with additional reporting by Tiffani Knowles

Exhausted from the proceedings of the day, he undoes his tie and cuff links, plops onto the queen-sized bed spread with crisp linen and a thin mint atop one pillow that connotes accommodations for the solitary, then reaches for the remote.

Flipping past programs of smiling families, alien invasions and perspiring preachers, he settles on the hotel’s in-room movie selections distinguished by three X’s and a sensual saxline.

His is a $30 per night habit to be paid for with a separate, untraceable credit card account on the night he departs unbeknownst to his wife, four children and 2,000-person Baptist congregation back in Memphis.

For many members of the Christian faith, pornography leaped off the steamy, graphic sex scene they saw on a cable TV show late one night. It jumped out of the web page or strange email message they stumbled upon accidentally. It lurked in the magazine that their childhood next-door neighbor or best friend hid under their bed. It was – like most habits – unplanned at the outset.

An unfortunate detail revealed by xxxchurch.com, a ministry that helps men fight porn addiction, is that hotel porn rentals increase considerably during ministry conventions. This means that some pastors are viewing hotel porn at a higher rate than the general public.

The world gasped when three years ago prominent gospel singer, Kirk Franklin, revealed on The Oprah Show that he had struggled with pornography addiction for the better part of his career in gospel music. At the sight of his first magazine at age 8, he became addicted. Unknown to many of the church officials and congregants, he battled porn and sexual promiscuity even while directing the church choir.

“I wished somebody would have been holding my little behind accountable years ago. But let me tell you what happens to the gifted. The gifted in the church slip right through. Because the gifted are able to naturally and emotionally control the atmosphere of the service,” said Franklin, who was named minister of music at age 11.

“No one asks the minister of music whether he's killing when everyone is crying and speaking in tongues. Nobody asks him, 'Are you going home tonight? How's your marriage? What's going on with you and your wife?' Nobody's holding the gifted accountable in the Body,” he said.

Like Franklin, this is the plight for all those in ownership of unbridled talent, those in position of political authority, and especially those who are role models within a faith community, etc. They go unchecked.

And, this in turn fuels the addict’s habit: both that he is unmonitored and the mere implausibility of his crime.

Daniel Collins (whose name has been changed to protect his identity), 25, developed a fixation with pornography in his mid-teens that grew gradually from the first day his friend showed him a porn website. In a matter of months, he began to fantasize every day about the pornographic images he saw on the Internet and surfed for more and more. The already shy guy started limiting his contact with people as his thirst for porn detracted from activities he used to like doing like talking on the phone with friends and being involved with youth group.

"I was young and I was really naive," Daniel said. "I didn't know it would have the effect on me that it did."

What Daniel didn't know is that he, like thousands of young men and a number of young women as well, had become addicted to pornography while connecting the scenes he looked at to fantasies that grew increasingly more and more explicit.

"I started being late with my homework and not having time to study. It began to consume my time," Daniel said.

Porn: A Billion Dollar Game

Pornography as a business brings multi-billion dollar profits to people who are paid to either perform, film, photograph, write about, broadcast or sell sexual acts for the intended purpose of arousing consumers.

Producers of pornography themselves admit they are in the business to make money.

"In New York, if you don’t hustle to stay above water, you’ll drown. I’ve got to make that money," Flamez, a New York pornography producer, said.

Flamez also said the money is attractive to people, especially women who perform in pornographic films or pose for pictures in magazines.

“Pay scale really ranges in this business. I can pay a girl $1,500 per session,” Flamez said. You rent a hotel room and you say, “Look, this is the role you are going to play.”

There are currently over 300,000 pornographic websites on the Internet with more and more springing up every day. And according to a survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice of approximately 1,500 10 to 17 year olds, one out of every four youths reported some unwanted exposure to sexual material over the Internet.

"Some people can see it and just turn away and leave it alone, but others for some reason keep going and get hooked," said Robert Peters, president of the media watchdog group Morality in Media.

Peters says pornography addicts can have a problem for years without ever knowing that it has escalated beyond mere curiosity.

"At the bare minimum, it distorts a man's view of sexual relationships," Peters said.

