The porn paradox

Lily Phillips is a precious child of God. She bears His image. Before the creation of the world, He dreamed her up and declared her “very good”. And He was so compelled by a love beyond comprehension that He sent His own Son to earth to die for her.

Lily Phillips is also an adult performer or, in more common parlance, a porn star. She is one of modern British culture’s most notorious women, having established a twisted rivalry with fellow ‘actress’ Bonnie Blue, that revolves around more extreme pornographic publicity stunts. In one, she had sex with 100 men in a single day. 

Both of the following things are true. She bears God’s image and is loved by Him. And she wreaks havoc on that image and draws millions of people into the event. 

There are two other pieces of information to add: In January, Phillips was baptised as a Christian, having – she claimed – rediscovered her faith. And while she hasn’t announced any new stunts at the time of writing, she also hasn’t said that she’ll cease working in the adult industry. Because of this, perhaps understandably, many Christians have struggled to welcome her into the faith or recognise her conversion as genuine. For some, it just feels like too much of a contradiction.

What I hate, I do

A couple of years ago, I was mentoring a teenage lad who, while I’m going to code-name him ‘Ben’, is happy for me to share his story. After a few weeks of surface-level conversations about navigating school and relationships as a Christian, he shifted gear as we walked around a local park. “I think I’m addicted,” Ben told me. To what, he wasn’t initially prepared to voice but, within a few moments, he’d offered enough clues: he felt a weight of shame over his regular use of adult websites.

I tend to offer a healthy scepticism when someone says they’re “addicted” to pornography. I have friends who are recovering substance addicts, and their descriptions of that condition are far more extreme than someone who occasionally engages in a behaviour they regret and feel disgust about. At times, we’ve mislabelled use as addiction and, in so doing, both downplayed the needs of real addicts and heaped shame onto those who are only stumbling. 

The list of adult performers who have died by suicide, contracted AIDS or other life-limiting diseases, or been ravaged by addiction is tragically long

Then Ben told me about the nature of his addiction. For four years – since the age of 14 – he had visited pornographic websites several times a day. Every time he was home alone, he was drawn immediately to his smartphone – through which he was easily able to bypass the parental controls that his family had confidently put in place. Often, he would watch porn to soothe himself to sleep; sometimes he would wake early and watch some at the start of the day. Every day, up to three times a day, this young, Spirit-filled Christian was watching men and women degrade themselves and one another in loveless, repetitive acts of sexual ‘entertainment’. He hated it, but he couldn’t stop. 

I listened and tried hard not to sound judgemental. We talked about Paul’s words in Romans 7:15, where he describes the frustration of living with the sinful nature, even as a Christian: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” We agreed that he would seek a deeper level of help. Then he asked me a question that I’ll never forget: “Does this mean I’m not a real Christian? Am I going to hell for this?”

Physician, heal thyself 

Well, if he is, he’s going to be surprised at who else is there. Waves of research over the last two decades have revealed that teenage boys aren’t the only Christians seriously struggling with porn. In 2024, American research institute Barna published data that suggested 18% of church leaders in the US (a culture which closely mirrors our own) struggle with porn use. A further 49% answered that they had struggled in the past. Those numbers are up from 14% and 43% respectively in 2015.

I find it interesting how nearly 50% of pastors claim to have removed modern culture’s most pernicious “thorn in [the] flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7). Let’s get real; admitting to a past struggle is a much more comfortable answer to give, even in an anonymous survey. There is, indisputably, a portion of this group who are either deceiving themselves or the researchers; perhaps they don’t feel entirely confident that their answers can’t be traced back to them; perhaps the cognitive dissonance of being a preacher against and a participant in moral depravity is just too much for their brains to handle. Why am I so sure? Because an overwhelming majority of pastors – 86% - told the same survey that porn use is common among Christian pastors. Just not them. 

So, let’s assume the number is higher; conservatively let’s say two in five. Churches across the world are being led by people (this isn’t just a male problem) who struggle – mostly in silence – with their own broken sexuality; teaching purity by day and giving in to extreme desires when no one’s looking. Is it any surprise that we’ve become so obsessively focused on sexual sin within Church culture? 

Pornography gets a lot of airtime in that teaching. We talk about how dirty and shameful it is; we remind everyone that once the dopamine hit wears off, users often seek out spiralling levels of depravity. In addiction terms, we focus a lot on the toxicity of the substance and what it does to us. We encourage accountability and internet withdrawal, and whole movements and organisations have been set up to help. None of this is wrong…and yet the statistics tell us that the problem is getting worse. 

Jesus and the sex worker

In Luke 7, Jesus is eating dinner at a Pharisee’s house when he’s approached by a woman “who lived a sinful life” (v37). We can’t be sure that she was a prostitute, but that is the overwhelmingly popular interpretation due to the clues in the text. The level of disgrace that follows her around certainly suggests a very public kind of sin. She is so overwhelmed by her own story, and by the proximity and hope of Jesus, that she bends down and engages in one of the most intimate acts in scripture. She weeps so profusely that her tears cascade across His filthy feet, and she wipes off the resulting muck with her hair. 

