ANTI-PORN CRUSADERS FIGHTING WITH PRAYER, SYMPATHY.

Byline: BRAD A. GREENBERG

Staff Writer

LAS VEGAS -- During the past few years, Craig Gross and Ron Jeremy have grown close and, despite diametrical career choices, have come to respect and appreciate each other.

Gross is an ordained minister who leads the anti-porn crusade XXXChurch.com and considers masturbation a sin. Jeremy is a secular Jew who has performed in 1,900 porn flicks.

"I have nothing against Ron Jeremy," Gross said as the two men drew a crowd while chatting at the Adult Entertainment Expo here earlier this year, singing "We Are the World." "I love this guy. I love hanging out with him."

How the war on porn has changed. While some still rail against the industry, others like Gross try to reach out to it and change the lives of those who earn their living in it, or those who have been touched by it.

Members of a Chatsworth church pray for the end of pornography and the healing of those it has harmed. Christian men gather to confess their Internet-fueled addiction. Rehab centers in Colorado and Kentucky provide short-term and months-long escapes more commonly used to treat drug abuse.

In the adult-entertainment industry, it seems every dark corner has a ministry. The former strippers of JC's Girls. Hookers For Jesus. And XXXChurch, the Web's "#1 Christian porn site."

XXXChurch, which runs a Web site where people confess their struggles and offers free anti-porn software, has made the biggest splash, using gimmicks at adult conventions -- like Wally the Wiener, a 25-foot inflatable penis -- to lure eyes, and hopefully minds, away from depictions of depravity.

The message is simple: Porn separates husbands and wives, defiles teenagers' minds and breeds lies. A tool of the devil, it can only be cured by God.

"People are blind to the consequences of this. They don't realize the problems this will cause down the line," Gross says, handing out Bibles at the Vegas convention. "This is a lie. This is not reality. Girls aren't like this."

'Not harmless fun'

In three decades, pornography has moved from a red-light industry reliant on seedy theaters and throw-away magazines to a multibillion-dollar enterprise piped into millions of American homes.

"I don't think America is 100 percent ready for porn. We're still a really puritanical society," actress Tera Patrick said. "But the business itself has definitely gotten a lot more popular in the five years I've been in it."

The daughter of an English-Jewish father and a Thai mother, the 5-foot-9 star with the DD chest and long black hair looks like a beauty queen. With her actor-director husband Evan Seinfeld, she owns the production company Teravision and is one of several stars credited with making the business mainstream. Last year, Patrick became the first porn star to grace the cover of FHM and also wrote a porn how-to column for the men's magazine.

But before there was Teravision, there was a cultural crisis, culminating in the mid-1980s with the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, which had been ordered by President Ronald Reagan.

"Under other circumstances," said commission member James C. Dobson, the conservative Christian who founded Focus on the Family, "one would not willingly devote a year of his life to depictions of rape, incest, masturbation, mutilation, defecation, urination, child molestation and sadomasochistic activity."

The 1,960-page report was rife with warnings about the negative social effects of pornography and allegations of adult-film stars being raped, kidnapped and tortured by employers.

But government pressure on the industry plunged when President Bill Clinton entered office in 1993, with then-Attorney General Janet Reno only concerned with child exploitation. Since then, the Department of Justice has struggled to confront Internet pornography, which has made it impossible for individual communities to keep out products they deem obscene.

"No one is seriously advocating the legalization of cocaine or heroin, but somehow the pornography industry has convinced a large segment of the population that viewing porn is not just harmless fun, but is also a fundamental right," Daniel Weiss, senior analyst for media and sexuality at Focus on the Family, said at a 2005 summit.

"By not calling pornography what it is -- highly addictive and destructive material -- we are heading for troubled times."

Porn's pull

In six years of marriage, Kyle Paulson had kept his promise to abstain from watching pictures of naked women.

But work had been stressful and, over the course of 10 days, he surreptitiously visited pornographic Web sites.

"It ripped her heart out," Paulson, 41, of Westlake Village said of his wife's discovery five years ago.

He responded by installing filters on his computer and asking a friend to hold him accountable. Finally, Paulson confessed his struggles to the men at his church and started a Bible study for others like him.

"I didn't feel like I was addicted," he said. "But I was afraid because it had such a powerful pull on me."

Last summer, a poll by the online Christian marketplace ChristiaNet found that 50 percent of Christian men and 20 percent of Christian women are "addicted" to pornography. Christian ministers speak vaguely of surveys indicating 70 percent of men look at porn monthly.

But Nielsen/NetRatings detected only 42 million unique American visits to adult sites in November -- at most 14 percent of Americans.

XXXChurch claims worldwide porn sales top $70 billion, more than the gross domestic product of all but 54 nations. But Forbes magazine reported in 2001 that adult-entertainment industry annual revenues exceed no more than $4 billion, while other analysts have pegged it as an $11 billion or $12 billion business.

"Whether it is Christians talking about pornography or the media talking about pornography, the statistics talking about pornography consumption are the least reliable I have ever seen," Weiss said.

Anecdotally, though, anti-porn crusaders tell countless stories of men leading secret lives, of husbands learning to lie to their wives, of adults sacrificing their families to self-gratify.

