(RNS) — Months after accepting an award in Miami recognizing her as one of OnlyFans’ highest-earning creators, Nala Ray was baptized at Fearless Church, a non-denominational Christian church in Los Angeles, and quit making the content that she says generated more than $14 million from 270,000 subscribers.
“I made more money than most NFL players,” Ray said. “I could have anything I wanted. It’s a very big false sense of empowerment.”
Ray, 28, left OnlyFans in 2024. She has since married her husband, Jordan Giordano, a former Marine whose Christian faith she credits as instrumental in her own return to church, and the couple recently moved to Nashville, Tennessee.
“God has this cleansing process, the sanctification, and it’s a beautiful thing,” Ray said. “Sometimes it hurts, and I’m going through that now.”
A video recording of her baptism on Dec. 26, 2023 generated 8.1 million views on her Instagram. Ray has since rebranded her online persona toward faith-focused and lifestyle content, often posting brand deals with Bible apps, prayer rings, a vacuum and Magnolia Cinnamon rolls. Her audience, which on Instagram is 1.4 million and on TikTok 730,000, has grown since she announced she was quitting.
“My social media blew up after telling my testimony,” Ray said, using a common evangelical term for the story of one’s conversion, or re-conversion in Ray’s case.
Today, Ray released the first episode of her new podcast, “The Nala Ray Show,” titled “The Secret I’ve Been Hiding for Years … Until Now.” The podcast, co-hosted by her husband, is intended to feature conversations about Christian faith as well as discussions with OnlyFans creators, both those currently in the industry and those who have left it.
Ray’s online presence is very stylized. Her Instagram aesthetic borrows from the influencer culture that defined her OnlyFans career and, in some ways, reflects the cosplay-inspired look she was known for on the platform.
Her posts often feature dramatic makeup, frequent hair-color changes and professional lighting that gives her profile a glossy, almost animated appearance. Despite the shift she’s made in her content, Ray said critics who regularly condemn OnlyFans models as promiscuous have accused her of converting to Christianity as a money-making scheme.
“That would be the stupidest thing for me to do,” Ray said. “Going from making $300,000 a month to thinking that I would make more than that being a Christian.”
Joshua Broome, a former top-earning porn star who converted to Christianity and later became a pastor and anti-porn advocate, even speaking about his experiences in 2022 to Tucker Carlson, told RNS that despite the backlash, he feels ‘proud’ of Ray.
“I’m super proud that she’s willing to invite people into her life to ask her difficult questions,” Broome said. “She wants people to know about the solution to the problem that she had, which was brokenness, and that solution wasn’t money or status … the solution was an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.”
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Ray’s relationship with faith did not, however, begin in a pool in California. As Ray and her husband prepare to launch a podcast called “The Nala Ray Show,” where she plans to discuss Christian formation and invite other OnlyFans models to ask what she calls the “hard questions,” Ray said her path to Christianity was not linear. Her newfound faith, she said, was built upon a strict and unstable religious upbringing.
Nala Ray. (Photo courtesy of Nala Ray, 2025)
Raised in Illinois in a Baptist household, Ray said she grew up in what she described as a “cage of religion.” Baptized at age 7, she described a childhood characterized by both severe rules and hypocrisy. Her mother closely controlled what Ray was allowed to wear, she said, while her father struggled with infidelity and at one point left his wife and five children. Ray requested her family’s names be withheld from the story for privacy reasons.
“I was a very troubled child because of what my parents had went through,” Ray said. “I cried all the time, and I was just always seeking attention in the wrong ways, because I was very hurt inside, and didn’t know that.”
She said religion during her childhood felt imposed rather than understood. At age 13, after rejoining the family, Ray’s father decided to become a pastor, which had a significant impact on young Ray’s relationship with God. “My dad was on stage to be heard — like he was on stage to be looked at,” Ray said. “We would visit tons of little Baptist churches all over the place, and he would just go preach. He was kind of a chameleon.”
