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In the early 1990s, a friend of mine took a pastoral training course at the Master's College in Santa Clarita, California. The class met once a week, surveying many of the topics one would expect in such a setting. But the professor also spotlighted a less popular subject: sexual sin. Every week, without exception, he recounted the story of a friend who had been disqualified for ministry by moral failure.

The failure could be an affair or an addiction to pornography. The saddest part, the professor said, was how easy it was to come up with such stories. He had more than enough to fill a semester.

According to an oft-cited statistic, the average child today is exposed to pornography by age 11. Christian musician Clay Crosse says he first saw a "girlie magazine" in fourth grade. I suppose I should feel fortunate. I didn't encounter pornography until age 12 or 13.

The first movie I watched, a tape of the Debbie Does variety, made me sick. The second one electrified me. It was the most exciting, magnetic thing I'd ever seen. Throughout high school, whenever I was at a friend's house with cable, I felt drawn, irresistibly, to search for porn.

In the 1989 movie Parenthood, Keanu Reeves's character reassures a 15-year-old boy (and his mother) that the boy's obsessive pornographic viewing and masturbation is normal. "That's what little dudes do," he says. It was only later—as a rededicated Christian talking with friends about how to resist sexual sin—that I discovered how true Reeves's statement was. If there is a Christian man who doesn't have a problem with lust, often pornography, I've never met him.

Of course, it's not just "little dudes" who consume porn. Consider the following statistics, compiled by Proven Men, a ministry of sexual purity and transformation:

• 60 percent of Christian men have sought some form of pornography.
• 16 percent of married Christian men use pornography to masturbate.
• 25 million Americans spend one to ten hours a week viewing internet pornography.
• Half of the country's cybersex addicts are women, who often prefer explicit chat rooms to images.
• 70 percent of internet porn viewing is done during business hours.
• In 2002, the adult video industry produced 11,000 titles—20 times more than Hollywood—and brought in $4 billion.
• Total pornography revenue in 2001 was between $10 and $20 billion, more than the revenue of any professional sport.

Pornography can no longer be considered a "man's issue." Nor are pastors less susceptible than parishioners. In "Tangled in the Worst of the Web," Christine Gardner reported that 33 percent of pastors polled, compared to 36 percent of laity, admitted visiting a sexually explicit website.

When my wife and I first moved to Florida, we visited one of our area's leading churches. Dynamic and growing, it needed a police officer to regulate the crush of traffic leaving its services. The senior pastor was a sincere and persuasive teacher, unafraid to speak boldly against sin, including sexual sin. Yet several years later, we learned he'd been fired for an entanglement with lust and pornography.

No one is insusceptible, it seems, to porn's allure. And though many blame the internet for multiplying the temptation, it's not like porn was hard to find pre–World Wide Web. In 1988, a Leadership editor, writing an intro for "The War Within Continues," bemoaned the new accessibility of video pornography: "The VCR, barely known five years ago, has made sexually oriented material much more easily available and brought it into many homes for the first time."

For Christians seeking to avoid explicit imagery, it's becoming harder and harder to find a safe haven. Beyond the video stores, cable pay-per-view menus, internet sites, and even cell phones that peddle hard-core porn, there's the quasi-porn on display on billboards, primetime television, and the magazine rack at Borders. As Amy Sohn concluded in her New York Times review of the book Pornified, "The real proof of our culture's decline may not be that so much pornography is available these days, but that you no longer have to look at pornography to get porn."

Despite porn's ubiquity, however, Christians seeking to rise above it have reason for hope. For me, the following story provides an apt image. In 1999, a church called Jesus in the City took over the building of an adult video store in Minneapolis. "We do relish the fact that right in the very offices where they handled this business, we're now having prayer meetings," said Steve Harrison, one of the church's ministry partners.

As Christians striving to live lives of purity, we cannot escape our pornographic culture—or our own proclivity toward lust. Not completely. Not yet. But we can create enclaves of prayer and recaptured innocence within it; we can invite God's Spirit into places where sexual sin once paid the rent.

Madison Trammel is an associate editor for Christianity Today magazine.

For more insight into lust, pornography, and addiction, and tips for pursuing purity, check out the following articles:

"Hooked"
"Cybersex Temptation"
"Battle Strategy: Some Practical Advice"