Should Pornography Be Completely Banned?

A fifty year view of the topic and the factors that impact public opinion

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

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One of the happenings of the 2024 election cycle, besides all the drama among the major party candidates for President, is the introduction of a group called Project 2025.

The landing page of their website states:

It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.

One of the publications put together by this group is called, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” It’s a 922-page PDF that lays out how the United States should be governed in the years to come. It includes 30 chapters that focus on nearly every major federal agency including the Federal Election Commission, the Department of Agriculture, and the Export-Import Bank.

The foreword (A Promise to America), written by Kevin D. Roberts, contains a section about pornography. Roberts writes that,

(Pornography) has no claim to First Amendment protections. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed.

As one can guess, that has met with some swift backlash, especially among those on the left side of the political spectrum.

The General Social Survey has been asking about the legality of pornography in nearly every survey they have conducted since 1973. The question is set up this way: Which of these statements comes closest to your feelings about pornography laws?

1. There should be laws against the distribution of pornography, whatever the age.

2. There should be laws against the distribution of pornography to persons under 18

3. There should be no laws forbidding the distribution of pornography

Here’s how responses to that question have changed in the last five decades.

The share of Americans who want no restrictions on porn has never been that high. It was 10% of the sample back in the early 1970s and today it’s dropped to a very small fraction - just 4% of those who took the survey in 2022. So, there’s little appetite for a laissez-faire approach to pornography.

Where the real movement has occurred is among the other two response options. In 1973, about half of the sample wanted a ban on the sale of pornography to minors, while 42% favored a total ban on pornography. Over time those two lines have diverged significantly. In 2022, about two-thirds of the sample favored a ban on selling pornography to minors and just 28% were in favor of a total ban for every age group. It seems that the public has increasingly moved away from the two options on the end of the scale and shifted toward a moderate position.

What about gender? That seems like a factor that could skew views of pornography.

Women have always been more supportive of a total ban on pornography compared to men. In the 1970s, the gap was about a dozen points. It actually widened a bit from that point forward. Around 2000, women were nearly twenty points more likely to favor a ban compared to men. But it’s narrowed in the last few years and has returned to a difference of 12-14 points. But, for both men and women, the appetite for a complete ban is clearly the lowest it’s been. I also want to point to the fact that in 1973, about 35% of men favored a ban. It’s the same share of women in 2022.

There has been a big jump in support for a ban on selling pornography to those under the age of 18. About 45% of women in favor in 1973, today it’s at least 60%. For men in 1973, about 53% were in favor and that’s risen to nearly three quarters in the last couple of years. There’s not a big gender gap when it comes to no restrictions on porn - men are more supportive, but it’s only by 2-3 points in most years.

What about religious groups?

The top left graph visualizes the trend for evangelical Protestants. For decades, a majority of evangelicals favored a total ban on pornography. That changed in just the last five years. Now the share of evangelicals who only favor a ban on sales to minors is slightly higher than those who support a complete ban. It’s important to point out that there’s not a single religious tradition where a majority of respondents favor a total ban now.

The trend lines for the other groups in this graph are pretty much the same. The difference in the share who favored a total ban vs only a ban on minors was pretty small in the 1970s and it has only widened in the last fifty years. Now, about 65% of mainline Protestants support a ban on sales to minors. It’s a pretty similar result for Catholics, as well.

Those with no religious affiliation are worth reflecting on just a bit. In the 1970s, this group was incredibly small but a surprising number believed that there should be no restrictions on pornography sales. That quickly dropped, however. By 2000, about 10% of the nones wanted no restrictions on porn. At the same time, the share of the non-religious who want a complete ban is also incredibly small - just 10% in 2022. That’s the lowest of any religious group that I analyzed.

That got me thinking - I wonder how much age plays a role in this and if the big shifts that are occurring in the first graph are just a product of generational replacement and not people actually changing their views of the issue. The only way to test that in the GSS is to do a birth cohort analysis. I divided the sample into five year birth windows and tracked their responses to this question over time.

There’s a fair amount of movement across the top row - that’s people born in the 1940s and 1950s. As they aged, the share who wanted a total ban on porn shot up, but almost all the movement happened by the year 2000. Among the oldest adults in the United States today, their views of pornography hasn’t really changed in the last two decades - a significant majority only favor a ban on pornography sales to minors.

The second row of birth cohorts shows a lot of stability really. A ban on sales to minors was embraced by significant majorities of each cohort. In many cases that was at least two-thirds of each group. The trend lines vacillate a bit, but they tend to end up in the same place that they started (or very close to it).

The last set of cohorts is hard to interpret because many of them haven’t aged through the life course, yet. But I think that they look a lot like those in the second row. A huge majority favor the ban on porn sales to minors. It doesn’t seem like there’s a discernible trend in either direction beyond that. Thus, the switch in opinion in the aggregate does seem to be drive primarily by generational replacement - younger folks tend to take less of a hard line against porn, with very few favoring a ban.

What factors tend to matter the most when they are thrown together in a regression model, though? The dependent variable (what we are trying to predict) is the likelihood of an individual supporting a total ban on pornography. I put a bunch of variables into the model including demographics, partisanship, religious attendance and religious tradition. Any time the purple lines intersect with zero, that variable was not predictive of more or less support for a ban.

There are a total of three factors that make someone less supportive of a ban on pornography: being male, having a higher level of education, and being white. No other variables in this dataset were statistically significant and signed in the negative direction.

There were a handful that did predict a greater likelihood of favoring a ban on porn. They are: age, being a Republican, attending religious services at a greater frequency, and being an evangelical Protestant. I think that most of us could have hypothesized before this model that those would be the most likely factors to drive support for a porn ban. However, it’s worth pointing out that none of those were predictive than the others. Statistically, their magnitude was the same.

One quick thing that is easy to miss in these results - when it come to religious tradition the reference category were those with no religious affiliation. There were only two groups that were more likely to favor a ban than the nones - evangelicals and those of ‘other faith traditions.’ For mainline Protestants, Black Protestants, and Catholics, they were no more (or less) likely to favor a ban on porn than the non-religious.

This is a situation in which I think it’s clear that polarization has not taken hold. The share of Americans who chose the middle of the road option is higher today than it’s ever been. The percentage of people who want a total ban is about 28% now, down from 42% five decades ago.

Given the political tumult of even just the last 3 weeks, it is nearly impossible to predict the state of national politics even one month from now. I think it’s fair to say, though, that Project 2025’s position on pornography may be a bridge too far for a majority of Americans, and perhaps even some Evangelicals and Republicans.

Code for this post can be found here.