If you missed it (you probably did), Right-wing social media was buzzing about Michael Knowles interviewing Nala Ray.
"$9 Million on OnlyFans & God Saved Me" | Michael & Nala Ray pic.twitter.com/kPP2eCm12Y
— The Michael Knowles Show (@MKnowlesShow) April 6, 2024
The Christian Right on Twitter, by-and-large loves this girl and her testimony.
I’m have doubts.
I’m not a Christian.
We Jews do not believe in salvation. That is not a Jewish principle.
We believe in atonement. One must atone for their sins. Part of atonement is making right and reforming previous behavior.
So I watch this interview and this is my take-away.
This girl made $9 million doing hardcore pornography on OnlyFans and builds up a huge follower base.
She finds a man, falls in love, want to get married.
She finds Jesus, prays, and is saved.
She quits OnlyFans.
She transitions to making softcore content of her in scantily clad costumes and athletic clothing and calls it cosplay and fitness influencer content.
She starts making money with Christian influencer content.
She doesn’t give away her $9M from OnlyFans, she doesn’t reject her followers.
She doesn’t do good works, build church, fund missionaries, help Christian hospitals, etc.
She found Jesus and a sports bra and did substantially change her life.
Social media tells me I can’t judge her. Her sin has been washed away.
Didn’t Jesus save Mary Magdalene, who was a prostitute?
Yes, but I don’t remember in my Episcopalian high school days, learning that Mary went back to being a prostitute after becoming a follower of Jesus.
Nala Ray’s transformation looks like a grift to me.
She gave up hardcore for a husband and parlayed making money off incels to making money off Christians.
I remember from the history books when the Medieval Catholic Church would require people seeking forgiveness to fast for 40 days and take a vow of poverty.
At least make her buy a planetary indulgence for $9,000,001.
Make her demonstrate an act of contrition.
Thus just feels like a grift and I don’t understand why more people don’t see it that way.
I’ll admit, I don’t know salvation, but I do know atonement, and nothing I’ve seen her do looks like atonement.
you have to take into account the massive stupidity of modern America… I agree with you. she made 9 mill with porn and now isn’t doing it BUT she is still making money with her body( and stupid males who pay to watch something they will never have). the dumbing down of America is complete. sad what my Country has become…
Didn’t Jesus save Mary Magdalene, who was a prostitute?
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Yes, but I don’t remember in my Episcopalian high school days, learning that Mary went back to being a prostitute after becoming a follower of Jesus.
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More to the point, after Jesus saved Mary Magdalene, she didn’t stop being a prostitute and become a stripper instead. (Oh, sorry: “exotic dancer”)
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That’s how this Nala Ray person comes off to me. She “found Jesus”, gave up hardcore pr0n, and now poses in very little clothing as a “fitness influencer”.
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Does she show her workouts on camera? Is she selling a fitness routine that works for her and (hopefully) will work for other people?
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No. She’s just posing in a sports bra and yoga pants and showing off her body for money and clicks. Just like she did before she “found Jesus”, but with slightly less actual nudity.
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And as you say, she has not divested of the $9MM she made doing pr0n on OnlyFans, or given up her “pr0n name” or subscriber base. She’s keeping those and leveraging them to continue making money.
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That is not atonement. IMO, it’s not even really salvation, which requires one to “Go and sin no more.” Jesus’ words, not mine.
There’s also repentance (Greek word: “metanoia”– change of mind, heart and/or direction) Someone commits sin, they become a follower of Jesus, they stop sinning. They change and go in a different direction. They don’t become a stumbling block for others, meaning they don’t lead them into sin; they don’t do things that make others want to sin with them.
It’s possible she and her husband (surely he’s aware of this) haven’t been taught. It’s also possible they know exactly what they’re doing. I don’t know. I do know that I can’t remember a time when Jesus said to “go out and acquire earthly riches by lascivious means and come follow me.”
random weird thought that ran thru me brain- this whole “I found Jesus shtick” is a way for this bimbo to ease her guilty mind… “I used to do porn for money but now I do THIS for money” ( not realizing its the same thing). yawn… another waste of time..
