Eden: Ben, thanks for being willing to interview with us and to share with us a little about your life and what you’re doing. I’m really excited to talk to you.
Ben Bozzay: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to collaborate with Bibles.net. I’ve been reading a ton of content on the site, and I can’t believe how much you guys have on there.
Eden: Oh, awesome. I usually start interviews by asking a few questions to help us get to know you. So what are a couple of things that bring you joy?
Ben Bozzay: I grew up on a farm. I was pretty outdoorsy as a kid. I did a lot of Boy Scout outings, and was very involved in the church and Boy Scouts and all that. And then in college, I got more into rock climbing, running, things like that. And that’s what I’ve stuck with. I’m pretty involved in indoor rock climbing mostly. I’m kind of more of an indoor cat these days, but basically that and running.
And then my wife and I are big into this game called Codenames. It’s like a board game. We love that game. We’ve been playing it like every night by ourselves.
Eden: So fun. For rock climbing, have you ever been climbing outdoors?
Ben Bozzay: Yes, I have. What’s odd is we had the pandemic, and I completely stopped rock climbing, even though you could go outdoors. It’s something that’s kind of hard to pick up and go do. And I’m not as adventurous lately. I’m more of an indoor cat, so mostly going indoor rock climbing.
Eden: I went outdoor climbing one time, and I was like, this is so much scarier than indoors and so much harder, but it’s such a fun sport.
Is there a particular part of God’s Word that is especially precious to you, or maybe that he’s using to teach you right now?
Ben Bozzay: Yeah. So the book of James is a book that I come back to pretty frequently. And there’s a few things that stick out to me that are particularly convicting. The one is: the whole theme of James is basically faith, prayer, and how you demonstrate that you have faith. “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:17). That is extremely convicting, especially when you can build things and do things. God gives you things, he blesses you, and you’re supposed to take those gifts and not just keep them to yourself. You’re supposed to go invest in the kingdom.
And at the beginning it talks about how the rust on your gold condemns you (James 5:3). And I always read that and interpreted that as—it’s not in the full context of this passage, but—I do not want to get to the end of my life with a pile of rusted gold that basically says, God gave me stuff and I didn’t do anything with it. And the fact that it exists and it’s got rust on it means that I wasn’t fruitful with the things he gave me. So I’d say that that sticks in my mind. I wake up and I think to myself, “What am I doing that matters? How am I living in fear and hoarding stuff and trying to protect myself when I should really be going out and doing things for the kingdom?”
Eden: That’s awesome. That reminds me of the parable of the talents, where Jesus gives various people a certain amount of money or whatnot, and he entrusts it to them (Matthew 25:14-30). And then some of them go and they invest it and they make more money. But then there’s one guy that freaks out, hides it away (Matthew 25:18), and Jesus comes back and he’s like, “What did you do with what I gave you?” And he’s like, “Well, I was afraid. And so I hid it” (Matthew 25:24-25). That’s such a strong call from the Word in so many different passages to be faithful with what God has put in front of us.
Ben Bozzay: It’s interesting. We spent a yearlong study in Matthew, and there’s a few parables about being entrusted with gifts from God—that could be gifts of the Holy Spirit—and then doing a lot with it, and some people doing virtually nothing. And it says, if you can be trusted with a little and do a lot with it, then a lot of times you’ll be blessed with more things because you’ve proven faith with the smaller stuff (Matthew 25:21). And that’s bro-biblical paraphrasing right there. It’s definitely not word for word. That’s my bro-biblical perspective.
Eden: I’m glad that that’s a precious part of the Bible for you.
Well, I’d love to hear about your ministry. No matter what someone’s doing, if it’s their normal work or if it’s something for fun that we’re talking to them about, I always put it as their ministry because like you said, God has given us certain corners of his kingdom that we’re responsible for. So tell us a little bit about what you do with most of your day, and the company that you’ve begun—just a quick overview on that for our listeners.
Ben Bozzay: I founded a company called Tech Lockdown, and the whole purpose with this is—I would call it a ministry. When you visit the website, a lot of it is to appeal to a broader audience. I really want to find common ground with people that don’t have the same faith that I have. But it is absolutely mission focused and kingdom focused.