According to Ray, her father adjusted his preaching style depending on the congregation. In predominantly Black churches, she said, he would preach passionately, sweating and waving a handkerchief. In more conservative white Baptist churches, she said he would “transform,” preaching more conservatively and wearing a buttoned-up suit.
“I was so angry,” Ray said. “I felt so rebellious, because I knew it was fake. Like, not one bit of it felt genuine.”
Over time, Ray said her family experienced multiple church splits tied to her father’s leadership. After he was voted out of three different congregations, she said he attempted to continue pastoring by purchasing a deteriorating building that had once housed a preschool.
“It had so many issues,” Ray said. “There was mold in the ceilings. There were so many rumors. It was horrific.” Rumors of theft forced her father to close this third and final church, and Ray said her dad began searching for answers outside their small town. When she was 17, he read Harvest, a book by Chuck Smith and Tal Brooke about societal outcasts who became Baptist pastors.
He later contacted one of the pastors featured in the book, who invited Ray’s parents to Florida for what he described as spiritual healing. After that trip, her parents decided to relocate and, in 2015, moved to Florida — a state Ray said she “hated” — where they attended two different churches.
Ray was 17 at the time and said now the timeline is “a blur,” but that she was still living in Florida when she started OnlyFans in 2020. That year, Ray said a manager from an OnlyFans agency, called Creator Inc., scouted her through Instagram while she was working as a secretary at a surgeon’s office. After she created her account, Ray said the money started coming in fast. She moved to Los Angeles a year later.
“I liked the money that OnlyFans gave me,” she said. “I didn’t like OnlyFans, but I liked feeling empowered, this false sense of empowerment that I made more money than any men I dated.”
According to Ray, her manager from Creator Inc. took 40 percent of her monthly earnings in exchange for providing filming sets, other models and alcohol for long, sometimes weeklong retreats or shoots. Ray said she “changed outfits constantly,” often “blacked out from excessive drinking” and worked all day.
“I never drank unless I was at a content house,” Ray said. “They’ll put you in rooms with girls with sex toys and cameras everywhere. My manager would put me on everyone’s schedules because they wanted them to be on my OnlyFans.”
During this time, Ray said she leaned into a sense of rebellion. “I definitely wasn’t an atheist,” she said. “I was very aware that God was real, but my past was so hurtful that it gave me an excuse to turn away from him.”
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In Los Angeles and as the COVID-19 pandemic began forcing everyone indoors, Ray quickly became one of her management company’s top-earning models. She got rich quickly, she said, but the emotional toll was significant. Despite living in a luxury home with a heated pool, Ray said she felt increasingly isolated. Meaningful relationships were difficult, dating felt impossible and loneliness became constant.
“You’re only friends with people who adore your sin,” she said.
In the back of her mind, she said, she knew she was going to “die a Christian,” but didn’t know how she’d get there.
“I did not have any moments where I was like, oh, God’s talking to me. Nothing,” Ray said. “It was radio silent, radio silent.”
Then she met Giordano, her future husband, through TikTok. She came across his page while he was streaming live, answering comments and speaking with followers while dressed in his Marine Corps uniform.
Ray said she was first intrigued by his gentle and earnest spirit. When she messaged him, Ray said Giordano did not approach her as a fan or comment on her appearance, which contrasted with how many other men interacted with her online. “He was so friendly,” Ray said. “Like, just never made passes at me, never said anything weird. It wasn’t cringy. He didn’t simp over me.”
According to Ray, Giordano was very open to speaking about God. In these conversations, his optimism and the way he spoke about his Christian faith felt different from her experiences growing up.
“Growing up, it was all forced,” Ray said. “And then with Jordan, it came so naturally. It’s like it came right out of his heart, you know. It was just so beautiful.”
“He was genuinely happy,” Ray said. “And I wanted that.”
After months of FaceTime conversations — Ray was in California and Giordano was stationed in Virginia — Ray said their relationship marked the beginning of her return to faith, culminating in her baptism in 2023. Within weeks, she told her management company she was leaving OnlyFans and began the long process of deleting her account. Ray married Giordano on March 31, 2024.
Ray said her father protested her decision when she told him she had been saved and was quitting OnlyFans. He encouraged her to stay on the website.
“His response to me confirmed that he was very drifted from the Lord,” Ray said. “My dad said, ‘you should stay on longer. Life is expensive. What are you going to do now with your life?’ But it was just out of pure selfishness because I had been giving him money for two years.”
“I was like, God, you’re gonna provide,” Ray said. “Like, whether I need to go get a nine to five, I don’t care. Like, God, I am here to serve and not be served anymore.”
Since leaving OnlyFans, Ray has appeared on a circuit of conservative and faith-oriented media, including an interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show” in June 2025 and a February 2025 conversation with Daily Wire host Michael Knowles.
Joshua Broome, left, and Nala Ray, second from right, pose with fellow speakers at the THINQ Summit 2025. (Photo courtesy of Joshua Broome)
One of the most liked videos on Ray’s Instagram — also pinned to the top of her account — shows her meeting Kirk at Riverside City College in California, where she tells the conservative commentator she was a top-earning OnlyFans model and asks whether he would support a nationwide ban on pornography. After Kirk’s death in September 2025, Ray made a memorial post with the caption, “He believed in me, he saw that Jesus had truly won over my heart and that I quit an easy lifestyle to live for God.”
In October 2025, Ray was billed as a keynote speaker, alongside Broome, at THINQ Summit, a Christian media conference. Despite her frequent appearances in conservative Christian spaces, posts criticizing gender-affirming policies and a new Instagram bio calling herself an “activist for Jesus,” Ray is not publicly identified with a political party and said her focus is more faith-based than ideological.
However, she said she hopes to continue aligning her public brand with her Christian faith and conversion. “I want to go deeper with my faith,” Ray said. “I want to talk to people about Scripture and what I’ve learned in this journey and stuff like that.”
With her next podcast project, “The Nala Ray Show,” Ray said she hopes to create a safe space for women involved in online sex work to speak openly and to ask candid questions about their experiences in the porn industry.
“I have such a big heart for girls,” Ray said. “I want to have those conversations with so much love, no judgment, but still ask difficult questions.”
In December, influencer Camilla Araujo said she intends to quit OnlyFans but didn’t say she was becoming a Christian. Ray posted a response video congratulating her.
“I think that 2026 needs to bring in way less hate than 2024 and 2025 did,” Ray said in the video. “You have no idea what she’s seen, what she’s heard, what she’s been put through … This year, let’s try something new. Let’s stop judging other people for the sins that they’ve committed, and let’s start focusing on the sins that we’re continually committing.”
Heidi Cooper is an ordained minister and recovery specialist at Covenant Eyes, a Christian accountability and support organization that provides software, resources and counseling to help people struggling with pornography usage. Cooper said she sees Ray’s story as essential in helping Christian women examine their relationship to both producing and consuming pornography. “The visibility of stories like Nala’s matters,” Cooper said. “When people speak openly about shame, addiction or regret, it helps others believe they don’t have to stay where they are.”
The past year has brought personal loss for Ray. In October, her father was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Florida after being found guilty of assault and battery for domestic abuse against Ray’s mother. Ray is no longer in contact with him. She is also grieving the loss of her brother, who died by suicide this past July. She said she is leaning on God more than ever, and her renewed faith allows her to see traumatic experiences in her life not as punishment but spiritual formation, a perspective she said she hopes others can find, too.
“I think God gives us an opportunity to acquire something that’s special through suffering … patience, kindness, gentleness, peace,” Ray said. “If we’re God’s creation and we were made in his image, what a beautiful thing to feel.”