CV NEWS FEED // In an exclusive CatholicVote interview held at the National Eucharistic Conference in Indianapolis, the chief operating officer of Road to Purity explained how the ministry offers hope and healing for those suffering with sex addictions.
David Aungst has worked with Road to Purity since his father, Dann Aungst, founded the ministry in 2016. David handles media, technical needs, communications, and fundraising.
Note: this interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Could you give some background on Road to Purity and what the goal of the ministry is?
Road to Purity was started by my dad about eight years ago. He is a recovering sex addict and has a very intense story. The gist of it that I’ll give is that he said that at his worst, he was almost about to start selling drugs to pay for prostitutes. He has completely come out of that, full recovery, and has basically dedicated his life through God’s calling to helping other men and women with this issue. And so [Road to Purity] has been going on for about eight years.
We like to say now that we’re trying to build an Empire of Purity and that basically means involving everybody to some degree, because part of our ministry also involves combating sex trafficking and stopping the demand for that. But the crux of it is that the issue of pornography, sexual addiction, or even just porn habits are typically something deeper. It’s not as simple as a lot of people think it is. It’s not just any desires. There’s woundedness and pain and just like experience that causes people to go that direction and to seek that out and partly why it’s so common.
Our ministry really is about finding healing more than more than sexual Purity and through that comes to freedom to break the addiction. We do that in three main pillars: awareness, recovery, and formation.
Awareness is pretty straightforward. We try and spread awareness about the harms and dangers of the pornography and the fuel that it is for human trafficking.
Recovery is all our programs dedicated to individuals who are really struggling, and we have incredibly well-built in-depth programs to help anybody struggling with any sexual impurity. It helps you figure out how to become stable, then dig deep and find the root of the problem, and then find healing.
Our third pillar is formation. We work on forming authoritative figures like priests, parents, therapists.
We’ve had people who have gone through the program who have told us that it basically changed who they were, and their porn addiction fell away on its own. Just to give an idea of the fact that it’s about more than just purity.
How did you start working with the ministry?
I mean, I’ve been there since the beginning. I’m very blessed that my dad has been very vocal and very helpful to me when I was younger. He started getting a lot of very clear vocational calls in this direction. He was originally called to write just a book and that took him a long time. It was very hard for him. He’s not really a good reader, doesn’t like to write, but he shared his story of being addicted for 30 years and how he found recovery. He is still married to my mom by the grace of God, for 35 years now.
I was there for that when that was a big thing for him and it was really beautiful to watch him go through that process. He called to put out a book that publicly talks about sexual addiction and what your family’s gonna think of that, him wrestling with that. Then he finished that and he went to adoration and told our Lord, “I did what you asked, I wrote the book.” And he said he heard a voice saying “Okay, now it’s time to get started.”
So that turned into the whole ministry. I’ve been there the whole time, helping out with little things here and there for a long time. I started working more officially about a year and a half ago and just recently went full-time. It’s just been something I’ve been exposed to for a long time.
I see the work that he’s done. I’ve been to conferences like this and see the men who come up to him, the way that he engages them and the way that the light bulb for so many men just goes off. And they do find freedom. We just had a group of guys today, this man came up with three of his sons and said, “I’ve been going through this program with my sons and it’s changing me and my sons.” Seeing stuff like that is why I started working. I got involved. I saw things that I felt God was calling me to do skills that I had.
If there’s someone you know reading this article struggling with sex addiction, what’s the one thing you would want to say to them?
I think the one thing I would want to say to them is piggybacking off of GK Chesterton, who once said that every man at the doorstep of a brothel is looking for God. And that there is hope. Genuinely, if you look at the story of my dad, if he can do it, anyone can do it. He’s got one of the worst of the worst stories. No matter how far you think you’re gone, you can do it. It’s just a matter of finding healing.
