"I'll Be a Hustler for the Lord'

How the President's sister converted the sultan of smut

To call Larry Flynt a pornographer is like saying that Shakespeare wrote. Flynt is the very sultan of smut, and his Hustler (circ. 1.9 million) stoops to pander with articles and artwork on such themes as bestiality, mutilation, excrement and various gynecological oddities. Or, rather, it used to.

In one of the most remarkable religious conversions since Paul stopped kicking against the goad, Flynt last week announced that he had been recruited for Christ by Evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton, the President's sister. Hustler will be reborn as a "religious" skin magazine, he added, and his multimilliondollar, 400-employee empire of magazines and sex products may be turned into a nonprofit religious foundation. As Flynt told a Pentecostal congregation in Houston, where he had gone for the National Women's Conference: "I owe every woman in America an apology."

Flynt's journey from horniness to holiness began earlier this year. While fighting--and losing--his much publicized obscenity trial in Cincinnati, Flynt recalls, an earlier urge "to find the truth and who I am" became an obsession. This fall CBS News Producer Joe Wershba steered him to Stapleton, who shared Flynt's concern about child abuse. Flynt spent a weekend with Stapleton and her veterinarian husband at their Fayetteville, N.C., home, and the Stapletons visited the Flynts' 23-room mansion in Columbus, where they discussed religion and sexual repression, Stapleton recalls. Flynt abruptly phoned her from San Antonio around midnight Nov. 17. "He was talking 90 miles an hour," she says. "Through the jumbled conversation I knew something real had happened."

What happened, Flynt told TIME Chicago Bureau Chief Benjamin Cate, was that he had found God at 40,000 ft.--in a chartered jet somewhere between Denver and Houston. "It was powerful and awesome," says Flynt of the experience. "There I was, representing the pits of what is wrong in our society, and it happened. I'm not ashamed to say that I cried for God." At first, Flynt's wife Althea was also emotional over his conversion, for another reason. "The Lord may have entered your life," she told him, "but $20 million just walked out of it." Flynt is not so sure. "I read somewhere that 92% of the people believe in God," he said. "There aren't that many who believe in pornography." Screw Publisher Al Goldstein, whose own obscenity prosecution ended in a mistrial this month, phoned Flynt from New York to see if his friend was still sane. Flynt told him calmly: "The Big Boy upstairs is on our side."

Whether He will remain there is uncertain, as is the future of Hustler. The next few issues have closed, but this spring Hustler and its sister skin-book Chic (circ. 436,305) will begin depicting "a healthy attitude toward sex, mixed in with a spiritual message," says Flynt. "We will no longer treat women as pieces of meat." Specifically, Flynt plans to discontinue vaginal closeups, banish all flesh from the cover and sanitize a few regular features: "Asshole of the Month" will become "Turkey of the Month," for instance, and "Chester the Molester" will be renamed "Chester the Protector" and reassigned to guarding young girls from evil. Flynt does not say what will become of nude photo spreads or of Flynt's thriving mail-order sex-aids business. Says one bewildered Hustler staff member: "I guess we'll be pushing dildos and crucifixes."

The convert concedes that many readers will remain skeptical. "People may think I'm kooky, but this is what happened," he says. "It's not a publicity stunt. I have asked God for forgiveness for anything I have done to hurt anyone. I've been all the way to the bottom. There's only one way to go now, and that's up. I'm going to be hustling for the Lord."

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