For NADA Miami, Deters will present work drawn from her research on “Flirty Fishing,” a proselytizing practice used by the cult Children of God (later renamed The Family International). During the 1970s and early 1980s, the group distributed comic-book-style pamphlets to female members, instructing them to act as “Hookers for Jesus”—to use sexual relationships as a means of attracting potential converts, donors, or sympathizers.

Deters reimagines these disturbing materials through collaged and embroidered paintings that, at first glance, recall the playful eroticism of 1970s Playboy cartoons. Yet the humor quickly curdles when one recalls that many participants—often very young women—were coerced into sex work under the guise of spiritual duty.

When the cult rebranded as The Family International in the 1990s, it attempted to destroy all traces of these publications in an effort to erase its sexualized past. Deters’s scholarly persistence and refusal to allow such histories to be sanitized have produced a powerful body of work. Her ongoing research now extends to other religious movements marked by sexual exploitation, including the Branch Davidians under David Koresh. Still, none pursued “sex for God” as zealously as the Children of God, whose founder David Berg advanced a warped, pleasure-centered reinterpretation of the 1960s Free Love ethos.