In my head, she and Osteen are the same kind of grifters, both equally despicable in using their so called faith/salvation to bring in more money. Professing one thing, but living another. To steal a line from Dennis Miller, “They say they’re non-denominational . . . but I’ve seen their eyes light up at tens and twenties.”
A probably more relevant bible story would be the woman caught in adultery that was about to be stoned. Jesus said, go forth and sin no more. He didn’t say that’s OK you’re fabulous now.
He also said to many, give away your riches and follow him.
Christian here, of the Protestant evangelical stripe, who really does believe that stuff. (Though, from the inside that category is quite a bit more complicated than it appears on the outside.)
“Time will tell.” See where she is in five years. (See where she is in one. Is she baptized? In a church?) If it’s not real, it will fade. It’s a life that’s often not easy. There have been plenty of, yeah, grifters, over the years.
What I see as relevant is Jesus’ parable of the sower.
Yep. Being a Christian is a skill. Some people are dabblers, some people are serious, and many people are in-between. Christian conversion is, more than anything else, a change in worldview. The key here is that for each of us, our worldview is largely based on speculation and trust. There is very little about our world that we experience directly, a bit more we have good indirect experience about, and the rest we accept as “truth” given to us by people and institutions we admire, and which fit in with some model of what we do know. When Christians and atheists debate faith, for instance, it’s not really about any facts. It’s about whether or not the discussants can find a chink in the other’s worldview suc that some agreed-upon fact cannot be explained away.
Worldviews are very dear to us. There is an area of psychology called “worldview theory” that has found that challenges to our worldview have the same emotional impact as death threats. In their jargon, it’s called “mortality saliency”. The more poorly constructed one’s worldview, the more it is threatened with perceived attacks and inconsistencies. If there’s not something holding it up, people with poorly supported worldviews frequently react with rage and violence. You see this with Progressives whose worldviews are very fragile. Since they cannot withstand challenge, they have to react by silencing it.
When one becomes a Christian as an adult, it is very much like being “born again,” because it calls for the death of one worldview and the intentional building of another, and as an adult, it feels much like a rebirth. That’s not the case for those of us who grew up in faith and simply continued on as an adult.
When an adult is “born again,” then, this theologically young (however old in years) Christian will be a bit fragile and will not really know what he or she is doing. That person needs training and guidance in constructing this new worldview so that it becomes internally consistent and can withstand challenge. Paul provides endless instruction on doing that in his letters. That is one of the purposes of the church — it is a community of believers who are at varying stages of this worldview construction who can help each other with challenges and questions.
It is very common for new adult converts to do silly things, because they don’t really have a clue about what they are doing. In particular, they often have to start reconstructing this new worldview on the wreckage of the worldview they left behind. Sometimes this involves radical rejection, but sometimes this involves partial accommodation of the old worldview’s broken struts as he or she rebuilds his or her life.
We Christians know that we have a big advantage in the guidance of the Holy Spirit during this process, and throughout our lives. But even so, without further guidance in scripture and help from more mature Christians, a young immature Christian will likely flounder a lot.
For one discussion of this, see: https://www.billoblog.com/wordpress/index.php/category/worldview-and-faith/
Not sure who is worse. People who prostitute themselves for money while pretending they aren’t or the idiots who waste money on them. Seems like they deserve each other. At least she’s not a pedophile doing nasty things to kids…. You’ve got to remember something. Not all democrats are pedophiles. But all of them have decided that pedophilia is not a deal breaker.
It’s true that if there were no prostitutes, there’d be no men visiting them.
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It’s also true that without “johns”, there’d be no business for prostitutes and the “oldest profession” would dry up very quickly.
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They not only deserve each other; they can’t exist without each other.