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June 27, 2006

Jesus Loves Porn Stars

A new Bible with a cover reading "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" is making waves.

This weekend at the erotica convention in Los Angeles, Pastor Craig Gross, who runs an anti-pornography ministry, handed out hundreds of "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" Bibles. Gross, in his "porn-mobile," is a regular fixture at porn conventions. His anti-porn Web site is provocatively entitled XXXChurch.com.

"I believe Jesus, he'd be in the show with us," Gross said. "He'd be mixing it up with these people. 'Cause he doesn't look at them as porn stars, or porn producers. He looks at us as all the same."

Gross is absolutely correct. The entire Christian message can be boiled down to this one thing: that all are sinners, that every single human being falls short of the standard set by God to enter Heaven, and that only through Jesus's substitutional death can anyone be saved. That pretty much puts preachers on the same level as porn stars in God's eyes.

But the American Bible Society thinks Gross's Bibles are unfit to print.

The [ABS] wrote Pastor Gross a letter refusing to print his Bible "out of a sense of propriety," saying the "wording … was misleading and inappropriate."

I can see why little old church ladies and those who print Bibles for them would be upset. After all, society was quite a bit different back in their day. Such things weren't spoken in polite company, let alone printed on the Holy Bible. But we're living in "interesting times."

Gross says his unconventional measures are what it takes to reach people today. "We're trying to reach a new audience and so we can't just do things like our parents did, like the generation did before us," he said.

After all this time it surprises me that many Christians still seem to believe clean-cut religious folks with King James Bibles could ever reach people in some segments of our society. And I find it sad that when someone does understand the language of the "sinner" and reaches out to offer them a message of hope, the response of the Christian world is rejection and scorn. But then, even Jesus faced harsh rejection when he ate dinner with a tax collector, allowed a prostitute to wash his feet with her tears, and actually touched an outcast leper to heal him.

Posted by Becky at June 27, 2006 09:21 AM