Fox News and Porn Have More in Common Than You Think

One deforms your view of sex. The other deforms your view of people. Both are discipling your soul.

Let’s clear the air up front. I’m not saying CNN or Fox News is the same as a porn site. But I am saying both can deform your heart in surprisingly similar ways.

Porn reduces intimacy to consumption. Cable news reduces community to contempt.

Both shrink the image of God in others. Both shape us into people driven not by love, but by appetite—whether for pleasure or for outrage.
And whether we want to admit it or not, we become what we consume.

The Discipleship of the Screen

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most Christians spend more time listening to news anchors than to Jesus. That’s not just a problem of balance—it’s a crisis of formation.

Cable news doesn’t just inform. It forms.
It doesn’t just report stories. It delivers tone, judgment, fear, enemy lists. It coaches us in who to mock, who to hate, who to trust, and who to fear.

Pretty soon news stops being about awareness and turns into entertainment. Entertainment flavored with contempt.
And we’re not just watching it. We’re being discipled by it.

What Happens to the Heart

Day after day, outrage becomes the diet. Fear becomes the lens. Enemy-making becomes instinct.

The fruit of that isn’t love, joy, or peace.
It’s anxiety, mockery, tribalism, and pride.

Paul’s list of the Spirit’s fruit in Galatians 5 stands in sharp contrast. And if what’s forming us doesn’t look like love, joy, and peace… we have to ask: what’s shaping us more—Jesus or the news cycle?

Because you do become what you watch.

Contempt Is a Form of Murder

Jesus made it clear: murder doesn’t start with a weapon, it starts with contempt. With words. With tone.

News channels may not pull a trigger, but they load the weapon. They give us a steady stream of enemies and then cheer when we curse them.

We’ve convinced ourselves it’s harmless entertainment. It isn’t. It’s formation. And it’s deforming us.
James is blunt: “With the same mouth we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people made in his likeness.”

That should stop us in our tracks.

Awake, Not Addicted

Being informed matters. Jesus didn’t ignore injustice—He walked straight into it.

But that’s not the same as being discipled by 24/7 news.
The machine isn’t built to form you into a peacemaker. It’s built to keep you outraged, anxious, and glued to the next segment. It doesn’t just tell you what happened. It curates what you should feel, who you should blame, and what you should fear.

It trains us to stay triggered instead of transformed. To consume outrage instead of carrying peace.

Being aware of the world’s brokenness is not the same as being discipled by it.

Not Left vs. Right

This isn’t about red vs. blue. It’s not a Fox vs. MSNBC fight.

It’s about a spiritual system deforming the church.
The business model is outrage. The effect is corrosion of the soul. The fruit is a divided church where contempt sounds louder than Christ.

I’ve seen it in real time. Christians who mock “the libs” or sneer at “the MAGA cult” with more venom than they’d ever show a true enemy. Believers who share news clips with more passion than Scripture. Leaders who echo the tone of pundits instead of the voice of Jesus.

This isn’t just unhealthy. It’s unholy.

Jesus Invites Us to Another Way

Jesus doesn’t invite us to play the outrage game. He invites us to love enemies, bless those who curse us, and do good to those who hate us. He says peacemakers—not pundits—are blessed.

So if your media diet is forming you into someone fearful, angry, and quick to mock, you’re not being formed by Jesus. You’re being discipled by a machine built on contempt.

That’s not who we’re called to be.

A Call to Action

What if the church broke the addiction?
What if we turned down the noise and tuned our ears to the Spirit?
What if our speech reflected the mercy of Christ instead of the contempt of commentators?

The world has enough angry voices. What it needs is a people so shaped by grace, so committed to peace, that our very tone sounds different.

So let’s start here: give Jesus more of your screen time than the anchors.
Turn off the rage machine long enough to hear His still small voice.
And then walk back into your neighborhood not as another echo of outrage—but as a living witness of love.