find that in the Scripture, and I don’t think that will solve the problem that we have, and this problem is getting worse. But the finality is the worst part of it, Tom. There is an eternity ahead, and we need to warn people of that and try to rescue them and let them know that Jesus Christ did pay the penalty for their sins.