Orthodox priest claims porn is warping children, afflicts 'all men and most women'

By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, June 02, 2026

An Eastern Orthodox priest claimed during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson that pornography is increasingly warping the identities of young people and that his ministry has led him to believe its effects have afflicted "all men and most women."

Father Stephen De Young, who pastors Archangel Gabriel Antiochian Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana, said rampant addiction to easily accessible online pornography is "breaking a lot of people," but that community is a major part of healing from it.

When asked about how the confessions he hears have changed over the past 20 years, De Young told Carlson that sexual sin is now increasingly done in isolation and at younger ages, which he said is having catastrophic consequences on children trying to form their identities.

Outside of any of the other controversies, this line from Father Stephen De Young to Tucker Carlson on the pornography problem is massive. "All men and most women." pic.twitter.com/rmPCRPBukN

— Gabriel J. Benton ?????????? (@OrthodoxPole81) May 30, 2026

"Sexual sin used to be a lot more about actually doing things with other people, and now a lot of it is distortions and things going on due to the pornography on the internet and that kind of thing," he said, going on to note that the average age at which American children are first exposed to hardcore pornography is 8 years old.

"I don't know why no one's in prison for that. It's so weird," Carlson said, prompting De Young to note the pornography industry is very lucrative and U.S. society has replaced God with money.

De Young said that pastorally dealing with the spiritual fallout of sexual sin in the age of internet pornography is different and more complicated than it used to be.

"That's not, 'I went too far with my girlfriend on a Friday night.' That's got to be unwound in a different way," he said.

Some of the people who come to him for help about pornography often note they were exposed to it "at some absurdly young age," and that the content escalated "into darker and darker places, more and more dysfunctional places," he said. He attributed the explosion of sexual and gender confusion among young people to early exposure, made worse by social isolation.

"A lot of people's issues with sexuality, with gender identity, a lot of it is traceable back to some of that early exposure to that material, and it creates this confusion," he said. "Because people's first sexual experiences being divorced from their own body causes this distortion, right? That takes a lot to unwind."

De Young said many young people are increasingly living almost exclusively online, and that helping them form real-world relationships is a major part of helping them heal from their spiritual confusion and pain.

"Part of the unwinding of that is having a community, right? Where they're spending time as themselves in their own actual body, talking to other people who are sitting there in front of them," he said.

"I mean, it sounds absurd, but for Zoomers, that's a rare experience now. A lot of them socialize completely on the internet. The people they identify as their closest friends are people they only know online. They have boyfriends and girlfriends who they've never met in person. Very common. Gen Alpha [born since 2010], it's even more common."

De Young added that "helping them get out of that and into a community of actual people who care about them, who are interacting with them in the real world, is a huge first step in sort of bringing people back to reality."

Based on his ministry experience, De Young told Carlson that he believes pornography addiction is a worse and more prevalent scourge on society than substance abuse, even though many are reluctant to be open about it.

"It's all men and most women," he said. "Men don't think that."

De Young and Carlson's conversation about pornography came near the end of a 90-minute interview that focused heavily on the identity of the mysterious Nephilim in Genesis 6 and the belief that human technological progress, including the internet and artificial intelligence, has been influenced by demons.

During an interview with Gen Z evangelist and podcaster Bryce Crawford earlier this year, Carlson suggested that rampant pornography addiction and the perverse fetishes it produces pose a greater practical threat to the United States than radical Islam by weakening its men and ultimately exposing the nation to conquest.

Ronald DeHaas, who serves as CEO of the subscription-based porn accountability software Covenant Eyes, told The Christian Post in a 2024 interview that widespread porn addiction has become "a civilizational crisis" that also afflicts many Christian families.

DeHaas cited a 2016 Barna study that found that porn addiction is rampant even among church-going Christians, and others showing that porn-induced erectile dysfunction and other sexual problems have increased among young men to an unprecedented degree.

DeHaas noted at the time that among the approximately 850 applicants in 2023 for Covenant Eyes' scholarship, which potentially offers $5,000 to full-time college students who use the software, the vast majority revealed in the first sentence of their essay that they were either addicted or profoundly struggling with pornography by the age of 12.

"Some of them were as young as 6 years old," he said.