LOS ANGELES, CA – When former stripper Heather Veitch saw one of her dancer friends die from alcoholism, she decided that she needed to do something about what she felt was a major problem in America: a sense of hopelessness and spiritual absence experienced by nude dancers and erotic performers.Today the still sexy blonde who left exotic dancing in order to embrace evangelical Christianity is the organizer of a religious mission dedicated to helping lap dancers, porn performers, and porn consumers find God.
Veitch launched JC’s Girls six months ago with the intent of having saved peers interact with their still-working sisters, primarily in the California strip club circuit. The visiting missionaries pay for private dances and then spend their special alone-time with the dancer in question sharing their testimonies and generally trying to convert her to their form of Christianity. According to Veitch, the group has motivated several strippers to begin church attendance.
Word of the girls’ “good work” – or perhaps their provocative website – has spread to the point where porn stars and porn fans who have visited their online presence have felt compelled to write, allegedly to thank Veitch for introducing them to Christianity and changing their lives.
And changing lives is what Veitch hopes to do with JC’s Girls. The death of her stripper friend made her realize that not every dancer or former dancer was as lucky as she was.
“Even though I had moved on and created this perfect Christian world for myself,” Veitch, a 31-year-old married mother of two explained, “a lot of people I cared about had not. They were alone and dying.”
In spite of that sad realization, Vietch believes her mission is about hope.
“My friend was angry and bitter and never had a chance to know that what she had done in her life could be forgiven,” she recalled. “I knew I had to go back into the clubs and talk to strippers about God. There is nothing that they have ever done that God will not forgive them for.”
With the help of Riverside pastor, Matt Brown, Veitch, who converted to Christianity five years ago and now works as a hairdresser, formed Matthew’s House, “a ministry to help people working in or addicted to the sex industry.”
When not caring for her terminally ill husband, Veitch is part of “an evangelizing team” that does “missionary work” in the style of Jesus and take their interpretation of his word “to the people who need him,” based on her own time as a dancer, during which she was too intimidated to attend church, in part due to her excessive drinking and “out of control lifestyle.” By conjecture, she concluded that such a lifestyle must be even “worse for porn stars,” and developed the website in order to do outreach to them.
A number of fellow evangelicals consider the JCGirls.com website, which has had 40,000 hits in three months, to be a bit racy, given that it features Veitch and Christian school teachers Lori Albee and Tanya Huerter in glamour photos taken by a porn film director. But Veitch defends the site, insisting that it gives lie to the stereotype of the frumpy Christian woman “locked up in a house with a Bible.” Additionally, Veitch insisted that “it is not a sin to be attractive or dress cute.”
