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Back then, she was a free-love activist: A picture at a rally shows her carrying a placard that reads, "Nudity is God's Creation." Crowned Miss Nude Universe in 1967, she spent the next two decades touring honky-tonks in the United States and Canada, taking time off to study yoga and faith healing. Between 1968 and 1979, she appeared in Playboy nine times, and would pose for about 30 other men's magazines. In between, she explored other interests: bodybuilding, writing pro-sex articles and co-authoring a book about women's physical fitness.

Everts' idea to blend stripping and preaching came in 1973. A California faith healer named Verna Talbot told her she had a revelation that Everts should use her body to raise money for Talbot's sect, the Church of the World Light. Everts was, as she put it, "under Verna's spell." Dancing one night at a place called the Follies Theater she decided to give a little sermon before her next number. She told the men that God loved them, that she would pray for their souls and that she felt compassion for their lustful thoughts. The men were stunned but they listened because they wanted to see more of her booty.

Everts proved as comfortable preaching the catechism as shaking her breasts. It was a paradox the press adored, and she played it up, giving interviews wherever she went. "God wants me to use my body to make money for his church," she told a Montreal newspaper in 1977. "I have felt his presence."

She became known as the "stripper for God." It was a bit of a misnomer: Everts wasn't really stripping for God; she was doing it to make a living. But as long as she captivated men's eyes, she thought, why not try to save their souls. One night, before a show at the Playboy Club in Chicago, Everts was in her hotel room when she says she saw Jesus. He gave her three rings, signifying her betrothal to him, and he told her she was on the right path.

Her career peaked in 1987, the year she was offered $5,000 a week to dance at the Millionaire's Club in Canada. But she was burning out. "I told my agent I was through," she says. At 42, she felt she was getting too old for the road. The job seemed taxing and the fame was more work than it was worth. She'd also stopped preaching as part of her act. "I got tired of being attacked and getting death threats," she says. Figuring she'd earn enough making videos, Everts retired from the stage, bought a house upstate and holed up as a living-room pornographer.

At first, she balked at her clients' demands -- especially the scatological stuff -- but she quickly discovered that raunch sells. Her videos got more explicit; it'd be better to feed their fantasies, she thought, than have them sublimate their sexuality. Twelve years later, Everts is an underground success, marketing about 450 tapes through her catalog and Web site and selling about 100 each month.

A refining of her religious philosophy has come over time. She's canned the parts of Christianity she finds offensive and replaced them with elements of Hinduism, Buddhism and her own ideas of feminine worship. Her commercial Web site links to her Church of the God Within, where, with drawings of a topless Goddess and a woman in thigh-high boots and bathing suit, she explains her ideas.

Next page | Will the Virgin's touch sustain her?