Tech Lockdown started out as me making a YouTube video during the Covid lockdowns when everybody started working remotely—and I’ve worked remotely for six years. I know the challenges of living alone, having no accountability, and being on the computer all the time. And I’m a software developer, so I always thought I would never—I guess the only way I could deal with the situation would be to go get an office somewhere and have more accountability. And the reason you need accountability when you’re around a computer all the time is that it’s basically a fire hose. You’re one click away from seeing pornography, stuff on Instagram that’s not good for you, wasting a lot of time watching worthless things. But the main thing that I’m interested in is solving the problem of little accountability around a computer and having endless access to really harmful content. And porn is the most harmful thing that you can look at. It’s not an innocent thing. It’s really, really dangerous. People don’t tend to take it very seriously until they’re affected, or they affect someone else with it.
So I started Tech Lockdown after I made this video, and I got overwhelmed with the amount of, usually, young men that were contacting me and saying like, “Hey, I’m really going down. Like, I’m watching stuff that I just didn’t used to be watching. And stuff that was interesting to me before is not as interesting. And I’m freaking out here. Like, I need to get some distance from this stuff.” So I started writing articles about my recommended approach. And I started spending a lot of time researching how do you configure devices and how do you set up effective blocking? And I found a setup that worked really well for me. I started talking about it and saying that I thought this stuff was really bad and harmful and that even though I’m really technical, I can implement stuff for myself, that is difficult for me to just turn off immediately. And as someone that’s technical, you might think like, okay, there’s no possible way I can block stuff because I’m so technical that I can figure out how to get around anything quickly. But that’s just not the case. You can set up some really effective methods of blocking, and then preventing yourself from compulsively getting around this stuff that you’ve set up to protect yourself.
So that’s what it started as—like information and helping people. And then from there, I started actually developing things and working more on building software to just help people simplify the whole setup process.
Eden: I think what I love about what you’re doing is it’s practical and helpful to people. Like it’s one thing to help change someone’s mind or help them understand that what they’re doing isn’t the best. But it’s another thing to actually provide them with resources to help them get out of something that’s destructive. So that is really an encouragement to us. We write a lot of content on what the Bible says about pornography, and is it really that bad because our society says it’s just like a permissible pastime. It’s something everybody does. And so we’re writing lots of content on that. But I love that you provide people with a resource to actually help them to remove it from their life and whatnot.
But I would love to talk with you about how you view pornography. So you had mentioned that it’s the most destructive thing you can look at. And I know that’s not necessarily the way that our culture views this. What do you have to say on what you think would be the harmful effects of that, or how we should see that? If I’m a person that’s like, “hey, I don’t think it’s that bad.” What would you say to me?
Ben Bozzay: It’s kind of a hard question because there’s so many ways that pornography is bad. It affects everybody in society—they just don’t have any tangible connection to it. They don’t directly see it.
The number one thing that porn does is it distances men from women from an intimacy perspective. The most common distressed person that contacts me is having issues with intimacy. And this is because what porn does, is it over—nobody starts off watching porn when they’re like 25, right? Around 2008, internet speeds became really fast. Everybody started getting iPhones. And what happened is that normal people who were non-technical suddenly had unfiltered access to the internet and could very quickly find stuff. You have a ton of people finding content that men are interested in particularly.
It starts from a young age, typically. I think around 13 or 14 is the average age that a child, usually a boy, starts watching pornography. There’s a million ways they can stumble upon it. But when you combine puberty with a smartphone, it is a deadly combination. And I personally was probably 14 when I first saw something, and it was traumatizing to me. I really didn’t know what I was looking at. But over time, you’re dealing with all these hormonal changes in your body. You’re looking at women and now you’ve got this thing within your grasp that can meet this need. And from a young age, you start associating that stuff with—when you’re really anxious or stressed or you’re dealing with emotions you don’t know how to process—you might cope using pornography because pornography basically causes this dopamine release in your brain. That makes you feel great, but it’s in your brain. This starts getting associated with all these things. And if you can imagine, if you go from the age of 14 to 24, you’ve had ten years of constant, consistent exposure to this stuff. So what starts off as something, you’re watching tame stuff, over time that starts to progress because you start to get bored of the same stuff. So if you think about the effects over a long period of time of constantly having access to this stuff, it develops into something that can get out of control.
There’s nothing positive about it. You might think about that the culture thinks it’s positive to be expressive and to go find things that make you feel great. But this does not have any positive effects. It ends up basically eroding you as a man over time. You start off and over time it becomes a much bigger problem. If you want to get married, you want to start a family, now you have this issue where if I want to have kids, how do I protect them from this stuff when I’m having the same issue?
