Indiana Jones and The Pussycat Preacher

Heather Veitch is a former stripper and fetish model who found Jesus a few years ago and started an outreach ministry for sex workers called JC’s Girls. She and accomplices from her fledgling megachurch in Riverside would go to strip clubs and attend the AVN and Erotica LA conventions and invite sinful women to church.

It was soon after I began writing this website that I met Veitch and her two cohorts in the studio of photographer/raconteur James “Jimmy D” DiGiorgio, as the JC’s Girls ministry was just beginning to get attention.

At the time I doubted that the end result of Veitch’s ministry was to simply convince strippers, prostitutes, and porn stars that Jesus loved them, but instead to convince them to give up their professions altogether. In my mind one doesn’t necessarily follow the other, and I succumbed to a prejudice I have about the vanity and disingenuousness of evangelists.

Maybe because there’s an Indiana Jones movie out now that I was reminded of a line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “Dr. Jones, do you seek the Grail for God’s glory – or your own?”

JC’s Girls hooked up with Jimmy D. so that he would photograph them like he would porn stars (albeit with clothes), so that the church ladies might seem familiar to the strippers they approached. Also on hand was documentarian Bill Day, whose The Pussycat Preacher, a film about Veitch and the genesis of JC’s Girls, was released this year.

It is an excellent movie. We watch as Veitch is cautiously accepted into the fold of Sandals, an evangelical church in Riverside housed in a college gymnasium and shepherded by Matt Brown, a reverend who looks – to the alarm of his cohorts in the Southern Baptist Convention – like a surfer dude.

Preacher details Veitch’s and Brown’s struggles for acceptance. First, on a personal level, Veitch must wade through the stares of decent churchgoing folk even as she looks less like them than she does the women she’s trying to save. Then Pastor Brown must fight for JC’s Girls to be accepted by the congregation and its larger church affiliations. Viewers will root for Veitch and Brown against the closed-minded Goliaths who don’t feel that a church should minister to sinners.

But the film does expose vanity on all levels. When a group of strippers is finally lured to the church, Veitch is angered by the tough sell laid on them by another church elder. She doesn’t want him getting credit for saving them. And only Veitch has experience with the sex industry; her cohorts are attractive ringers, along for Veitch’s ride. When I asked them in 2005 if JC’s Girls would accept unattractive women as ministers, they said there was always room behind the scenes.

JC’s Girls were not represented at Erotica L.A. this year, though precursor XXXChurch (covered by Bill Day in his previous documentary, Missionary Positions) was, as was newcomer The Pink Cross. I found it odd that the three porn ministries pointedly had nothing to do with each other, even if they all shared the same boss.

At the end of Preacher, Veitch moves to Las Vegas to start a new ministry. She has since been divorced from her disabled husband and has suffered more Christian slings and arrows because of that.

Her move seems abrupt, though, given that she and Brown have spent the movie fighting for her right to stay at Sandals (Brown admits early in the movie that every week Veitch would come to him with something “she always wanted to do”), but Veitch would not stick out like a sore thumb in Las Vegas, and being an Everystripper is advantageous to a preacher in Sin City.

(Disregard the awful voiceover and soundtrack music – they do not appear in the movie)

Previously: Oh JC’s Girls, Book 2; Erotica L.A. in a nutrag
See also: JCsGirls, Bill Day