"Pornography is intense pleasure, and when a man becomes addicted to intense pleasure, nothing else will satisfy him," said Steve Gallagher, president of Pure Life Ministries, a so-called sexual rehabilitation center in Kentucky.

"So what happens over time is he just becomes hollowed out as a person and he loses interest in interaction with other people -- wife, kids.

"He just becomes a zombie."

Critics warn that porn glorifies extramarital sex, can be violent and can appeal to fetishes, to things God didn't design us to enjoy.

And it can be deadly, they say.

"Pornography, especially on the Internet, has become the crack cocaine of sexual addiction," said Ted Roberts, an Oregon pastor and author of "Pure Desire: Helping People Break Free From Sexual Struggles."

"Internet pornography takes someone from zero to full-blown addiction in two months.

"The implications are the disintegration of family, the loss of financial resources and, for a Christian man, it is the absolute craziness of him believing one thing and doing something else. It sets up a wrenching situation in the man's spiritual life."

At Pure Life in Kentucky, self-enacted stays last six to nine months for men who feel enslaved by homosexual experiences, prostitute liaisons and pornography.

'A bondage to sin'

"It is a bondage to sin," Gallagher said. "If it is a bondage to sin, only God has the power to break that bondage and replace that empty spot in their hearts. That really is what happens here. In simple terms: Their love for pornography and sex diminishes and their love for God increases."

On a frigid Sunday morning in Chatsworth, two hours before the first service at The Church at Rocky Peak, a small group of prayer warriors treks to the property's apex.

This is a common occurrence, repeated the second Sunday of each month since January 2003. It began after Neil Johnson, the church's director of men's ministries, returned from a mission trip to Peru, where, he said, 700 people accepted Jesus as their savior.

Johnson was told that before his mission team's arrival, a group of women hiked to the mountains to pray for a spiritual awakening. That explanation made sense. In the Bible, the children of Israel often communicated with God from the mountaintops.

Why not, Johnson thought, do the same in a pocket of Los Angeles synonymous with sex?

With a panoramic view of the San Fernando Valley, the group members face the sun as it rises and sing praises to God, praying for their church, for spiritual revival below and for the end of pornography.

"Lord, we pray right now that we will be able to reach out to people in the adult(-entertainment) industry, that we will be able to love them, that we will tell them we love them but not what they do," Johnson's wife, Lynn, says.

"Lord, we pray right now for the marriages that have been pulled apart by pornography. Lord, we pray for restoration, we pray for healing."

'Are you a sinner?'

At the four-day Adult Expo in Las Vegas, Gross and his XXXChurch carried the porn-ministry baton.

XXXChurch's booth was on the main floor, next to Gourmet Videos' 10-foot-wide poster board featuring 120 movie covers, from "Tons of Fun" to "Over 50."

Twenty feet away, fans posed with a 6-foot-1 transvestite in fishnet stockings, a pink bikini and 6-inch stilettos.

Nearby, actress Penny Flame, wearing a cut shirt that said "Naughty American" and tiny red boy shorts, collected money for breast cancer awareness by selling foam breasts signed by her, Patrick and other adult entertainers.

"Are you a sinner? Do you need redemption?" Flame bellowed through a sheaf of papers rolled into a bullhorn. "For $5, you can be redeemed."

Fans surveyed the countless booths hawking niche films, erotic toys and photos with their favorite porn stars. Confusion was common when they passed XXXChurch and were handed the word of God.

The pocket-size Bible, written in contemporary language, is yellow and fuchsia with three stars, bubble lettering that states "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" and a sketched face that, with its aviator sunglasses, pencil-thin mustache and shaggy hair, most mistake for porn legend John Holmes.

"That might go against what you've heard, but it's true," the back of the Bible states. "Jesus loves porn stars as much as he loves pastors, soccer moms, liars, thieves and prostitutes. We're all the same to Jesus. We're all just people who need God to save us from the mess we're in and lead us to a better way."

Gross is an odd breed -- too much of a fundamentalist for liberal Christians and too provocative for theological conservatives. He sees himself as a minister cut from the same cloth as Jesus, someone unafraid to reach down into the gutter.

At a convention celebrating sin, porn patrons and performers not only accept the Bibles handed to them but ask for extra copies.

"What have we here?" asked Adam Gilad, a fan from L.A.

"This is the real New Testament," J.R. Mahon, a XXXChurch pastor, responded.

"This is how you reach out?" Gilad asked.

"We're not about shutting down the industry. We're about helping people," said Mahon.

"So you're real Christians? They're real Christians," Gilad said in a gee-whiz way.

He stuffed the Bible in his bag of adult toys and walked away.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Neil Johnson of Tarzana holds his hands out during a song while attending a service near The Church at Rocky Peak, where members pray for the end of pornography.

Alex Collins/Special to the Daily News

(2 -- 3 -- color) Church members, above, pray together for the eradication of the porn industry near The Church at Rocky Peak in Chatsworth. At left, XXXChurch.com founder Craig Gross talks to nude model Sativa Verte as he hands out Bibles at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.

Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer