Stop rubbing your eyes; you’re seeing it correctly. It’s not every day that you’d think to find those three red X’s alongside the word “church,” but in this case, the two actually do go hand-in-hand. XXXchurch is a non-profit organization aiding individuals of all ages with an admitted addiction to pornography.
Safe Families, an online resource committed to keeping families safe, says that more than 70% of men from 18 to 34 visit a pornographic site in a given month. According to XXXchurch’s mission statement, the organization offers “tools, resources, and blogs to help prevent pornography from becoming a destructive force in people’s lives. We have created the very best software programs for accountability and filtering online.”
XXXchurch launched in 2002 after founders Mike Foster and Craig Gross set up a booth at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas to promote what was just a website at the time. One of the biggest developments that the organization has demonstrated thus far is X3watch, which it calls accountability software.
The software maintains a log of risky websites a user has visited and searched; it will then send the information to an “accountability partner” of the user’s choice. This can help keep the user accountable, thereby contributing to eliminating the user’s porn addiction.
The website also says that a full life without the strains of a culture reinforcing the addiction is within reach. This message was at the center of the Porn Kills Tour featuring founder Craig Gross, Jefferson Bethke, and Levi the Poet. The tour was free for attendees and several of the performances were streamed live or uploaded after the show.
XXXchurch hosts a variety of events. Porn and Pastries is an event in which women have an opportunity to gather and discuss how the industry has affected their lives, and Porn and Parents is a seminar that educates parents on the risks of the internet and ways to protect their children. Other events include a Porn Debate, an X3 Youth Night and a premarital class for singles.
Statistics are hard to ignore. XXXchurch is just one of the hundreds of non-profit and for-profit organizations battling those numbers.