“Imagine that you have a teenage daughter,” said Ron DeHaas, president of the anti-porn software company Covenant Eyes, in 2011. You go to your imaginary daughter’s bedroom, DeHaas went on, “and to your horror what you find is your daughter is posing in front of her computer nude from the waist up, camera on.” DeHaas was speaking at a summit promoted by his company for “religious leaders” to discuss “porn and sex trafficking”—two topics inextricably linked in the mind of a great many on the Christian right. “How on earth did you get to this site?” DeHaas imagined parents yelling. “We have a filter on our computer!” DeHaas then claimed that “22 percent” of teen girls “practice sexting” and that “the worst of it all” was “my daughter thinks that it’s OK.”
This was DeHaas’s pitch for Covenant Eyes, the internet monitoring app also promoted by Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, as a tool for holding his son “accountable” for watching porn by sending him screenshots of his son’s online activity—and vice versa.
When a video of Johnson promoting Covenant Eyes in 2022 was published by the social media account Receipt Maven last week, the scrutiny it drew to Johnson largely focused on the spectacle of Johnson and his son allegedly keeping tabs on one another’s porn habits. But the 2022 church appearance wasn’t even the first time Johnson hawked the app. A few days after the 2020 election, Johnson made a post on his official Facebook campaign account presenting Covenant Eyes as “a great way for all of us parents to help guard the hearts of our teenagers,” along with an affiliate link for a 14-day free trial. “In our house, when you get a smartphone, it comes with this requirement,” Johnson added.
This may sound creepy. But Johnson was just promoting Covenant Eyes exactly as it has been touted within Christian evangelical spaces for two decades: a vehicle for promoting evangelical Christian sexual norms, and for recruiting people to that cause.
It’s not surprising that Johnson said he first heard of Covenant Eyes at a Promise Keepers conference. The Promise Keepers were once the dominant face of what historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez has described as “a militant ideal of white Christian manhood,” synonymous in the 1990s with Christian purity culture. Long before I knew who Mike Johnson was, I had heard of Covenant Eyes being promoted in the 2000s as a way to end sex trafficking—another evangelical Christian cause that has flown relatively under the radar of political reporting but has proven remarkably effective at dragging sexual politics to the right.
The most notable of those anti-trafficking groups pitching Covenant Eyes was Shared Hope International, founded by Linda Smith, who served in Congress from 1995 to 1999. Elected on a platform devoted to opposing abortion and gay and lesbian rights, Smith spent her post-Congress time promoting herself as a leader in the movement against “sex trafficking.” Smith was the keynote speaker at the same 2011 porn and sex trafficking summit where DeHaas asked the audience to imagine their teen daughter naked on the internet, delivering melodramatic testimony about an American man “buying a girl” in an undercover video, and the girl “looked like my granddaughter.” Shared Hope, like other evangelical Christian sex trafficking groups, also mobilized against porn as something that they said drove “demand” for sex trafficking. Covenant Eyes took up this messaging; in 2014, they published a guide they called Stop the Demand: The Role of Porn in Sex Trafficking. Announcing the guide, DeHaas wrote, “If child prostitution is the main act, porn is the dress rehearsal.” On the Covenant Eyes blog, posts about purported “connections” between porn and sex trafficking still feature prominently, claiming to reveal “how children are trafficked through social media” or declaring that “the trafficking industry is fueled by porn.” Anti–sex trafficking groups began promoting Covenant Eyes to their supporters, pitching it as something concrete they could do to fight trafficking—to “take an active stance against the demand,” to “lead by example” by installing Covenant Eyes, as one anti–sex trafficking men’s group put it.
The “end demand” rhetoric fit perfectly alongside DeHaas’s ongoing promotion of Covenant Eyes as an “accountability” tool to halt porn use. Covenant Eyes was software that churches or employers could install on all work devices, he has offered in his pitch, to ensure that employees obey a church’s policies prohibiting viewing “unacceptable” content. Rather than merely filtering content a church or employer wants banned, the app captures at least one screenshot per minute, blurs them, and stores all of them on a server. From there, they can be accessed by the users listed as “accountability partners,” who are also periodically prompted with alerts to review their “partner’s” activity. “I wouldn’t quite call it spyware,” one member of an evangelical Southern Baptist church called Gracepoint, who was asked to use Covenant Eyes, told Wired. “It’s more like ‘shameware,’ and it’s just another way the church controls you.”
Covenant Eyes doesn’t merely capture screenshots of whatever it is you might think would be categorized as pornography. Even Mike Johnson joked that his son’s Covenant Eyes report showed a “clean bill of health,” despite one screenshot it flagged as problematic, which the speaker reviewed and said was just a picture of women talking. But the experience of one Indiana family using the software was much more frightening: Covenant Eyes captured screenshots of everything they viewed on their devices, from “images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law,” according to an investigation from Wired earlier this year. They learned this after one family member was ordered to install the software by his probation officers, who served as the “accountability partner.” While Covenant Eyes’ terms of service forbid this kind of use in a “premediated legal setting,” Wired’s reporting showed that courts in at least five states were using Covenant Eyes in just this way, monitoring people awaiting trial or on parole.
All of which is to say: If you think Mike Johnson’s use of Covenant Eyes is merely creepy, consider how it’s been used against people and how it has been embraced by churches and by law enforcement. Johnson’s odd father-son relationship may, in the end, be the least creepy thing about this app he endorses.
