5th August 2026

THE PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE.

Reading the paper the other day, these four words stood out for me – the journalist was writing about how sophisticated drone warfare had become, so accurate that beyond the old ability to target a tank or other armaments, it is now possible to target an individual soldier and graphically display the ensuing slaughter: the pornography of violence, and this at very modest cost but with video recording to demonstrate the success of the exercise. While the pope may talk about making AI safe, the commercial market, it argued, looks for profits in making it lethal. All this is consumed by millions of watchers who themselves become traumatised by the event.

Many other events bring violence nearer to home: are our great cities safe at night when even cars can be used as weapons of destruction, and guns and daggers all too speedily do their business, again swiftly portrayed to us in the pornography of violence?

Our television screens, too, bring violence into the home, in some adverts, and the invitation to view films most of us will choose not to watch, but there the images remain, still intruding on our domestic life and normalising our vision to contemplate sex and brutality, with an unavoidable impact on our children, surely a matter of critical concern.

Worse still inevitably this will be for some not an issue ‘out there’ but is in fact a vicious agency corroding family life at its point of intimacy so at its most evil it is also ‘in here’.

But in the midst of such a turbulent world as this, there is another story the church must tell – a story which, whilst embracing judicial violence, is a story of grace, love and salvation, all found in the life of Jesus and his death on Calvary’s hill.

John Briggs