A positive verdict on O.C. radio host’s book

Steve Arterburn couldn’t resist the joke at his own expense. When he learned that a Pennsylvania judge last week sentenced a sex offender to read one of his books on addiction, the Laguna Beach-based Christian radio host and author cracked wise on his website about the book being so bad it was considered punishment to read.

Arterburn says he later felt sheepish about joking on a serious matter, but he need not apologize. If a judge 3,000 miles away is recommending your book, you’re doing something right. Plus, it was a good joke.

I picked Arterburn’s brain for a while Monday to find out what might have so impressed Judge Anthony Beltrami about “Every Man’s Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time.” The judge, who said he couldn’t discuss the sentencing with me because of court rules, ordered the 27-year-old defendant to read the book and write a report on it, according to the Express-Times in Easton, Pa. The judge also sentenced the man, convicted of having sex with two 14-year-old girls he met online, to one to two years in jail and five years’ probation.

Turns out that Arterburn, whose show is on 185 stations, is not a fire-and-brimstone evangelical. He likes to joke on the air, he says, and he peppers his books with lusty references that let people know he isn’t holier than they.

He began “Every Man’s Battle,” which he co-wrote with Fred Stoeker and Mike Yorkey, with a personal story of driving Pacific Coast Highway from Malibu to Oxnard on a summer day in 1983. He recalls having the top down on his Mercedes and the wind blowing in his face.

“I never intentionally set out to be girl-watching that day,” he writes, “but I spotted her about 200 yards ahead and to the left. She was jogging toward me along the coastal sidewalk.

“My eyes locked onto this goddess-like blond, rivulets of sweat cascading down her tanned body as she ran at a purposeful pace. Her jogging outfit ... was actually a skimpy bikini. As she approached on my left, two tiny triangles of tie-dyed fabric struggled to contain her ample bosom.”

Allow me to continue.

“My eyes feasted on this banquet of glistening flesh as she passed on my left, and they continued to follow her lithe figure as she continued jogging. Simply by lustful instinct, as if mesmerized by her gait, I turned my head further and further, craning my neck to capture every possible moment for my mental video camera.

“Then, blam!”

That’s right: he rear-ended a Chevy.

The point, Arterburn says, is that he writes the books in language that people fighting their problems can understand. “We’ve been kicked off many Christian radio stations,” he says, “because we talk about anything. Sometimes, the things we talk about, they don’t want to talk about. It’s too explicit. But we have fun, we laugh.”

However, his hourlong call-in show at 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on KKLA-FM (99.5) isn’t a comedy show. “We talk about our problems, and we’re open,” he says. Openness best captures the often painful reality of temptation, he says, and frees the person to share his or her problems. What separates it from more conservative evangelical approaches, he says, “is that we don’t apply Bible verses to every problem.” He invokes Scripture but says he tries to penetrate the person’s inner self to “truly fix what’s down inside.”

Arterburn says he heard the judge hadn’t read the book, one of 70 that he’s either written or co-written. He presumes he learned of it from workshops that Arterburn and his New Life Ministries have held around the country in recent years. He says 5,000 men have attended the meetings, which feature Christian psychologists and group sessions. “The men then go back home and confess to their wives what they’re involved with,” Arterburn says. “It’s his best day and her worst day.”

After his PCH episode, Arterburn continues in the book, it took him another 10 years to realize he “needed to make drastic changes in the way I looked at women.”

Now married to his second wife, Arterburn, 53, has a teenage daughter, two stepsons and a 6-month-old son.

Unlike many people who just don’t get it, Arterburn says, people with sexual problems need more than jail time. That, he says, is why he’s pleased that the judge recommended his book, which he says has sold 1 million copies.

“I get e-mails about that book every day,” Arterburn says. “I’ve just never heard of a judge recommending it as part of a sentence. I’m thrilled that he didn’t think this guy didn’t just need punishment but that he needed help.”

His prose may be overly purple for some tastes, but Arterburn notes, with good humor, that “we weren’t trying to write it for Sunday school teachers. We were trying to write it for men really struggling....”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.