Hannah Hirsh spent five years working as a stripper before walking away from the industry after what she describes as an encounter with Jesus. Today she runs Kept by Grace Ministry and returns to strip clubs regularly, not to work, but to try to pull other women out.
“A lot of the things that I saw while I was in that life for five years was very dark. You see a lot of addiction. I even got involved into addiction myself. You see drugs. You see alcohol… you even see trafficking,” Hirsh told Fox News Digital.
Hirsh said women often enter the industry thinking they can make quick, easy money without understanding what comes with it. “You don’t realize the door that you’re opening, and you don’t realize all of the darkness that comes with it… This all comes with that lifestyle and just feeling empty inside, feeling dead inside and just going against your morals just for money,” she said.
She says she fell into stripping because of the pull of money, and argues that both the industry and the broader culture sell a false picture of what that life actually looks like. “[That’s what] stripping glamorizes [and] society glamorizes this lifestyle and portrays it to be something it’s not,” Hirsh said. “If you’ve actually lived inside of it, you know that while you are doing this, you are not happy.”
Hirsh’s time in the industry ended when strip clubs in her area shut down during the 2020 pandemic. She says the forced stop gave her time to sit in silence with God, a period she credits with pulling her away from the work and toward her faith.
“Society makes it seem like this luxurious lifestyle is the goal, but what I have truly learned is the goal is Jesus. The goal is eternal life. That is the true goal. And true riches are found in God,” she said. “This fast-paced lifestyle [is] glamorized by society, but it is not glamorous at all. This is coming from someone who lived it.”
Hirsh said most of the women she worked alongside were using drugs or drinking daily to cope. “You’re constantly being degraded on a daily basis. So, it’s not empowering you at all — it’s actually belittling you and making you feel less than. But because you are walking away with money, you think that it’s empowering you, but just as fast as that money comes is just as fast it goes,” she said.
She founded Kept by Grace Ministry shortly after returning to her faith and now goes into strip clubs to speak with women still working there. “What goes through my mind when I go into the strip club is that these women need God… I go in there and I tell them what they need to hear, what God is placing in my spirit to tell them because my job is to just plant the seed, but God is the one that’s going to make the seed grow,” she said.
Hirsh pushed back on the idea, even among some Christians, that women in the sex industry are beyond help. “For the Christians that believe strippers are beyond saving, I would say that they don’t have a true relationship with the Lord… Jesus sat and ate with prostitutes. Jesus was going to those that the Pharisees were calling too dirty… So for the Christians that believe that strippers are too far gone, I would say that you need to understand the heart of God because no stripper, nobody is too far gone for God. No matter what they have done, God can redeem anybody,” she said.