For Daniel, the images he watched rapidly began to change his mindset about relationships and the way he viewed women.

"In all honesty, my mentality wasn't the same. Before, I was able to talk to a woman and have a mature conversation with her without thinking about anything else. Afterward, all of a sudden I was like, “look at that girl over there, or ‘wow,’ that girl looks good in those shorts.” I couldn't keep my thoughts pure anymore," he said.

Daniel who was a Christian at the start of his addiction said he always knew what he was doing was not pleasing God, but was able to rationalize the addiction away and kept viewing pornographic sites for over four years.

And, this rationale is one that liberally feeds individuals in America whom are characterized by “high morals” and “old-fashioned family values.”

Red (Light) States

According to this new study by Harvard University, the states with the highest concentrations of politically conservative and traditionally religious people are also the top 10 porn-buying states in the nation. For example, in typical red states like Utah, Alaska, Mississippi, Florida and West Virginia, where most people oppose gay marriage and abortion, there exists the highest rate of adult website subscriptions in the nation.

“I think that many people of faith project a certain façade and when they’re behind their closed doors, they unleash,” said Vannara Ung, 28, who attends Morningside Church in New York City. “They think, “hey, no one’s watching!”

Here are some of the report’s findings:

1. In regions where more people report regularly attending religious services, overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere.

2. Subscriptions are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative legislation on sexuality (regression results on file with the author). In the 27 states where “defense of marriage” amendments have been adopted (making same-sex marriage, and/or civil unions unconstitutional), subscriptions to this adult entertainment service are weakly more prevalent than in other states ( p 0.096). In such states, there were 0.2 more subscribers to this adult web site per thousand broadband households, 11 percent more than in other states.

3. In states where more people agree that “Even today miracles are performed by the power of God” and “I never doubt the existence of God,” there are more subscriptions to this service.

4. Subscriptions are also more prevalent in states where more people agree that “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage” and “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”

5. Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in “blue” states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the “red” states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.

An article about the study on the NewScientist Web site also makes this observation:

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

Porn Leads to Crime

Many like Franklin and the leaders of xxxchurch.com use their struggle to help others overcome addictions to pornography. However, on the other end of the spectrum, pornography often fuels the obsessions of people who eventually stop resisting the urge to act out their fantasies and become sexual predators.

This is the case for many Catholic priests.

And some, like Ted Bundy, become killers.

Morality in Media interviewed a retired NYPD police lieutenant who wrote a book to help police officers investigate sex-related crimes. In his book, Vernon Gerberth described the link between many of the cases he investigated and pornography.

In one case, Gerberth wrote about finding the diary of a serial rapist. In his journal, the rapist consistently wrote about acting out the scenarios depicted in sexual bondage and discipline magazines he purchased.

While building a case against a serial killer that had been murdering prostitutes, Gerberth wrote that detectives went to the suspect's home and found a number of pornographic videos.

"The videotapes contained a number of scenes that were similar to what the offender was doing to his victims," Gerberth wrote.

News networks and newspapers have often also chronicled the link between perpetrators of violent sex crimes and pornography.

According to a study by Morality in Media, a Connecticut judge who sentenced a man to 20 years in prison in 1991 said the man's whole life was dominated by pornographic fantasies that he eventually tried to act upon. The man tried to rape a Wesleyan student and attacked her housemate.

In 1993, The Miami Herald reported the account of a then 22-year-old woman who said a man raped her and held her prisoner for 18 days. As part of her ordeal, the woman said, the man asked her to re-enact sex acts directly from pornographic magazines.

Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family interviewed Ted Bundy, the infamous serial killer, on January 23, 1989, one day before the serial killer was executed in Florida.

Bundy told Dobson he didn't blame pornography for his killing sprees. Pornography and alcohol, Bundy said, just killed his inhibitions - the forces inside him that were telling him that the violent criminal behavior he was contemplating was wrong. Bundy told Dobson he thought the same was true of many sex offenders.

"Listen. I'm no social scientist, and I haven't done a survey," he told Dobson. "But I've lived in prison for a long time now. And I've met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence like me. And without exception, every one of them was deeply involved with pornography - without exception, without exception - deeply influenced and consumed by an addiction to pornography."