In 2000, Covenant Eyes CEO Ronald DeHaas, who founded the pornography monitoring website “when he had two teenage sons and saw the gathering storm [of pornography] during the early days of the internet, told The Christian Post that churches ‘need to be talking about’ the epidemic of porn addiction among young Christians especially” The Christian Post reported (https://www.christianpost.com/news/covenant-eyes-ceo-calls-porn-demonic-urges-churches-to-do-more.html).
The Post noted that DeHaas also said “’there is no doubt in my mind’ that there is a demonic element to the pornography addiction that his company aims to remedy, and he believes that spiritual attacks have afflicted them amid their efforts.”
In a recent interview with Politico’s Dylon Jones, Samuel L. Perry, a sociologist of religion, and author of Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants, pointed out that in evangelical communities, pornography is called “a cancer.” Perry added “some of them would say it’s the most dangerous threat to the church in history, primarily because of the way it fosters addiction among young people” (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/07/stormy-daniels-donald-trump-evangelical-appeal-00156488). Last year, a 2022 interview with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian, resurfaced in which he acknowledged that he and his son use Covenant Eyes software to monitor each other’s porn-viewing habits.
What is Covenant Eyes?
At its website (https://www.covenanteyes.com/), Covenant Eyes declares: “Struggling to quit watching porn? YOU'RE NOT ALONE -- Join over 1.5 million people who've used Covenant Eyes to experience victory over porn.” Visitors can select from: “I’m a man who wants to quite porn,” “I’m a woman who wants to quit porn,” “I want to help a friend live porn-free,” “I want to help my spouse live porn-free,” or “I want to help my child live porn-free.”
Covenant Eyes is a major player in a very crowded porn accountability universe. It name comes from a verse in the Book of Job: “I have made a covenant with mine eyes. Why then should I think upon a maid?”
As Slate’s Kelsy Burke, author of The Pornography Wars reported in November of last year, there is an “industry of pornography addiction recovery – products and resources … that frame internet porn use as a dangerous affliction affecting mostly men, who need urgent support to overcome it” (https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/11/mike-johnson-republican-speaker-interview-covenant-eyes.html).
According to WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra, an investigative data journalist, “Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps that are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity. For a monthly fee, some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an ‘accountability partner,’ in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountability2You—violate its policies.”
[To more fully understand how Covenant Eyes’ monitoring works, see https://support.covenanteyes.com/hc/en-us/articles/11976472404763-How-does-monitoring-work#:~:text=The%20Covenant%20Eyes%20app%20captures,to%20protect%20your%20private%20information. ]
Mehrotra reported (https://www.wired.com/story/covenant-eyes-anti-porn-accountability-monitoring-apps/) that “The current iteration of the Covenant Eyes app was developed by Michael Holm, a former NSA mathematician who now serves as a data scientist for the company.” It “is allegedly capable of distinguishing between pornographic and non-pornographic images. … captur[ing] everything visible on a device’s screen, analyzing the images locally before slightly blurring them and sending them to a server to be saved. ‘Image-based pornography detection was a huge conceptual change for Covenant Eyes,’ Holm told The Christian Post, an evangelical Christian news outlet, in 2019. ‘While I didn’t yet know it, God had put me in that place at that time for a purpose higher than myself, just as I and others had desired and prayed for.’”
It addition to its app, Covenant Eyes organizes conferences “that are attended by thousands of people and dedicated to educating attendees about the dangers of pornography while pitching the company’s product as an urgent solution to what it characterizes as a growing moral crisis,” Mehrotra noted.
"’Someday I should write down all the times that we have had attacks here at Covenant Eyes," said Covenant Eyes CEO DeHaas. "They've been demonic attacks, they really have.’”
According to the Post, “DeHaas said the spiritual battles against his company have manifested in ‘disruption’ of the relationships among company executives, most of which he said have healed, though he also claimed they have experienced technological attacks.”
"’I don't know whether Satan has control over servers,’ he said. ‘I have trouble thinking that he does, but sometimes I think, 'Boy, there are just issues.'”
DeHaas is a busy man. Not only does he run Covenant Eyes spending time spotting Satan, but he is also chairman on the board of directors for an outfit called the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). According to Slate’s Kelsy Burke, NCOSE “sees pornography as one of many interconnected threats to a thriving society and to men in particular.” Its mission is “to crack down on the sex industry in its entirety.”