My husband and I married in a Presbyterian church in Watkins Glen, N.Y., on the banks of Seneca Lake. It was June 2006, three months before he started seminary and five-and-a-half years after I had quit the sex industry. I considered our wedding the marriage of the former stripper and the future minister.

After the wedding, I followed the contours of his career with the flexibility and accord of a synchronized swimmer. I left my job at a Vermont newspaper and moved to Boston, where he had enrolled in theological school. While he studied, I read books that told me how to read The Book, how to live The Book.

To cross the Jordan, I read, we must die, symbolically. We must give ourselves up, let go and be embodied by Christ. I let go of all my friends, gave up my Blues music (too sexy) and Celtic music (too many mentions of whiskey) and my tight iridescent clothes.

My sex toys and handcuffs dropped straight into the garbage. The furniture I had owned was expunged from our lives, the wood buckling on the back porch before we tossed each piece into the trash. Purged of my former life, I started over, guided by this 22-year-old man, seven years younger than I, who was making Jesus his business.

He thought he was saving me, and I thought I needed to be saved.

In my experience, sex work and Christianity were not incongruous. I only danced for a few months, in San Francisco and New York, to make my rent payments between college and my job as a web developer, but the shame and guilt I felt about stripping pivoted neatly to my role as a good Christian wife. In both cases, I relied on the perceptions of others to define my value.