This is my long-winded way of saying it’s a very destructive thing. I wish that society had more of an open mind about things that are destructive to the family, and companies like Apple and Google would develop things that made it easier to filter this stuff out, but it’s just not a priority for them. But that’s my mission is to give people the tools to deal with this. Start going for men who have been steeped in this for their whole lives and give them some tools to get some accountability and help. Obviously it doesn’t replace everything you need. You’re filling a God-shaped hole in your heart, and that is the truth. If you’re married, your wife is going to be confused about what’s going on. If you have kids, they need to be able to trust you to look out for them and protect them. So you have to be very uncompromising with this kind of stuff.
Eden: Amen to that. It sounds like, from what you’re saying, that this isn’t just something like, “oh, I play tennis occasionally, or I enjoy basketball, or I play video games.” This is something that seems, from what you’re saying, to enslave a person—the need for more severe content, the inability to get away from the stuff, the way it alters your brain, the way you think, the way you relate to other people. I think it’s a big issue, not just because it’s a pastime that seems like something that’s, well people shouldn’t be looking at that stuff. It’s more because it’s actually enslaving the person involved in it.
Ben Bozzay: Yeah. And one of the ways you know this is that whenever I talk to a guy who says it’s not a big deal, I challenge them to take a two week break from it and just come back and tell me, how easy was that for them. And a lot of times they’ll find that after about five days or a week, it starts to seem more like a need. And pornography is not a need. I think we have a need for intimacy, but we don’t have a need for pornography. If you find that there’s something in your life that you’ve done for ten years and you think you can just stop it within two weeks or something, I would challenge you to go try that out and just test your theory. And if you find that it starts to pop in your head as this is something I need, well, you may have an unhealthy relationship with it. It might start to have a tighter grip on you than you might think. (“For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19 ESV).
Eden: Ben, you’re also a believer. You talk to lots of unbelievers about this, practical reasons to get out of this and everything. As a Christian man, how does that inform your perspective on this as well?
Ben Bozzay: Well, the Bible has the best advice on this kind of thing. It has the most extreme advice, which is that the problem starts in your eyes (Matthew 6:22-23), what you allow to enter your brain, basically. I believe it’s in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew, Jesus says, “You’ve heard that committing adultery is bad. But I tell you that even if you look at a woman [with lust], you’re committing adultery with her in your heart” (Matthew 5:27-28). The really famous verse when it comes to this subject, also in Matthew, talks about if your eye causes you to sin, then to gouge it out because it’s better to be missing an eye or a hand than to spend eternity in hell (Matthew 5:29). And the reason this is such good advice is that it does start with what you allow yourself to look at. If you make a habit of objectifying women, you go to the gym and you spend a lot of time noticing women when you’re at the gym, you’re allowing with the way that you’re behaving to give the devil a foothold in your life. Because it starts with you deciding to look at something, but then it steamrolls from there. What started off with something like, I’m just looking at this thing, turns into a cycle.
So gouging your eye out when it comes to this kind of thing is, some people get rid of their internet connection. I’ve literally talked to guys that got rid of their smartphones. And if you’re a Christian man and you’ve got Instagram, and you start finding out that it’s really causing you to stumble because you’re opening yourself up to temptation, you should not have an Instagram account.
But if you’re not willing to make that kind of sacrifice, then you’re not really serious about pursuing the call that Jesus has for us. To be more like Jesus, you may have to give up having things in your environment that cause you to stumble. I’m not prideful enough to say, “hey, I just have the best willpower of all time. I’m the best Christian. I’m going to put myself in all these situations where I get to test that willpower and my ability to resist temptation.” That is a very bad idea (Matthew 6:13). I don’t think there’s anything in the Bible that says to go test your skills of dealing with temptation. I think it says, “flee from it” (1 Corinthians 6:18).
Eden: What you said is so applicable to so many things. Jesus died for us. He gave his life so that sin would not have power over us (Romans 6:6), so that we could be set free from the things that are destructive to us and that isolate us from God, ultimately, and from other people. There’s a quote, I think it’s by Charles Spurgeon, and it says, I’m going to butcher it, but it says something along the lines of, “[If Christ died for me…] I will not engage in what killed my best Friend.” And seeing sin as so serious that this is what put Jesus on the cross, and what caused the Son of God to put on our flesh. He came to rescue us from that. He came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). His response is we have to be serious about sin. It led our Savior to the cross and to deliver us from it. And so we don’t want to keep re-engaging (Hebrews 6:6). But his perspective, Jesus’ perspective, is if something causes you to sin, get rid of it. It’s not only applicable to pornography, but so many other things. Honestly, whatever temptation we’re faced with, are we that serious? That’s convicting.
