Don't be shocked. Just look at the pedophile priest scandal. And though McNamara's destruction was limited to himself, as my grandmother used to say, the so-called righteous need forgiveness as much as if not more than your garden-variety sinners.
Now 52, McNamara serves as an assistant pastor at Crossbridge Community Church in Woolwich, Gloucester County, and runs a Christian addiction recovery group.
And as part of his recovery, he's written No More Hiding, No More Shame: Finding Freedom From Pornography Addiction, a memoir-testimonial that offers Bible-based advice on how to free oneself from addiction.
"I wrote the book as a confession and as a way to keep myself accountable," McNamara says. "I don't want to go back - and it's so easy to go back."
Not the only one
McNamara writes that he is part of a staggering 51 percent of pastors who have confessed to viewing porn on their church office computers, and among the 37 percent who say it's a current struggle, according to a Christianity Today leadership survey he cites in his book.
I remember a couple of years ago, when the Grammy-winning gospel artist Kirk Franklin told Oprah about his porn addiction. Franklin, who was adopted, said years of insecurity and low self-esteem caused him to turn to porn "as company."
McNamara writes about growing up in upstate New York - abandoned by his mother and physically, mentally, and sexually abused by his stepmother. Pornography became an escape, a comfort.
"All I needed were those paper ladies to give me that feeling again. . . ." he writes in his book. "The girls on the pages never hurt me. I felt safe with them."
Decades before personal computers ushered in a burgeoning cyber-porn industry and sexting, McNamara, at the time a husband with a toddler daughter and another on the way, was secretly buying girly magazines at a smut shop at 17th and Market, only blocks from the old Philadelphia College of Bible, where he went to school.
