Sexiness, Next to Godliness: Religion and the Sex Industry

Posted at 9:00 PM Apr 07, 2008

This is part one in a four-part series called Sexiness, Next to Godliness, which will run on Mondays through the end of April.

Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but religion is prostitution's oldest adversary. In the United States and especially in major urban areas like New York, religious figures have long organized to eliminate what was, in the nineteenth century, referred to as "the social evil."

During the early stirrings of the women's movement, religious middle class women began to step forward and establish benevolent societies. Since these women regarded themselves as morally pure and fabulous examples of womanhood, they had no problem telling other women how to live their lives, raise their children, et cetera.

In 1834 a group of these middle class ladies founded the New York Female Reform Society, with the goal of keeping women out of prostitution and assisting those who were in prostitution in becoming more respectable. This group was very much a religiously-driven effort, and around this same time other reform groups opened prostitute asylums to cure sex workers of their wicked ways. Though certainly some of the prostitutes welcomed the help, others probably resented the way they were being preached to and treated as though they were mental defectives (which is pretty much how popular medical literature referred to them).

Although today there are certainly religious (and secular) organizations that strive to eliminate the sex industry and adopt patronizing rescue tactics for prostitutes and other sex workers, there are also several religious groups whose goal is to work with sex workers who have or are looking for faith. Sex workers - whether they are prostitutes, porn performers, or dancers - may feel excluded from religion, but many identify as religious or spiritual and seek organizations that will accept them and their work.

Over the next few weeks, this series will delve into the world of religious groups who view sex workers as the primary population they serve. The policies and aims of these organizations are by turns encouraging, accepting and problematic. In this series, I hope to shed some light on these issues and the ways they are being handled.

--Audacia Ray

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