I also would love to hear from you, let’s say there’s a guy watching this or a gal and they’re like, “I want to be done with this.” What hope would you give them?
Ben Bozzay: Well, I can tell people my personal experience, which was that I was exposed to this stuff when I was 14. I was very distressed by it. I grew up in the church. I always knew it was wrong. I did feel tremendous conviction about what I was doing. I went to someone in my church who I trusted, and I asked him like, “Hey, brother, I have to confide in you. I have this thing that’s really distressing to me. And that is devastating me. It’s devastating my conscience.” I’m playing in the worship band. I was playing bass guitar in the worship band. I confided in this guy, and I looked to him as a spiritual leader, and he kind of passed it off as it not being a big deal. He basically told me like, “Hey man, everyone struggles with this. It’s not that big of a deal.” And even at the time, in my own ignorance, I knew that that was not the response that I should have gotten. I didn’t feel like that was the right Christian approach. I knew it was a serious thing. I knew that I can’t be doing this kind of thing. I need some help from the outside to deal with this. I didn’t really feel like I got it.
And then even in college, when I was in these men’s groups, Bible study would turn into basically all guys there admitting that they were watching porn. And I had a little bit of a reaction to this. In college it’s a terrible environment for this stuff as well. But I started to see Christian men as, “Oh, no wonder they’re not out pursuing women. No wonder they can wait till they’re 30 to get married. They’re getting this need met.” My sisters can’t find anybody and they’re wondering why no guys are coming up and pursuing them. And it’s really hard to find someone. And I started to sort of—I’m ashamed of this—but I started to look at Christian men as, okay, these guys are losers. They’re going to be porn addicts when they’re 30. They’re not going to find anyone because they’re not working on themselves. They don’t have any sense of urgency to deal with this. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I started to go the other way where I was like, well, I don’t want to be a loser. I’m going to go pursue women and make sure I don’t become this guy when I’m 30. It’s the wrong way to go with it. You can go that direction, too. And you end up leaving a trail of destruction in your path, that direction too.
1. Stop Normalizing Porn
The thing I would tell guys is don’t take this lightly and don’t tell other people that it’s not a big deal. If someone comes up to you and says, “I’m struggling with porn addiction or I’m unhappy where I’m at,” don’t tell them like, “Hey, don’t worry everybody does this.” Stop normalizing it. That’s the first thing.
2. Believe You Can Have Victory
Don’t normalize it and don’t make it seem like it’s going to be something they struggle with their whole life, because that’s not the message of the gospel. We’re not supposed to say, “Thank God I found Jesus. I can’t wait to struggle with the same sin I’ve had for my entire life for the rest of my life.”
3. Seek Out Accountability
But at the same time, just because you’ve prayed a few times and you’re trying to work on this and you’re still struggling with it, doesn’t mean that God isn’t sovereign. So you can also go the other way, which is some people deconstruct their faith and they say, “well, I became a Christian. I’m still a porn addict. How did Jesus change me?”
I would say at a bare minimum, you should get some accountability in your life. You should have a brother that you can talk to and make a commitment. “I don’t want to be doing this anymore. Can you hold me accountable? Let me set up screen time on my phone and give you the PIN.” Start with that. Tell someone that you’re dealing with it.
4. Get Rid of Sources of Temptation
Then from there, start looking at things that you don’t want to have in your life that are causing you to slip up. And that might be getting rid of Instagram and Facebook. Start there and at least show that you’re serious about this. Have faith that you can get through it, but actually take action. Get the donuts off your kitchen counter, if you’re trying to lose weight. Stop putting donuts right in your field of view if you’re trying to resist it all the time. Get immediate temptation out of your environment so that you’re not always having to say no. And then from there, I’d say that’s a pretty good starting point.
5. Get Involved in Your Church Community
I think that there are pretty solid groups at church. I have not had the best experience finding them, at least when I was dealing with this, but I also didn’t really seek it out that intently. So I would say go look for groups that are focusing on this kind of thing.
