THE HARLOT AND THE SCREEN
BABYLON THE GREAT, MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF EARTH’S ABOMINATIONS (Rev 17:5).
While the historical referent of this vision encompasses the totalizing systems of worldly power-Rome in John’s day, and every empire of idolatrous commerce since-the pornography industry stands as perhaps the most precise modern analogue to the Harlot’s economy. It traffics in the same merchandise: human bodies and human souls (Rev 18:13). It enchants by the same sorcery: pharmakeia, the drugging of the nations (Rev 18:23). And it will meet the same end: total, catastrophic, irreversible exposure and ruin.
This study traces three movements: first, the spiritual anatomy of Babylon as described in Revelation 17-18; second, the precise correspondence between Babylon’s character and the modern pornographic industry; and third—most terrifyingly—what the Day of the Lord means for those images that men now love, and how they will become objects of absolute horror.