NORMAN, Okla. – For decades, the religious right has led the charge against pornography in the U.S., lobbying legislatures, publishing articles and preaching from the pulpit about porn’s many evils.

At the same time, it’s a well-established fact many churchgoers are themselves porn consumers, spending their Sunday mornings silently asking God’s forgiveness for how they just spent Saturday night — and possibly praying for some much-needed relief for a severely chaffed penis.

What could explain this dichotomy, this enduring split between Christian credo and licentious libido?

Some say the explanation is simple, bald-faced hypocrisy, but Samuel Perry, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma, dug into the data available through the Portraits of American Life Study (PALS) and discovered something so counterintuitive, so unexpected, it turns our entire understanding of the relationship between porn and religion on its collective head.

Among other things, Perry found “viewing pornography may lead to declines in some dimensions of religiosity,” but among heavy, habitual users of porn “extreme levels may actually stimulate, or at least be conducive to, greater religiosity.”

That’s right folks: Watching significant amounts of pornography actually makes a person more religious.

I’m sure a lot of you are shaking your heads in disbelief right about now, reflecting on your own porn viewing and how it hasn’t caused you to run off-register at a seminary. Why should you believe watching a lot of porn makes someone religious?

Perry conceded some other studies appear to contradict his claim, including one in which “a considerable percentage of students expressed that porn viewing had negatively affected their spiritual lives.”

“Among those who viewed pornography, 43 percent of males and 20 percent of females felt that viewing pornography worsened their relationship with God/Christ,” Pretty wrote. “Further, 20 percent of males and 9 percent of females reported that porn use contributed to their losing interest in spiritual things.”

The difference, of course, is that Perry didn’t stop digging at such surface-level, self-reported feelings. He dug into the PALS data to find “earlier porn viewing only predicted declines in other religiosity measures to a point.”

“Those who viewed pornography more often at Wave 1 reported lower levels of religious salience, religious service attendance, and prayer frequency at Wave 2 until the ‘two to three times a month’ mark,” Perry observed. “Beyond that frequency of pornography viewing, religiosity either leveled off or actually increased in a curvilinear fashion.”

While Perry offers some possible explanations — including the observation “those who feel helpless in their addiction often elicit supernatural help,” meaning the increased religiosity might be a function of trying to quit watching porn — none of the explanations are particularly satisfactory. Perry noted in order to determine whether porn is really a “secularizing agent” within American society, somebody probably will have to do more than plumb the PALS data.

As is often the case, though, the relevant academic in this tale of surprising studies is wrong.

We don’t need further study to figure out how it’s possible for porn to make people more religious. I have figured out the dilemma on my own, using the tried and true method of taking a large amount of peyote, spending a couple hours watching television, then briefly getting lost in the Sonoran Desert while being led by my spirit animal, which happened to be a very difficult to follow Cooper’s Hawk.

The spirits informed me, in great psychedelic detail, how the relationship between porn and Christianity works. The abridged version is when people watch porn, in addition to being exposed to a great deal of nudity, spurting bodily fluids and bad tattoos, they’re also subjected to the intense sounds of porn stars hollering in ecstasy, real or feigned.

As you know if you’ve watched much porn, it’s not uncommon for performers to invoke God as they do their work, emitting strings of “Oh God, yes” or “Jesus, that feels good,” or “Fuck yeah, God, my ass, fuck it feels good, Jesus, my ass, you like that tight little hole don’t you? Jesus, don’t stop, God yes, right there, right fucking there.”

At the same time, as you know if you watch cable television at odd hours (which you definitely would if you took as much peyote as I did in researching this story), a lot of lonely, sex-starved people out there also are ordering bottles of Peter Popoff’s Miracle Spring Water.

Obviously, it’s hard to find fault with a man of the cloth of Popoff’s stature giving away miracle water. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to get their hands on some of this liquid salvation for free?

Before you fill in that request form, though, think about this: Porn is making you more religious, meaning you’re more interested in things like miracle spring water, especially when they come from a guy with a made-for-porn name like “Peter Popoff.”

Are you starting to see the big picture now, even without a trusty Cooper’s Hawk to guide you?

Yes, folks that’s right: This entire porn thing is just a lure, an attempt to get you hooked on Peter Popoff’s Miracle Spring Water.

Mark my words: Someday, possibly years from now, the price of the miracle water is going to rise sharply, from $0 to something like $4.99.

Here’s the real catch though: Even as you think you’re buying a single vial of the stuff for five bucks, in reality you’ll be signing up for a one-week trial, after which his ministry will be sending you a larger bottle every month for $39.95 until you cancel. Plus, there will be a little pre-checked box at the bottom of the order form that reads: “Yes, I also want to try a three-day trial of Peter Popoff’s Miracle Wafers,” and if you don’t cancel within 48 hours of signing up, you’ll be hit for $40-worth of hopelessly bland Christian crackers, too.

Want further evidence of the connection between porn, religiosity, late night TV informercials and the ministry of Peter Popoff? Take a look at the packets the Miracle Spring Water comes in and then try telling me with a straight face it doesn’t look exactly like a tube of personal lubricant.

I rest my case.