“Jesus had a penis. And wet dreams.” This was the philosophy that inspired Heidi Johnson to found the Pussy Club, a sex-positive group at Duke Divinity School where Christian female students would discuss, among other things, masturbation as a spiritual practice, in 2014. They also gathered to buy sex toys to explore this newfound sexuality. And so, Johnson earned herself the nickname the “Pussy Pastor.”
Johnson, who, after graduating from Duke with a Master in Divinity, is getting ordained with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, will start as an intern pastor at a church in Bend, Oregon this September. She describes the Pussy Club gatherings, which still take place at Duke and around the country, as “loud, drunken, emotional mess[es] with tons of laughs, stories shared, and tears shed for the ways the religious community abuses and suppresses women’s sexuality by labeling it as evil and sinful and temptation.” The concept behind them is that “in the Christian tradition, we are called to love God with all our heart, strength, mind, and soul—AKA with everything,” she told me over the phone. “Sex toys are presented as a medium to engage in body love, self care, and exploring your sexuality as one of the ways we love God with all of our holistic being.”
In a religion that deems sexuality sinful at worst and ignores it altogether at best, integrating sex and spirituality sounds radical. But for Johnson, it’s what Christianity is all about.
Ever since she was in high school in 2009, Johnson knew she wanted to be a pastor — and that she was a sex-positive feminist. Her church shunned all discussion of sexuality, leading her to believe these aspirations were at odds. But they blended together in her bedroom. Her masturbation routine felt simultaneously like a rebellion against her patriarchal religion and her own spiritual self-care act, akin to doing yoga or hiking a mountain as the sun sets.
Then, during her first year at Seattle Pacific University, she was sexually assaulted. “It was like the string that wove together my body, mind, and spirit was cut in the aftermath of that violence,” she says. Unable to even look at her body in the mirror, she stopped masturbating.
At a campus sex education event later that year, a speaker described how masturbating during prayer helped her heal from the sexual shame the church imposed on her. Johnson wondered if returning to her body—the one thing that now seemed like her enemy—could heal her trauma as well.
The first time she tried this ritual in her tub, she had to leave her bathing suit on. “I hated my body being able to hold and remember so much pain and violence,” she says. “It was like I was bathing in shame instead of water.” But a month later, she mustered the courage to try it again… and again. “It became this type of baptismal ritual, which had the power over time to resurrect my sexuality and my sexual body in new ways and into a new life,” she remembers.
By reconnecting to her sexuality, Johnson also started reconnecting to her soul and to God. This is one reason she now views the body as part of the soul—and as a creation of God. “The body has a consciousness,” she says. “We don’t need to bring the body back into spirituality. It’s always been there. It’s literally re-membering our spirituality and our bodies.”
“We don’t need to bring the body back into spirituality. It’s always been there. It’s literally re-membering our spirituality and our bodies.”
But as she began hooking up with classmates and enjoying her sexuality, she realized it also worked the other way around: She couldn’t heal sexually without addressing the spiritual damage done both by her assault and by an upbringing that taught her sexual well-being was unimportant—which is why she started the Pussy Club.
Once Johnson gained a reputation as the “Pussy Pastor,” faculty at Duke Divinity School warned her about her employment prospects. But as more and more of her peers approached her on campus with questions about sex, she saw how many people could benefit from this work.
One such person was Katie Thomas, who kept in touch with Johnson after living in the Seattle Pacific dorm she advised and attending group discussions she hosted on feminism. “There aren’t many models out there for me to look to, and the fact that she desires to serve the Lord and understand her body is rare,” she says. “I feel like as women in the Church, we have to decide one or the other, and I see many walk away from their faith because of tensions similar to this.”
Another was Tyler Nelson, who worked under Johnson as a Resident Assistant then collaborated with her as the president of Duke’s LGBTQ group. “My previous church and youth group had instilled in me that expressing sexuality was sinful, that this natural part of all of us is something that needed to be suppressed,” he said. “I remember saying my prayers each night, asking God to let me wake up straight. It didn’t work, and at the time I thought it was because God was punishing me for being gay.” After leaving his church because he thought it was incompatible with his queerness, Heidi taught him “a faith that uses the word of God to help with identity exploration, as opposed to identity suppression.”
Since graduating last May, Johnson continues to host Pussy Club meetups and online discussions, and she’s still known as the Pussy Pastor among her community. She’s also been working as a chaplain at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, where she counsels patients who enter the emergency department after sexual abuse and other traumas.
Over the course of this work, she’s noticed parallels between the trauma people experience through purity culture and the trauma of sexual assault. Both have used sex to exert “power and control,” she says, giving people a twisted notion of sexuality. Given how many people have come to associate sex with disempowerment, she sees why it’s a difficult subject for so many. But rather than disavow such a fundamental aspect of ourselves, she believes in rising to the challenge of loving and making peace with our entire souls, including our bodies.
Our bodies may hold trauma, but they can also transform it.
In fact, it’s embracing what her own assault and recovery taught her that keeps her on her path: Our bodies may hold trauma, but they can also transform it. And other people’s bodies may betray us, but they can also teach us to trust again. Johnson experiences this contradiction every time she holds a trauma patient’s hands. “These stranger’s hands are here to help you, and I know that’s hard to understand when someone just used their hands to hurt you,” she tries to convey.
“Trauma happens in community, so obviously, healing happens in community,” she adds. “It’s the same human body and hands and community that’s going to heal you.”