Ex porn star’s testimony highlights exploitative Christianity

Former Only Fans star Nala Ray recently committed her life to Christ, causing a frenzy of controversy online. Clips of her sharing her testimony and encouraging other women to leave OF and follow Christ are circulating on X and TikTok, which in her recent interview with Michael Knowles she explained is monetized for income (making little compared to her former porn career).

Speculation about the authenticity of her conversion abounds, with comments ranging from joy over the return of a prodigal to derogatory remarks about “body count” and sociopathy. While it is true that false and shallow conversions pop up in Hollywood from time to time, the cruelty directed towards Nala even from alleged Christians took me by surprise. Critics cite her red hair and presence in the public sphere as evidence of inauthenticity.

Her testimony itself didn’t strike me as remarkable. Jesus Christ saves sinners, and many of the experiences she relayed sounded familiar: a conversation with God asking what was wrong and why she felt so numb, the restoration of her emotions, and everything looking brighter after baptism. This is standard, and in my opinion, believable.

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What did strike me was the exploitation she experienced as a Baptist pastor’s kid and the progression to exploiting herself as an adult. She described a childhood where it was her job to always be “on,” to be the happy face at every church program along with her siblings and parents (who she emphasized did their best). She lived through church splits and instability in her parents’ marriage (who divorced, remarried, and are divorcing again). She described feeling disconnected from her parents, disconnected from peers, and disconnected from herself.

This emphasis on dissociation struck a chord with me: “Toxic positivity” is rampant in the church. To force people, particularly children, to present themselves in line with a religious ideal of perfection and perpetual joy is a form of control and manipulation. It encourages dissociation, and it is exploitative. It turns the human being, one who in this fallen world shares in the sufferings of Christ, into a prop or commodity designed to market the Gospel as the solution to negative feelings and failures.

Is it any great leap for an ambitious youth to go from shutting down their emotions to sell church to shutting down their emotions to sell sex on the internet? Are we truly surprised when young men and women who grow up in repressive environments lose touch with their hearts, enabling them to go into deeper and darker sin? Certainly, some of this depends on temperament. Nala Ray describes herself as someone who is driven and born to lead, and she capitalized on her own brokenness. Other temperaments may simply shut down and become consumers.

A study by the Barna Group, released in 2013, found that pastors’ kids retained their faith at a rate consistent with that of congregants’ (40% doubting their faith, 33% no longer active in church, 7% no longer identifying as Christian). The Bible teaches if you train a child up in the way they should go, when they are grown they will not depart from it. We must therefore ask, in what ways is the church failing to train children in the way they should go?

“Feel good” Christianity is one example of the church failing in this area. Tactics such as teaching children to “speak life” and “reject lies” in accordance with Scripture can become destructive if they turn into thought-blocking mechanisms, making children vulnerable to dissociation as well as spiritual abuse. However, some streams of Christianity err on the opposite side with toxic therapy where otherwise healthy children and adults are encouraged to constantly examine their emotions, even leading to what is commonly called trauma culture. (A particularly toxic form of church culture would be one where therapeutic methods are used to expose thoughts and emotions, which are then subjected to well-intended thought control mechanisms to encourage conformity to religious ideals.)

The lack of stability in Nala Ray’s childhood stood out as a way in which the church failed to train her in the way she should go. Divorce in the family and divorce in the church led to a lack of security in her life. “I never felt safe,” she remarked. So perhaps we’ve underestimated the destructive tendency of protestant and non-denominational churches to split. Perhaps for us to rage against divorce and abortion in the political sphere, while modeling divorce in our church structures, is hypocritical and misses the incarnational call of Christianity.

It was interesting to see Nala speak with a Catholic. I am unable to come to terms with the theology and practice of Roman Catholicism, but I see value in its relative stability. The Orthodox church likewise seems to have more success at maintaining unity, but again there are things about it that are difficult for the protestant mind to come to terms with. We value truth, and we need to value truth — but truth can’t simply be an intellectual assent. Is it possible for the protestant church to reclaim an embodied sense of wholeness without reverting to an abusive church hierarchy?

Neuroscientific philosopher Dr. Iain McGilchrist writes extensively on how modern society has swung to a more “left hemisphere dominant” way of existing: in categories, abstract, impersonal. This is certainly true in modern protestant churches and is reflected in our teaching-first, beauty-last structures. Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches tend more towards right hemisphere worldviews: embodied, tangible, and beautified. It’s almost as if the physical space of these traditional churches, combined with the heavy personification of the Church as “one Body” that cannot be split, has acted as a safeguard against the more dissociative tendencies of abstracted Protestantism. Even the physical nature of sacraments as practiced in the more traditional forms of Christianity protects against technological abstraction of the faith, in a way protestant Christianity is not protected. It is much easier to say church can be done online when “church” is about hearing a good message, agreeing with it, and reading song lyrics on a screen. This technological approach to faith is dissociative as well.

Nala Ray’s story is one of a young woman crying out for physical affection, for unity in her family and community, for a more embodied practice of the faith where the full spectrum of human emotion and experience is accounted for and embraced. Without these in place, she was forced to numb herself to survive, which led to acting out in extreme ways to try to reclaim the feelings she denied. Her story begs us to examine the physical and emotional embodiment of our faith as protestant Christians. A disembodied, plastic-smile, and stoic Christianity is not what Jesus Christ of Nazareth initiated. He came and ate, and loved, was betrayed, He bled, He suffered. The Apostle Paul wrote about rejoicing while suffering — a picture we’ve lost because of a tendency to see Scripture as a collection of fragmented parts rather than wholes. We’ve lost the humans in the text, so when we apply it tend to dehumanize ourselves and each other to fit our understanding of what it is to be a Christian. Nala repeatedly cites her ability to cry and feel pain after years of numbness as evidence of God’s redemptive power in her life.

How many of us see the ability to cry as a gift?

I hope and pray that this young woman continues to grow healthy and whole with her new husband and family, and I pray the Church, in general, reconnects with its own humanity in such a way that stories of kids growing up in church and becoming addicts and sex workers become far less common.