Sin or Sickness?

The increasing tendency to reclassify moral failures as “mental disorders” is troubling. Here’s why Christians must resist the pressure to diminish moral guilt.

When students confess pornography addiction to me, I point them to the necessity of accountability, the importance of counseling, and other strategies that can help them overcome this bondage. But I also encourage them to repent, to confess their deeper bondage to sin—a bondage that started with a moral failure, the choice to click and to click again, and to click again. Their hope, I want them to know, is ultimately found in the grace of God, as proven in Christ Jesus, that God will forgive our sin and deliver us from it.

Few people today still think like this. There’s a growing trend to describe sex addiction not as a sin, but as a sickness, like chicken pox or cancer or depression. And that trend has just become more official.

Recently, the USA Today reported that the World Health Organization has added “sex addiction” to