When Christians Defend “Redemptive” Porn

Onscreen immorality cannot be harnessed to promote covenantal love

To many people, it seemed odd, if not misguided (or worse), for me to spill so much digital ink over four minutes of one movie. I’m talking, of course, about the four minutes of onscreen sex in Redeeming Love. Since this film releases on DVD today, it’s a good opportunity to revisit and expand on the issues I’ve previously addressed.

There are many professing Christians who justified the inclusion of softcore content because it resulted in the promotion of marital love (as the two sex scenes in question were between actors pretending to be married). Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one pushing back against such rhetoric. For example, in her post “Redeeming Love Misses the Mark” (pictured above), screenwriter Lori Twichell wrote the following:

[C]onsider the fact that several actors were asked to be naked, simulate sex and even orgasms on camera. That’s where the bulk of my concern lies. I don’t believe a faith film should ask a young woman to be naked on set in front of men who are not her husband. It also required a young man to simulate sex with a woman he didn’t know before this production.

Twichell continued, helping her audience understand how filming a scene actually works:

If there are four minutes of sex in this movie (as noted by Focus on the Family’s Plugged In review) it’s entirely possible that those four minutes came from hours of footage of the sex act that were left on the editing room floor. That means you don’t see it, but someone had to sit through everything that you didn’t see in order to choose the best angle, lighting, etc.

Even before filming, all those things had to be choreographed. Rehearsed. Set for lighting and sound and props. Perhaps repeatedly. That’s a lot of time, thought, and focus on sex.  To get a two second shot of his hands covering her breasts could possibly mean an hour or more of setting, placement, lighting with his hands on her in that manner.

There’s this persistent perception that sex scenes aren’t necessarily bad if they don’t “show anything”—i.e., if the actors’ private parts remain hidden from the camera. But such a perspective reveals a myopic focus on the sexual purity of the audience (since there’s no actual nakedness moviegoers see) and ignores the sexual purity of the actors involved.

As Twichell points out above, actress Abigail Cowen had to physically undress for one of the sex scenes. And Tom Lewis had to literally fondle Cowen for the scene—in direct contradiction of Proverbs 5:20: “Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?” (In this verse, the terms “forbidden woman” and “adulteress” literally mean “strange woman” and “foreign woman,” respectively. Scripturally speaking, a man may not have sexual relations with a “strange” or “foreign” woman—i.e., any woman to whom he is not married.)

Some have (rightly) pointed out that the process of filming sex scenes is often not erotic. As one person recently put it, “Some people would just say it is just acting and there is no feeling behind it. Having acted in stage myself in my young adulthood there is a lot of truth to that.”

On this I wholeheartedly agree. There is “no [sexual] feeling behind” much of the sexual acts portrayed in mainstream films. If anything, a lot of the actor testimonies I’ve compiled over the years shows they feel discomfort, awkwardness, shame, guilt, and revulsion when filming such content. Their experiences with libidinous kissing, undressing their scene partners, fondling each other, and the like don’t seem to involve a lot of sexual arousal.

But if a lack of sexual arousal is the standard by which we separate “sexual sin” and “legitimate work involving sexual organs,” then much of the hardcore pornography produced today would qualify as the latter, since filming sex scenes in “adult” entertainment also typically involves discomfort, awkwardness, shame, guilt, and revulsion.

Circling back to where we started: yes, it’s “only” four minutes we’re talking about—from an audience perspective. But from the actors’ perspective, we’re talking about hours and hours (at least) of public sexualized nudity and sexual acting out. We must reject a self-focused, audience-centric view of the filmmaking process—as if our experience as moviegoers is all that truly matters.

The reality is that actors like Cowen and Lewis are people too. Their privacy and dignity matter. They, like the rest of us, are created in the image of God. And those four minutes of sex scenes in Redeeming Love required their repeated practice and performance of sexual acts.

Cowen and Lewis’ onset, on-camera immorality should be more than just a footnote in the discussion among discerning Christian audiences.