Kanye West Is the Case Study No One Wants To Admit About Porn

It’s hard to watch a crash in slow motion, especially when you used to cheer for the driver.

That’s how it’s felt watching Kanye West over the past few years. He seemed like a man crawling his way toward truth, only to spiral back into a version of himself that now looks disturbingly like a parody.

When Kanye declared, “Jesus is King,” I believed him. Not just because I wanted to, although I did, but because there were moments of real spiritual clarity. Bravery, even. He denounced pornography and its grip on his life. He started Sunday Services. He ruffled the feathers of the secular elite, the Christian elite, and everyone in between. He was, for a moment, seemingly making his way toward the cross and trying to fight his demons, out loud, in public, in real time.

I didn’t roll my eyes. I didn’t say, “This won’t last.” I didn’t indulge in the reflexive cynicism that so many Christians, especially online, have made a hobby out of. I hoped it was real.

Because here was a man who’d been given the world, talent, money, and influence, and it was still clearly not enough. And for a while, he seemed to understand what had gone wrong. But then something shifted. And it’s been heartbreaking to watch what’s followed.

From Jesus Is King to “I Am the God of Me”

Kanye’s spiritual journey has always been dramatic. From The College Dropout to The Life of Pablo, you could trace a kind of moral whiplash. One moment irreverent and self-glorifying, the next broken and desperate for meaning. But after his brief, blazing season of Christian conviction, the pendulum didn’t just swing back. It shattered.

Conversion, as any honest Christian will tell you, doesn’t instantly erase the war inside a person. It illuminates it. But in Kanye’s case, the battle seems to have gone nuclear. And at some point, when the highs of spiritual awakening gave way to the daily grind of obedience, when God didn’t answer every prayer the way Kanye wanted, and when being a Christian started to feel less like a creative breakthrough and more like suffering, he turned back.

"I have my issues with Jesus," he stated on Big Boy's Neighborhood Podcast. "I said a lot of prayers, and I ain't seen Jesus show up, so I had to put my experience [with what I was dealing with] in my own hands. I had to do it myself...I am the God of me, and you can't tell me who I am." And he dove back into the very thing he once denounced, doubling down with less shame, more spectacle, and a truly disturbing willingness to let the darkness speak for him.

And his spiritual unraveling has been nothing short of devastating. His wife, Bianca Censori, is routinely paraded in public wearing little or nothing at all. He’s hinted at launching a porn studio. And on X, he’s begun posting increasingly explicit, disturbing content, including hardcore porn, which he shares with the same casualness most people reserve for selfies.

It’s jarring. It’s grotesque. And it’s trauma on display.

The “Cousins” Confession

In another horrifying turn of events, Kanye posted a song titled Cousins alongside a tweet that stunned even longtime followers. In it, he shared that, as a child, he had engaged in sexual activity with his male cousin. The incident, he said, was sparked by their discovery of pornographic magazines in his family’s home. They began reenacting what they saw, and the behavior continued until he was 14. Even more disturbing, Kanye added that this sexual relationship likely caused his cousin’s eventual life sentence for the murder of a pregnant woman.

We’ve been sold the lie that porn is harmless fun. A way to “meet a need.” A stress relief. But Kanye’s story is what happens when porn shapes your introduction to sex. It does not educate. It exploits. It does not empower. It corrupts. Millions of boys and men are trapped in the same cycle. They are exposed to porn too young, become addicted before adulthood, and live with a deep sense of shame they don’t know how to name or process. So they normalize it. They laugh it off. They over-sexualize everyone around them. And they pass the pain along.

This is what we are watching happen to Kanye. Porn didn’t just shape his desires. It helped define his identity. And now it’s defining his public life, too.

What Porn Really Does

We’ve been wildly misled about what pornography actually is and what it actually does. The culture markets it as a private indulgence, a stress reliever, even a harmless fantasy. But that narrative isn’t just dishonest, it’s dangerous.

Pornography is not neutral. It is a powerful neurochemical event designed to hijack the brain’s reward system. Repeated exposure leads to desensitization and the pursuit of increasingly extreme content in order to feel the same level of arousal. One study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions found that compulsive pornography use is strongly linked to elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. The brain isn’t built to withstand that kind of constant stimulation without consequences.

But it doesn’t stop at the neurological level. Porn corrodes relationships. It teaches people to view others as objects, not souls. It reduces intimacy to performance, love to power, sex to consumption. A large body of research shows that high pornography use is associated with reduced sexual satisfaction, decreased emotional intimacy, and higher rates of infidelity. One review from Utah State University Extension concluded that pornography undermines trust, increases relational instability, and damages commitment, even among couples who don’t initially think it will.

And it’s not just individual users who are harmed. Pornography has created a ripple effect. It fuels sex trafficking and exploitation. It sets unrealistic expectations about bodies, pleasure, and consent. It influences how children are introduced to sex, often before they have any emotional tools to understand what they’re seeing. It’s not just a personal vice. It’s a cultural epidemic.

Kanye is not an outlier. He’s just the most visible example of what happens when this addiction starts early, goes unhealed, and is eventually spiritualized or monetized. His unraveling is dramatic, but the core issue, being exposed to porn young, being shaped by it, and being unable to find freedom from it, is far more common than most people want to admit.

The Collapse We Shouldn’t Celebrate

Some people are taking Kanye’s collapse as proof that they were right all along. “See? He was never really saved.” But that’s the wrong takeaway. This isn’t a moment for theological "gotchas." It’s a moment for grief.

Behind the controversy, the chaos, and the clicks is a man who's deeply lost in the dark. Not because God abandoned him, but because he ultimately went to God to fix his life on his own terms. When it didn’t go his way, he walked away.

Kanye’s descent isn’t just about mental health or fame. It's also about spiritual warfare. Pornography wasn’t just a bad habit in his life. It was the open wound. The origin point of pain. The catalyst for years of confusion, shame, dysfunction, and abuse. And now, it’s not just destroying him in private. It’s destroying him in public.

So what do we do with that?

We stop pretending porn is anything less than a weapon. We stop packaging it as entertainment or stress relief. We tell the next generation that freedom is not indulging every desire, but in learning how to say no to the ones that will destroy you.

There’s a temptation to mock him now. Plenty of people who never took his Christian phase seriously are gloating. It’s easy to dismiss Kanye as a troll, mentally unstable, or just another celebrity spiraling out of control. He’s given his critics plenty of ammunition.

But what’s harder is telling the truth, that his story mirrors what countless others are living in silence, on a smaller and less visible scale. Alone. Ashamed. Unsure if healing is even possible. But it is.

Redemption is always on the table. And the God Kanye once sang about? He’s still there. He’s still listening. He still saves. Even now, for anyone willing to surrender the illusion that they were ever meant to save themselves.