On What Kind of Lust Jesus Condemns

It is well known that Jesus accuses people with lustful thoughts of the crime of adultery in the Gospel of Matthew.

Matthew 5.28 (ESV) - But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Let's say someone has committed adultery with a woman in his heart. How bad is that, according to Jesus? The passage immediately after gives us a pretty good idea:

Matthew 5.29–30 (ESV) - If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

It’s hella bad. But how often do we human beings actually commit adultery in our hearts? Do we do so every time we, say, use porn to get off? To figure that out, we need to elucidate Jesus’ teaching by precisifying our terms.

Lustful Intent

It can be argued that, in this verse, "look[ing] at a woman with lustful intent" means looking at a woman and intending to have sex with her. Let's use "adulterous intent" to refer to an intention to commit adultery, and "mental adultery" to refer to committing adultery in one's heart.

On this interpretation, the verse can't be used to condemn much porn consumption, for four reasons. The first is that few porn consumers actually intend, or plan, to have sex with porn actresses, much less with the actresses whose porn they consume. They only think about, imagine, or desire sex with the actresses. Thus, even if Mt. 5.28 is true, much porn consumption doesn't involve lustful intent, and so may not involve mental adultery. The second is that, even if a porn consumer did intend to have sex with a porn actress, that would only amount to adulterous intent if the consumer or the actress were (presumed) married. So, Mt. 5.28 is false on this reading (unless “woman” refers to someone else’s wife, as I shall argue presently), assuming that mental adultery requires adulterous intent (not just adulterous desire, say); only a married person who looks with lustful intent at a woman, or an unmarried person who looks with lustful intent at a married woman, has committed mental adultery. The third reason is that, even if the consumer intended to have sex with a porn actress who happened to be married, adulterous intent couldn't fairly be ascribed to that consumer unless they had sufficient reason to suspect that actress was married. So, again, Mt. 5.28 is false on this reading; unmarried people who look at women with lustful intent have only committed mental adultery if they have enough reason to suspect those women are married.

One might think porn consumers always have sufficient reason to suspect porn actresses they find attractive are married, precisely because of the actresses' attractiveness. But that's not the case if the actresses' public relationship statuses—which can be found on PornHub, for example—say otherwise. With the help of these public relationship statuses, it's feasible for an unmarried Christian to ensure (with some possibility of error, since the statuses may be misleading or out of date) that they only develop intentions to have sex with unmarried porn actresses. Of course, it can be difficult online to find images of unmarried women without seeing and being aroused by images of potentially married women, but this could be done.¹ Websites and personal porn collections could be designed to facilitate this.

The fourth reason Mt. 5.28's utility for anti-porn purposes is limited is that, even if the consumer intended to have sex with an actress whom the consumer had enough reason to suspect was married (to someone other than the consumer), adulterous intent couldn't be fairly ascribed unless the consumer intended to have sex with the actress during her marriage to someone else.² If the consumer only intended to have sex with that woman after her marriage ended, they could not be accused of mental adultery.

Lustful Desire

But admittedly, not too much weight should be placed on the fact that the ESV translates "pros epithymēsai autēn" as "with lustful intent" rather than "with lust" or "with lustful desire" or what have you. The translators might have seen these phrases as interchangeable. And there's a perfectly clear sense in which simply wanting, or fantasizing about, sex does count as having sex in one's heart. For one does entertain or play out the scenario in one's head, though not necessarily in great detail.

So suppose that the term translated as "lustful intent" just means a strong desire to have sex with someone, which one can have even if one doesn't plan to have sex with them. Then one can still consume porn without falling afoul of Mt. 5.28. For, as discussed in the previous section, one can simply look up porn of the unmarried—ideally wherein the unmarried person doesn't pretend to be married—and thereby avoid adulterous desire. And more generally, an unmarried person can look with lustful desire at an unmarried woman without committing mental adultery, as long as looking only elicits a desire to have sex with that woman, rather than any married woman.³

One might also consider it overly strict to require that a married person never strongly desire to have sex with someone other than their spouse. For how can one control, or be responsible for, such sexual desires? Granted, one can control whether one consumes porn, more so than one can feasibly control whether in real life one sees and desires someone other than one's spouse. But a central claim of the anti-porn movement is that porn is addictive, meaning enough exposure to porn leads to diminished control over whether one consumes porn. Thus, the more addicted one is to porn, the less blameworthy one is for consuming it. And at any rate, it is not just looking at porn that Jesus is talking about, but any instance of looking at women lustfully. It's hard to see how a Christian could reasonably hold people responsible for such lustful desire. A reasonable person will either

• doubt that the God who inspired Mt. 5.28–30 is just, 
• deny that God endorses the punishment for lust described in Mt. 5.28–30, or 
• reinterpret Mt. 5.28 so the punishment in Mt. 5.29–30 seems more proportional.

Any Woman at All?

Maybe we should actually focus less on the term "lustful intent" and more on the term "woman." Obviously the English word "woman" does not single out any particular kind of woman, but according to the Englishman's Concordance, Strong's Concordance, and Thayer's Greek Lexicon, the word "gynaika" which was translated as "woman" in Mt. 5.28 often specifically refers to someone's wife. These sources also say the term sometimes refers to any woman at all. But clearly, within the context of this verse, it makes the most sense to translate "a woman" as "a wife/married woman." For if the woman weren't married, an unmarried person couldn't even commit adultery by actually having sex with her, let alone by mentally having sex with her. If what one is doing in one's mind is having sex with an unmarried woman, one may be fornicating in one's heart (though it is debatable what "fornicate" means in the Bible), but one is not committing adultery in one's heart. Further, even if Jesus would count this as mental fornication, the question remains whether that is nearly as serious a thought crime by Jesus' lights as mental adultery.

Endnotes

1. It's questionable whether such fleeting arousal would lead to the purportedly sinful intention, anyway.

2. Mk 10.11–2 may be cited to show that even sex with someone who got divorced is effectively adultery in Jesus' eyes. (Technically, though, it says remarrying is adultery, not sex with someone new after a marriage ends.) Thus, an intention to have sex with an actress after her marriage ends counts as adulterous intent. But what if the divorce happens for some reason (e.g., sexual abuse) that Christians commonly consider adequate? Or what if there is an annulment rather than a divorce? Or what if the marriage ends because one of the spouses dies or is rendered permanently unable to meaningfully interact with the other spouse(s)?

3. I realize this is a big "if," but that's mostly because it's nearly impossible to avoid desiring sex with attractive married people, period. Porn is barely relevant, though of course it can be a trigger and intensifier, even if it features only unmarried people. If someone knows of a way to avoid such desire, I ask that they explain why porn consumers can't in theory avoid it the same way, especially considering that porn consumers can exclusively view unmarried people.