The Tangled Web of Religion, Spirituality, and the Sex Industry
Posted at 10:38 PM Apr 21, 2008
This is part three in a four-part series called Sexiness, Next to Godliness, which will run on Mondays through the end of April.
Part 1: Sexiness, Next to Godliness: Religion and the Sex Industry
Part 2: God Loves Sex Workers and Doesn't Require Them to Repent
Carla Van Raay, who now lives in Perth, Australia and is the author of two books mapping her journey through spirituality and sexuality, survived childhood sexual abuse, joined a convent and became a nun at age eighteen, and then four years after leaving the convent, became a prostitute. 
If anyone is well-qualified to talk about the relationship between religion and the sex industry – it’s certainly Carla. Her first book, God's Callgirl is her coming of age tale, while her follow up book, which is called Desire, Awakening God's Woman in the UK and Australia and will be released this month as The Price of Passion in the United States is the story of the next chapter in her life.
When I asked Carla about whether working in the sex industry is compatible with being actively religious, she differentiated between religion and spirituality, saying that, "If I had been religious instead of spiritual [when I worked as a prostitute], I would have suffered a lot of guilt... I would have [had] a lot of self doubt; felt awkward and uncomfortable, sinful and wrong." Identifying as spiritual, on the other hand, allowed her to more fully experience working as a prostitute in a profound way, a way that didn't mar her relationship with spirituality. The essential difference, for Carla, is that spirituality allowed her a more direct relationship with God, one that was unmediated by the mores of an organized religion.
Carla uses language about healing on her website and in advertising her workshops and phone consultations, but because the 70 year-old has put her sex working history behind her, she doesn't identify as a sacred whore. Some sex workers who see themselves as healers and have a holistic approach to their work, however, do identify as part of the sacred whore tradition. Though unsurprisingly the concept of the sacred whore has been usurped by contemporary (mis)understandings about commercial sex, once a upon a time long long ago, some cultures treated whores as goddesses. Annie Sprinkle has been a very visible proponent of sacred whores and priestesses, and she along with many other people who identify as such have been profiled in the book Reclaiming Eros: Sacred Whores and Healers
--Audacia Ray
For this installment of my four-part series Sexiness, Next to Godliness, I interviewed two women, Bowie Snodgrass and Lia Scholl, who are allies of sex workers and have created community-building projects for people who work within the sex industry. But despite being devoted to their causes, neither woman is overly focused on bringing the word of God to sex workers. Instead, community building takes precedence.
It was with this foundation that eight members of Transmission, along with an equal number of sex workers and local artists, conceived of the idea of 
Lia spoke effusively about this point, and throughout our conversation she stressed that one of the major things that sets her ministry aside from others is that, “Many ministers don’t believe people can be right with God and be a dancer, but I don’t buy that. I don’t try to get women to quit, but I think women should all have choices – women should have free agency.”
This is part one in a four-part series called Sexiness, Next to Godliness, which will run on Mondays through the end of April.
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).
