Wife of religious leader recounts her family's private battle

SALT LAKE CITY — If you can picture the shock, the pain and the lingering internal damage of being hit hard in the stomach with a baseball bat, then having to keep quiet about it, that's what it's like to find out your husband is addicted to porn.

You're horrified, you're feeling betrayed and you're terrified someone will find out — especially when he's a prominent religious leader.

That's how Christina Anderson remembers feeling when she found images her husband had forgotten to erase on the family's computer a few years back. A nationally known leader in his denomination, Pastor Bernie Anderson now shepherds the Wasatch Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church, sans the double life and the constant fear he held tightly to back then.

They've held their marriage together, though Christina says she'll never forget the hyper-vigilance she felt about keeping his secret in the beginning, even though it was eating her alive.

"I just figured that was the end of his career. In our denomination, appearances are very important and we don't talk about our stuff. He was our only source of income. I was very nervous about what would happen if it ever leaked out, but privately, I had no clue what it even was. ... It was something I'd never been exposed to, and I didn't know you could be addicted to it."

'There were signs'

Like so many other women, she had watched her adoring husband pull further and further away from her and their daughters during the first seven years of their marriage, not understanding why his time at the church or in his private office in the backyard was always so much more enticing than they were. "There were signs along the way, but I didn't see them. ... Even when he was with us, he wasn't with us. He wasn't fully engaged in what we were doing."

There were always plenty of reasons for Bernie to be at the church or in the office early in the morning, late into the night and on weekends, too, she says. He spent most of his time alone, isolated with a computer, including the laptop he used at church but could pick up and take with him.

As she felt more isolated, distance wasn't the only issue.