A free way to help the men in your church.

Churches usually meet this as a guilt problem. Confess it, promise again, try harder. Most of the men in your pews have done exactly that, more times than they can count, and it has not held.

The research explains why. Shame does not stop the behavior. It feeds it. In a study of 177 people seeking help for compulsive pornography use, those most prone to shame showed more of the behavior, while those prone to guilt showed more motivation to change and more of the habits that protect them.¹ The difference is the one the church has always known: guilt says I did something wrong and moves toward repair; shame says I am something wrong, and hides.

It is not only this struggle. Among 105 people newly sober and recruited from Alcoholics Anonymous, the ones who showed the most shame while talking about their past were the ones who drank again in the months that followed, and drank harder. Guilt they reported predicted none of it.² Shame makes a man hide, and a man in hiding cannot be helped. Scripture got there first: “I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10).

Underneath the behavior there is usually pain. The clinical criteria proposed for the DSM-5 described it as something men reach for in response to anxiety, depression, boredom and stressful seasons of life, and a field trial found it tracked emotional distress and stress closely.³ Loneliness and pornography use rise together, and each appears to deepen the other.⁴

Your men are carrying this, and most are carrying it alone.

These are from the largest recent study of pornography and the church, by Barna Group with Pure Desire Ministries: 2,976 U.S. adults surveyed in October 2023, and 462 senior pastors.⁵

• 3 in 4 Christian men say they view pornography to some extent.
• 54% of practicing Christians — faith very important to them, and in church in the past month — view it at least occasionally. And 22% view it weekly or daily.
• 84% of people who view it say no one is helping them stop, and about half say no one knows.
• 1 in 10 Christians and churchgoers say their church offers any help with it. More than half say they want their church to address it.
• 67% of pastors say they have struggled with pornography at some point, and 18% say it is a struggle now.

One caution, because a pastor will be asked. The line that “70% of men in church struggle with porn” is repeated widely, and no published study measures it. The figures above are the real ones, each is sourced below, and they are enough.

Sources.

1. Gilliland, R., South, M., Carpenter, B. N., & Hardy, S. A. (2011). The roles of shame and guilt in hypersexual behavior. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 18(1), 12–29. Anonymous survey of 177 people seeking treatment for compulsive pornography use.
2. Randles, D., & Tracy, J. L. (2013). Nonverbal displays of shame predict relapse and declining health in recovering alcoholics. Clinical Psychological Science, 1(2), 149–155. A study of alcohol, not pornography, cited here for what it shows about shame and hiding.
3. Kafka, M. P. (2010). Hypersexual disorder: a proposed diagnosis for DSM-V. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 377–400; and Reid, R. C., et al. (2012). Report of findings in a DSM-5 field trial for hypersexual disorder. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 9(11), 2868–2877. The diagnosis was proposed and field-tested, and was not adopted into the DSM-5.
4. Butler, M. H., Pereyra, S. A., Draper, T. W., Leonhardt, N. D., & Skinner, K. B. (2018). Pornography use and loneliness: a bidirectional recursive model and pilot investigation. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 44(2), 127–137. 1,247 participants; the authors describe it as a pilot.
5. Barna Group and Pure Desire Ministries (2024). Beyond the Porn Phenomenon. Online survey of 2,976 U.S. adults, October 20–30, 2023 (±2.3%), and 462 U.S. senior Protestant pastors, September–October 2023 (±3.5%). “Christian” is self-identified; “practicing” adds that faith is very important and church attendance in the past month. Summaries from Barna: practicing Christians, church programs, pastors.

If something here is wrong, or reads as though it was written by someone who has not sat in a room with men on a Tuesday morning, that is worth more to me than a polite reply: hello@getbramble.app.

Handing a porn recovery app to a specific man you suspect needs it is close to the hardest ask there is. However kindly it is put, he hears an accusation in it — because there is one, and you both know it. Most men will say they are fine. Some will say it warmly, and mean none of it.

The same holds with a group. Naming a free resource to a room of men singles out no one. A man who needs it will remember where he saw it, and go there on his own, at the hour he actually needs it, which is rarely a Tuesday morning.

If you would rather point at something that asks nothing at all, point at the guide instead of the app. It is twenty minutes, needs no signup and no email, and it prints.

Three things worth saying out loud.

If this comes up in a group, these are worth saying plainly. Most of the men in the room have heard the opposite.

• Something happened to you. Nothing is wrong with you. It is the sentence shame cannot survive, and it is the one a man is least likely to have heard from a pulpit.
• You are not the only one in this room. Three in four Christian men, by the numbers above. Common is not the same as harmless, but it does end the lie that he is uniquely broken.
• Praying about it and still being stuck is not evidence of a faith problem. This article takes that question seriously, and argues that the grief a man feels about this is evidence of love rather than its absence.

All free, no signup, nothing tracked, and none of it requires installing the app.

• The guide — the whole of it in one sitting, about twenty minutes, and it prints.
• The ten questions — Carnes’ criteria in plain words, with no label at the end.
• The two-minute reflection — six questions, no score, nothing leaves the page.
• The three circles — the worksheet, stored in his own browser.
• The library — sixteen books on five shelves, linked to publishers, no affiliate codes.

Some of this needs a clinician, and seeing that early is pastoral rather than a failure of nerve. If a man keeps returning despite consequences he genuinely cares about, if there is trauma underneath it, or if a marriage is being damaged, the right next step is someone trained specifically for this — a CSAT, listed in the IITAP directory. Bramble sits alongside that work rather than instead of it.

We would rather work out what Bramble should be for churches with pastors than guess. Luke reads every one.

Your name

Your email

So we can write back. You are not added to any list.

Which describes you best? Choose one A therapist or counselor A pastor or church leader Something else

Your church — optional

Where you are — optional

City and state.

Anything you want us to know — optional

Website

Send it