6. Pursue an Authentic Relationship with Christ
If you’re Christian, you may want to do an audit of your day-to-day life and figure out how often are you actually praying and reading the Bible? Because I wasn’t in college, even when I was playing in the worship band. If I really, honestly looked at it, I was praying on Sunday and reading the Bible on Sunday. But I couldn’t have told you I had an authentic relationship with Christ.
Eden: Ben, thank you so much for sharing that and sharing your story. As I hear it, it’s so encouraging that your life is a testimony of the Lord’s work. Even as you were talking about the conviction and the guilt that you felt and how you were so unsettled, it reminded me, praise God for the Holy Spirit in our lives. And it says that the Spirit of God is the one that brings conviction (John 16:8). And that conviction is such a blessing and it’s there to rescue us. And I know in my own life, the Bible describes it as [God] having his hand upon us. And I have felt those times when the Lord’s heavy hand is just weighing on us (Psalm 32:4). And you’re like, until I get this right, I will not be okay. So I think of the faithfulness of the Holy Spirit in your life and it also gives me hope. We are hoping together—Bibles.net and Tech Lockdown— that other people will be delivered from this. But it’s such a wonderful thing to even see how God has worked in your own life. We’ll pray that he works in many others.
Ben Bozzay: Yeah, actually, now that you just mentioned that, it did make me think of one other thing I want to mention, which is that the devil uses shame, especially with Christians, he uses shame to keep you from reaching out. Shame and guilt are two different things. I don’t believe shame comes from the Holy Spirit, because shame is basically saying that you are bad and when you sin that it’s actually because you’re an awful person and that no one could love you and God doesn’t love you because you’re dirty and all these things. That’s shame. Guilt is I’ve done something wrong. I want to go to God and repent. And I want to turn from this. But our identity is in Christ. We cannot become perfect and go to him first. So when the devil comes to you and lies, you need to recognize when it’s shame and when it’s from the devil, and when it’s guilt and when you should be going to God in those situations. So that’s all I want to say.
Eden: I love that point. That’s so true. I don’t know if it was an article I read or something, but it talked about how repentance (which is what we do with our guilt). So if you’re guilty, I’ve done something wrong, the biblical answer to that is I repent. So I turn, I stop doing that thing and I turn to God instead. What I found in my own life, too, is that when we experience guilt and then we repent and we turn to the Lord, the Holy Spirit always, if he convicts us of a sin, he doesn’t just make us feel awful. I think that’s part of how you identify it as the devil’s work. So the devil’s called the accuser (Revelation 12:10). So if you just hear relentless accusation and are pummeled, that’s not the Holy Spirit. What the Holy Spirit always does is not only give you a conviction, but he gives you the power and the courage to change and to turn (2 Corinthians 7:11). Like you said, you were under this conviction but the Holy Spirit also gave you the courage to go talk to someone, or to seek counsel, or to open your Bible again. And so I think that’s another kindness of who the Holy Spirit is. That he doesn’t just say, “Hey, you’re wrong. Why can’t you be better?” He’s like, “This is wrong, and I’m going to help you change. Let’s start right now.”
Well, Ben, I think we’ll wrap up here. But before we go, I’d love to hear a resource that’s changed your life that you could share with our listeners. Something that has really changed the way you think and that could be beneficial for them.
Ben Bozzay: There’s a book called Surfing for God, which is a very good biblical perspective on this problem. Basically, just talking about how you’re filling a God-shaped hole. I’m sure many people have heard of this, but specifically when it comes to sexual sin, the advice in the book is very specific and actionable.
The advice I would give to someone who maybe is not religious and they can’t even read a book like this but maybe you want to know more about the issue of internet porn addiction, you should read the book called Your Brain on Porn by Gary Wilson. It’s a great explanation of the things going on in the brain and the overall problem. And it’s a secular book, but it’s extremely helpful to help you understand the overall problem, like the things going on in your brain and why sometimes you feel like it’s a need. And it can be helpful to deal with it.
Eden: Awesome. Ben, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for sharing your story and thank you for what you’re doing online. And we hope to be a support and an encouragement for you in that. So we appreciate your time.
Ben Bozzay: Yeah. Thanks so much, Eden.
Eden: Thank you so much for listening to our podcast today. If you enjoyed our conversation, I would encourage you to like or subscribe to our podcast so that you can hear the next conversation. And if something that you heard today spoke to your heart or got you thinking, I would encourage you to not let the day go by without talking to God about what’s on your mind. We believe that he loves you and that he’s pursuing you today out of that love.