The Virtuous Prostitute
How Dostoevsky Shook My Faith
Rose-Colored Glasses
I was 20-year-old college student when I met Sonya Marmeladova. We were both young Christian women. I was a born-again evangelical in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the early 1980s, and she was a devout Russian Orthodox parishioner in 19th century St. Petersburg, Russia. We met in a literature class, deep in the pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
I was new to my faith. Raised in a family that sometimes attended church but never brought it home, I had not gotten “saved” until my freshman year in a campus Christian club. I didn’t have the Sunday school and youth group background in evangelicalism that the other members of the Baptist Student Union (BSU) took for granted. With their upbringing and indoctrination they may have considered that Sonya wasn’t a Christian at all, or at least not destined for heaven, because her church didn’t meet their evangelical standards for salvation.
I didn’t think like that. To me, the details of various churches were irrelevant. It was the intention that counted. Just repent, ask Jesus to be your savior, and you were a heaven-bound member of the Christian club — Catholic, Protestant, Quaker, Orthodox — whatever. I was naïve. I had no idea about the strife and bile that raged between the different Christian churches. I suppose I thought it had all ended centuries ago.
But despite my ecumenical outlook, Sonya turned my whole faith upside down. Because concurrent with her fervent devotion and regular church attendance, Sonya was a prostitute.
Now how could that be? My studies with the BSU had taught me that once you sincerely accepted Christ as your savior, the Holy Spirit started working within you, gradually steering you away from your larger sins. This was born out in testimony from others. People who had been into drinking, partying, fornication, swearing, crime, and prostitution would testify as to how they had begun to lose interest in these vices and drawn closer to god and their Christian brothers and sisters. Abstention from vice was seen as evidence of one’s faith and salvation. Continuing in these larger sins, on the other hand, demonstrated that the person had not been sincere in their repentance, and was therefore not a true Christian.
So what was up with Sonya? Being as devout as she was, certainly she knew that her lifestyle was an affront to god. How could she do that to god, and to herself?
A Different Virtue
What I learned about Sonya and her faith shook my own faith almost to the core. In class we were acquainted with her world — a land of fabulous wealth among crushing destitution. It was a society where women were paid only a small fraction of the wages given to men for similar work, preventing them from attaining any measure of financial independence. Women’s fates were determined mainly by the status of their fathers or husbands who legally owned them. Thus with an alcoholic and chronically unemployed father, Sonya was faced with a devil’s bargain. She could become a homeless thief and beggar, along with her mother and sister, or she could turn to the only profession that could pay her a living wage — prostitution.
The city’s brothels were legal and booming. Men, according to Russian law, had a need and a right to satisfy their natural urges.
So Sonya made the same choice as hoards of other women in 19th century St. Petersburg. She sacrificed herself to support her family. Her earnings kept them fed and in their home, though as a “fallen woman,” she herself was required to live outside their neighborhood.
But it wasn’t just her body and her dignity that Sonya sacrificed. She also endangered her mortal soul. Sonya knew that her efforts to keep her mother and sister in respectable society, and consequently in good standing with the church and god, could result in her own soul spending eternity in hell. Still she chose to sin so they wouldn’t have to.
I never forgot the question our professor posed to us: is there room in heaven for a soul like Sonya’s?
According to the Baptist teachings I had learned, the answer was no.
Danger Zone
What did it mean then, to be “saved?” Had heaven, until very recently, been an exclusive club for the wealthy and privileged? Had your husband or father’s failure been a greater threat to your soul than your own choices about god and repentance?
When I posed these questions to other students in the BSU, I got confused stares and shrugs. What did it matter? That was a hundred years ago. Things aren’t like that now.
Well, maybe, but if all those prostitutes in Europe a hundred years ago went to hell, wouldn’t they still be there now? And if we had been born back then, might we not be in hell with them? How much of our salvation was actually due to living in a time and place where we are able to support ourselves and our families honestly?
It was like my head had sprouted green horns.
The culture of the BSU was not about such big questions. The Southern Baptist Convention had set a goal to share the gospel to everyone in the world by the year 2000. My brothers and sisters in Christ were immersed in trying to strengthen their faith and muster the courage to go out and witness to people. Because we were failing miserably in that task. We needed to learn to trust god, to rid ourselves of our worldly concerns, and get to work bringing in the harvest of souls.
That was what we needed to focus on, not some dead prostitutes back in the dark ages. How did that matter?
To my mind, how did it not? I wanted to serve a just and merciful god, a good god who played fair. Was I supposed to just be grateful that the system had tilted in my favor and not care about those who never really had a chance? Was that the kind of people I would find in heaven?
A Seed is Sown
My faith did manage to survive this first crisis, mainly because I so badly wanted it to. In the end, I concluded that Sonya and the hoards of Christian women in her shoes had to be forgiven and rewarded in heaven.
Because otherwise god would be a monster. This was just an exception to the evangelical rules I had been taught at the BSU. Well, another exception actually. There were also the ones about Catholics going to hell for praying to saints, and about members of the notorious mainline churches suffering the same fate because the Spirit was dead within them. This “deadness” was demonstrated by their singing old-fashioned hymns instead of contemporary songs, reciting written prayers instead of spontaneous ones, and sitting quietly in the pews instead of clapping, swaying, and shouting.
It was probably my non-religious upbringing that made me hold out on these points of doctrine. I maintained an outsider’s logical approach to issues of judgement. Were details about praying to saints or worship being quiet or loud so important to god that he would revoke people’s salvation over them? If so, certainly he would have been very specific about such things in the Bible. But the Bible was silent about whether you had to pray directly to god or could go through some holy person already in heaven as an intermediary. And music, clapping, and shouting were never mentioned in any instructions about worship.
Could our god be so petty as to send people to hell for making honest mistakes on these details?
During the two years I had been a Christian, I had been glossing over these quirks that my friends in the BSU espoused. After the Dostoevsky crisis, however, I began to notice just how much daylight there was between me and them in our outlook. Their willingness to judge and condemn entire churches and millions of other Christians over trivialities started to bother me. I remember kids saying that these Catholics and mainline Protestants were going to get a surprise in the afterlife. Some of them said it with relish.
So for the first time I stepped outside my bubble of faith to look at it, and at myself, from a broader perspective. Without the rose-colored glasses I had been wearing, what did this god and this religion look like to other people, way beyond myself, whose lives bore little resemblance to my own?
What I saw did not scare me too much — yet. But when other crises later arose, I would remember this technique and use it. And I would remember Sonya. My conclusion then would be different.
A Tribute
Decades later, I remember my few years in evangelicalism like a bad virus. It was unfortunate, but it also bestowed the benefit of a lifetime immunity to religion in general. As a curious, reflective person, I was probably a bad fit for any fundamentalist faith. It may have been inevitable that I would outgrow such a cruel, restrictive belief system. But as it happened it was Sonya Marmeladova who first shook me from my slumber, starting me down the road to freedom.
So when I finally kissed god goodbye it was not just for myself, but for her, and for all the women throughout the ages who tread her same path.
