MAKING SISTER CINDY

The viral Evangelical preacher returns to LSU

BY CROSS HARRIS @thecrossharris

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 last 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 1977. 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-

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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 chal- lenge. 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,” Smock said, 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