I came across this article some time ago (I think this was the same one, though I can't remember where I originally found it):

What is an Adult?
"Obviously, I am not an adult. At least by common definition I'm not. I don't visit adult bookstores, I don't watch adult videos, I don't go to adult shows, I don't click on to adult Web sites. So I must not be an adult..."


I was thinking about this yesterday and it occurred to me (as a rather Chesterton-like reversal), that what our culture calls "adult" entertainment is in fact precisely the opposite of adult-like.

Roger Palms (assuming the above is correctly attributed) said that our culture says that "to be adult is to be perverted." I think it's even worse than that. The attitude that best characterizes a viewer of pornography - passive, self-centered, self-indulgent, dependent upon others to be "taken care of" - is characteristic of a phase of human development, but it's not adulthood. Pornography is distinctly adolescent.

On some level, this is an obvious fact to almost any man who has experienced pornography. Virtually all of us were exposed to it first as teenagers, and our interest in it was part and parcel of our experience of life as sex-crazed adolescents.

The problem is that some men never grow out of this phase of life. In fact, statistically, it seems that most American men - including Christians - never grow out of their teenage sexuality at all. And our culture has convinced us that this is normal, and even somehow healthy; pornography should be defended in the name of "freedom of expression." (of course, if something as morally charged, but otherwise apolitical, as obscenity can be defended as freedom of expression, how can we possibly deny the defense of freedom of expression for similarly morally charged but explicitly political activities... like say, suicide bombings?)

To be an adult is to be responsible for our decisions. To be an adult is to be morally accountable for our own lives. To be an adult is to have an integrity of will such that phrases of blame, complaint, and self-victimization (everything from "the devil made me do it" to "I can't help it; my parents ruined my life") are ultimately rejected as the excuses they are.

It may well be that the only people who are fully adult-like in the world are Christians - and even a very small subset of them. It takes the power of the Holy Spirit and good dose of healing in our hearts before we can have the freedom to even take responsibility for our own actions.

I Corinthians 13:11
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.