What Arouses Evangelicals? Cultural Schemas, Interpretive Prisms, and Evangelicals’ Divergent Collective Responses to Pornography and Masturbation

Abstract

AbstractThis study elucidates the puzzle of evangelical grievance selection by comparing evangelicals’ divergent collective responses to pornography use and solo-masturbation. Drawing on eighty in-depth interviews and content analyses of fifty-five evangelical monographs, I show how internal and external influences shape evangelicals’ evaluations of and responses to the two issues. Internally, evangelical cultural schemas of biblicism and pietistic idealism necessitate that grievances be connected directly to the Bible and believers’ “hearts.” Pornography is more aptly linked to explicit biblical proscriptions against heart-lust and consequently perceived collectively as a moral threat, compared with masturbation, which is neither directly addressed in the Bible nor unambiguously connected to lust. Externally, the growing influence of psychology within evangelicalism heightened concern about pornography’s harms while debunking myths associating masturbation with mental illness. These cultural influences provide “interpretive prisms” through which evangelicals differentially perceive the two issues, resulting in fervent anti-pornography activism and relative ambivalence toward masturbation.