Porn Pastor Visits St. Louis This Weekend to Discuss Women's Issues

Craig Gross is the porn pastor. He presides over the TripleX Church. This, unfortunately, is not as juicy as it sounds. Instead of performing unspeakable acts with a collar and a hymnal, Gross, 34, helps others overcome their porn addictions. He also faces off against Ron Jeremy in "porn debates".

Tonight at 7 p.m. and tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., he'll be leading separate workshops for men and women at Destiny Church in Town & Country. Sadly, Jeremy will be at neither.

The women's workshop is a newer venture for Gross, and its purpose is threefold: He wants to help women whose husbands or boyfriends are addicted to porn, women whose children are sneaking porn off the Internet and a growing number of women who are addicted to porn themselves.

"One out of every three people looking at porn online are women," Gross informs Daily RFT via cell phone from the Las Vegas airport, where he's waiting to board his flight to St. Louis. "Our culture has embraced pornography. Girls wear T-shirts that say 'porn star'. Women aren't as stimulated by porn as guys, but they say they're interested in it to get the guy."

Porn, he adds, makes some women feel inadequate because they can't "perform" in bed as well as the actresses in the movies. "A lot of women take it on themselves," he explains. "They think, 'What's wrong with me?' Men are able to emotionally disconnect from their affairs and porn. But women are more emotionally engaged."

Gross has done more than fifty shows since he became the porn pastor eight years ago and says that lately women comprise half his audience. "In church we don't talk about sex," he says. "We can talk about weight and divorce and money, but when it comes to people's sex life, we shut down. People think no one's going to relate. Porn makes you feel like you're all alone."

At one event in Atlanta, Gross says, 900 women showed up. Afterwards, they all stood around and talked for more than an hour, until the church had to blink the lights on and off to make them go home. Some of them later formed their own discussion group.

Tomorrow Gross will be accompanied by Shellie R. Warren, who blogs about women's issues on TripleX Church's very slick website, which bills itself as "The #1 Christian Porn Site".

After the jump, a video from TripleX Church that pretty much encapsulates Gross's message, only with a cute, blonde Christian chick named (what else?) Noelle: