Editor’s note: This article contains language some readers may find offensive.
When Sister Cindy comes to campus, she draws a crowd.
So it was this Tuesday, March 21, through Thursday, March 23, when the evangelical preacher famous for her controversial methods spoke at LSU’s Free Speech Alley.
On Wednesday, her sermon revolved around the story of a rudderless young woman who led a life of sin. This young woman chased men, had premarital sex and shunned God. This young woman was Sister Cindy Smock 44 years ago.
Only then, she wasn’t Sister Cindy Smock at all but Cindy Lasseter: a 20-year-old college student at the University of Florida.
The year was 1972. She wore “tight” Sassoon jeans and hit on men like marks, she said.
“Sex, sex and more sex,” said Smock with pursed lips. “That’s all I knew. . .I was a ho, on God. My life was empty, without purpose. I lived for self-gratification. I was on the path of self-destruction.”
Smock described her younger self not only as a “ho” but a “vampire ho” because of her especially bloodthirsty slant.
She was also a journalism student who worked as a reporter for the student newspaper.
“My dream was to become the next Barbara Walters,” said Smock, “I worked my way up. I always got the story. I never failed.”
Her tenacity earned her praise and promotion. For the paper, she pursued leads. For herself, she pursued men. In both endeavors, Smock had achieved a series of easy projects. Now, she sought a challenge. A man who would resist pursuit.
His name was Jed, a young preacher from Indiana who sermonized on the University of Florida campus.
“I had a plan,” said Smock, rubbing her hands together. “I was going to seduce him.”
So Smock approached the young preacher and asked if she could take him to dinner.
“No, Cindy,” he said. “But I’ll take you.”
“He was an alpha male,” Smock said.
But over dinner, all Jed did was talk about Jesus.
“It wasn’t what I really wanted,” Smock said.
Afterward, he took Smock to his church for a Bible meeting. “They told us about Jesus. . . that we needed to know God. But I didn’t want to know God,” she said. “I wanted to get down and dirty.”
When the Bible meeting ended, Smock left unpersuaded, she said, and as the two sat around the church parking lot in Jed’s black Chevy Cordoba, what usually happens between a young man and woman, at night, at the end of a date, in a car, in the ‘70s didn’t happen.
Instead, the young preacher called emphatically upon God to save his date’s soul.
“But while Brother Jed was praying, I was plotting,” Smock said.
The young preacher hadn’t kissed a woman on the lips since his conversion to Christianity six years earlier, according to Smock. But she intended to change that.
“My plan was to get him to give me just a teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy kiss on the lips, and once he did that, I was going to slip him the tongue!” Smock said. “Because vampire hos know that french kissing always causes an. . .e-rec-tion!” she called out, pronouncing the word with a pause between each syllable for effect.
But Jed ended the date before she could convince him to kiss her, she said. Smock’s plot did not go according to plan.
More dates followed, and the young woman, who had angled to corrupt the young preacher, found herself drawing closer and closer to both Jed and God, she said, until one night in a Krystal Hamburger parking lot, she had an epiphany.
“I called upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and said I’m sorry for my sin. Lord Jesus, I’m sorry for hurting you. Lord Jesus, thank you that you died for me. Thank you that you rose again for me. Lord Jesus, I repent. I turn from all my sin, and I give my life to you, to love you and obey you always,” Smock said.
And like that, “I was a ho no mo’,” said Smock.
Immediately, she began preaching. Four years later, she and Brother Jed shared their first kiss, when a minister pronounced them man and wife on their wedding day.
The two were married for 39 years, had five children and 11 grandchildren. Jed died on June 6, 2022, just before their 40th anniversary.
Through their organization, Campus Ministry USA, the husband and wife duo traveled from university to university, preaching the “Ho No Mo” gospel nationwide. Today, Sister Cindy continues their work in Jed’s absence.
Her religious and social opinions are many, varied and surprising.
“I love the gays,” she said in a video from February 2019 at Florida State University. “The Lord Jesus loves everyone.”
It’s not what you’d expect from an evangelical preacher. But there’s more.
“Sister Cindy almost, almost became a lesbain,” she said in another video from March 2022 at the University of Arizona. “After spending most of my life on college campuses and meeting a lot of college boys, I understand why a lot of you females are being driven to lesbianism,” she said on March 10, 2021 in Dallas, Texas. “These boys are driving women to vagina land,” she added later that month at Texas State University.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Smock opposes pornography, masturbation, immodest clothing, drinking, drugs, premarital sex and even premarital kissing.
She also advises college-age men never to take their dates to Mexican restaurants—not because she dislikes Mexican people, but because of the presence of margaritas at said restaurants, which she believes often lead to sex.
“If you buy her two margaritas, she will jump right on your penis,” Smock said in a video from April 21, 2021 at Indiana State Unviersity.
Another surprise: Smock may support abortion rights. “Ladies, if you get pregnant, run on down to the abortion clinic and have that little bastard sucked out,” she said in one video from May 3, 2022, at Missouri State University.
In almost all ways, her persona is an uncanny blend of myth, oddity and pluck. Some students conjecture that she’s really a stand-up comic, testing out material. In several videos, she appears to do the Griddy.
The bulk of her controversial messaging, however, arises from the “Ho No Mo” campaign, aimed primarily at young, college-age women who she sees as promiscuous. The slogan is fairly self-explanatory. Smock wants young women across the country to give up sex and kissing outside of marriage, to give up immodest clothing (read: leggings, short-shorts, short skirts, latex things, lacey things, strappy things) to get closer to God.
Or, as Smock put it during her 2022 visit to LSU, “You’re princesses made in the image of God, yet you traded your crown to be a cocksucker.”
Student opinion of the polemic preacher is mixed at best.
“I really used to dislike her,” said finance senior Patrick Oakland. “I don’t agree with the vulgarity she uses, but today, for the most part, I think she spoke the truth.”
Oakland, who has been abstaining from pornography and sex for over two years now, said he believed Smock does “net good.”
“Her testimony of being saved by Jesus, I think, is extremely powerful,” he said.
Toward the end of her sermon on Wednesday at LSU’s Free Speech Alley, students formed a line to ask questions, receive answers and take home “Ho No Mo” buttons, autographed and personalized by Smock herself. Those who were able to recite the Ten Commandments or Apostle’s Creed from memory could take home a personalized “Ho No Mo, Obey Jesus” Bible.
One student asked her advice on how to mend his relationship with the mother of his child. Another asked if she could be a Christian and still believe in the power of crystals.
“What I say is, when you know God, you don’t need crystals,” Smock said.
Then a student asked her how she felt about faiths outside of Christianity.
“Christianity teaches that the only way that God can be just and forgive sins is through the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ, through his death and resurrection. If that is true, and I believe it is, that Jesus died for our sins and rose again, and he is the only way to have sins forgiven, then all other religions are false,” Smock said. “Now, how do you spell your name?” She began signing a button.
When hundreds of students come to hear her speak and curse and preach, there’s no denying that Smock has molded herself, or else evolved naturally, into an attractive quantity. Smiling in moments of uncertainty, bouncing spryly with Bible in hand, she’s strangely endearing, some students said.
“I love her. I think she’s an icon,” said English freshman Lilly Gunn.
“She is the moment,” added psychology freshman Alyssa Maddie.
“Obviously, I don’t actually agree with the majority of what she says, I don’t take it to heart, but I think she’s very entertaining, and I was really excited to meet her and get a ‘Ho No Mo’ button,” Gunn said.
While the bulk of Smock’s messaging may miss her target audience, there are nuggets of wisdom in her sermons.
“I will say, some of the things she says about ‘wait until you find someone who respects you’—I might keep that in my brain, but also, I’m still gonna be a ho. I do feel like it was a little bit enlightening – a little bit.” Gunn said.
Smock hasn’t been well-received on all the campuses she’s visited.
In April 2022, Smock had to call campus police to be escorted through a swarm of students at the University of California San Diego. Tensions rose earlier in the day when the crowd wouldn’t let her and her husband leave. In one video posted on Tiktok, students can be seen rushing her belongings, picking off stray ‘Ho No Mo’ buttons and snatching odds and ends. On Twitter, the UCSD student newspaper characterized the exchange as harassment.
Back at LSU’s Free Speech Alley this Wednesday, Smock reflected on her journalism days at the University of Florida and imparted some more common wisdom.
“They told me I was the best reporter they had,” Smock said. “I always followed through with the assignment. If you want to get anywhere in life, get up and get out of the bed, make your bed and study. It’s those that are willing to work for it that go far.”
At some moments, students cheered for Smock, and, at others, the crowd grew quiet. Those who arrived first came mostly for Smock’s spectacle, and those who stayed longest sought, mostly, Smock’s God.
For the most part, folks were just trying to figure out her angle or enjoy the show. Before the final day of her visit closed, Smock remarked that LSU is her favorite campus.
And sooner or later, wherever you are, Sister Cindy will come to a campus near you. In the middle of the people and opinions and sound is where she’ll be, fervently preaching as few others can, do or would.
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