A recent issue of Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine highlights the anti-sex trafficking work of Linda Smith, who says she has "spent 10 years of [her] life restoring little girls and young women who have been in the commercial sex industry." If Smith's terminology, "restore," gives you the willies considering the subject matter -- evoking not just new "virginal restoration" services being bought everywhere from Hollywood to Muslim communities in Europe, but also the more general sense of the word, as repairing a broken or used object, applied to women -- there's more to be find suspect in Focus on the Family's praise for Smith, a leading figure in the Christian right anti-trafficking establishment who embodies a lot of the tensions in the alliance between feminists and religious right activists working on the issue.

Linda Smith, a two-term Congressional representative from Washington state, who broke into the House on a grassroots, Christian, write-in campaign, had a 100% positive rating from the Christian Coalition for her staunchly conservative anti-abortion politics, and was profiled in 1995 under the title "Invasion of the Church Ladies" by Hanna Rosin for The New Republic, as part of a class of female representatives-Smith's opponents dubbed her the "Hazel Dell Housewife"-going to war in D.C. for traditional values. After a failed Senate bid in 1998, Smith retired from political life-in a way-to begin work on an anti-sex trafficking organization she founded, Shared Hope International, and which she considers her Christian "ministry," though she's cagily told supporters, "If I ever advertised as a Christian, I can't do the work I do."

Smith hasn't quite left Washington though, appearing in congressional hearings in 2002 to testify about her newfound convictions on sex trafficking, and continuing to lead national campaigns on the issue, along with three other groups, including two other religious groups, that make up the War Against Trafficking Alliance, an advocacy organization that provides trainings for governments and NGOs with support from the Depts. of Justice and State. In Smith's own SHI, she works to "restore" women who have been removed from prostitution in a series of Christian-oriented and staffed "Houses of Hope" that combine shelter from sex traffickers and pimps and a halfway house work model: having the women work in bakeries and other small businesses. In interviews with the Seattle Times several years ago, Smith was vague about the houses' locations, occupancy rates and business opportunities, preferring to linger on details of the financial aid she and her husband bestowed on individual rescued-and-restored women. Several "Houses of Hope" are now listed on SHI's website.

Smith's focus, which is shared by a number of colleagues on the religious right, who have made the issue a favored evangelical cause in recent years, is criticized by groups with a broader trafficking focus, who charge that the focus on "sex slavery" erases the less sexy issue of plain labor trafficking and slavery, with workers forced into indentured servitude-like situations in factories and fields, as well as by sex-worker advocacy groups who complain that the sweeping targets of anti-sex trafficking work includes women who choose sex work willingly and prioritizes criminalizing all sex work-and demanding that NGOs that help sex workers condemn those sex workers in exchange for aid money-over helping ensure better working conditions for the women who engage in it.

This much seems clear from Smith's testimony to Congress in 2002, where she argued the absolutist position that countries with legalized or tolerated prostitution provide "cover for the traffickers," and should be considered part of the problem. "I encourage the administration to consider countries with legalized or tolerated prostitution as having laws that are insufficient to eliminate trafficking," she told the congressional subcommittee, seeming to argue for an ever-murkier line between any sex work and slavery. In this, Smith seems to agree with feminist anti-prostitution purists who argue that there's no substantive difference between prostitution and "sex slave" trafficking: a rare instance of orthodox feminist theory making it into the mainstream, albeit on the shoulders of the Christian right.

It's a tricky divide, as Smith's newest campaign, an investigation on "domestic minor sex trafficking," aims to expand the definition of sex trafficking for good purpose: relabeling the prostitution of U.S. children as domestic sex trafficking so that the children will be eligible for the same protections that foreign-born tracking victims are (brought to social services instead of being arrested as prostitutes). It's an admirable goal to enact a commonsense fix, but, as for Smith's broader goals, as with other strange bedfellows coalitions, it's worth remembering that Christian right muscle doesn't come without an orthodox price.

Linda Smith appears on the Christian women's television talk show, Everyday Woman, to offer her take on anti-trafficking work.

This piece first appeared on Religion Dispatches.

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