As she pours an expensive jar of perfume – in both literal and metaphorical terms, her whole life – onto His feet, the onlookers recoil. Forgiveness, grace, encounter with God – or even just a noted teacher – should not be accessible to someone like her. Her sexual brokenness creates a social chasm that they all believe should be a spiritual one, too. It’s important to ask ourselves: what would we do if we were seated around that table? Might we express unease, or even outrage, that this woman drew so close to Jesus without directly and openly committing to “leave her life of sin” already?

In 2024, data suggested 18% of church leaders in the US struggle with porn use

Jesus doesn’t seem particularly interested in the specifics of that. In Luke’s account of the story at least, He doesn’t say anything about how vile He thinks sex work is, or the impurity of what she has put her body through. He doesn’t tell her she’s disgusting; He simply notes that her sins are “many” (v47). To which of us might that same phrase not apply to?

Jesus recognises the beauty and brokenness of His child in a moment of intimacy that isn’t remotely sordid. He loves her with a deep, unconditional love that no man has ever offered. Just as she dissolves the crud on His feet with her tears, He melts her shame and worthlessness with His love. This is how Jesus meets with someone who has been caught up in degrading, taboo, sexual activity: He simply loves and forgives them.

Jesus loves porn stars

Emily Willis is a precious child of God. Born in Argentina, she moved to the US at a young age. Her life changed when she met an actor through a dating app who had links to a pornographic film company. Having been persuaded to act in her first sex scene, she went on to perform in more than 700 adult films. Like many in that industry, Willis developed a drug habit to numb the physical and emotional toil. In 2024, she suffered a cardiac arrest while in rehab. She suffered brain damage and has since been diagnosed with locked-in syndrome.

Her story is extreme, but not unusual. The list of adult performers who have died by suicide, contracted AIDS or other life-limiting diseases, or been ravaged by addiction is tragically long. For many, the only means of escape has been finding faith in Jesus.

People who appear in adult videos are often somewhere along the spectrum between coerced and trafficked – or get into the industry because of financial desperation. Often what appears consensual is actually rape. Even those who do participate by choice are either deluded by the surrounding culture or destroyed along the way. Pornography is not just an issue of personal morality; it is a justice issue. When we use porn, we become complicit in a culture of financially driven abuse.

Every Christian youth group talk I’ve ever heard, or indeed given on this subject, has centred on us, the people trying to stay pure by disciplining ourselves to look away from the filth on our screens. Yet when we meet Jesus in the Gospels, mixing with the ‘sinners’ and stepping into their worlds, He doesn’t seem to be obsessed with talking about personal sin. It’s important to Him, of course, but He’s far more occupied by a relentless passion to see the ones He loves liberated from systems and cultures that are crushing the very life out of them. Would He like us to stop using pornography? Of course! But not just so we can tick another form of righteousness off a list. He wants us to participate in extending His kingdom, in which men, women and the sacred act of sex are not dehumanised or commodified.

A culture without shame

In one of my mentoring sessions with Ben, he told me about how widespread the use of pornography was among boys of his generation. Most of the lads he knew watched porn at least as much as he did, but few of them expressed any concern about their habits. Far from being shameful, it was routinely joked about; links were shared and recommendations made, like discussing the weekend’s football scores or the latest cinema releases. Ben’s Christian faith created a dissonance within him which others did not experience, but it wasn’t enough to titanium-coat his sense of self-control. 

We know that the same is true of adult Christians, and indeed of pastors. Their struggle with pornography illustrates the paradox that so many Christians experience with this issue. But if this contradiction between our beliefs and behaviours is hard for us to wrap our minds around, it was the same for the apostle Paul. “I do not understand what I do”, he says at the beginning of that famous verse. The dopamine plays havoc with us; content crafted specifically to hijack our self-control is so difficult to resist. This is not a problem that can be fixed by just ‘trying’ to stop, because everything in our culture is telling us that objectifying women and sexualising everything is entirely permissible. 

Pornography is not just an issue of personal morality; it is a justice issue

We need a completely new narrative. One that recognises that porn isn’t empowerment – regardless of what certain branches of liberal feminism might tell us – and that pornography itself isn’t entertainment, but abuse. That these are beloved human beings who are being subjected to awfulness by a money-driven industry that doesn’t care if they live or die. We need a story that steps away from introspective self-disgust and is motivated by the love of Christ, who allowed a sex worker to sit at His feet and wipe them with her hair. We don’t know if she went back to sex work, by the way; her culture may have simply given her no other choice. 

The people who drew close to Jesus 

When Phillips pronounced that she had rediscovered her Christian faith, the reaction outside the Church was an almost-unanimous chorus of mockery. One social media comment joked that “even Jesus wouldn’t want her after she’d been with that many men”. Inside the Church, the reaction wasn’t much less cruel. There was an unwillingness to believe her conversion was genuine, and a desire to see proof of change, as if our role as fellow Christians is to act as interrogators. That didn’t go well during the Spanish Inquisition, and it’s not a good look today.

In an article on this magazine’s website, cultural commentator Lois McLatchie Miller wrote of Phillips: “The issue is whether she is turning away from sin and towards Christ.” The gist of the article was gracious, and I agreed with much of it, but it still carried that hint of doubt, and perhaps also missed the wider context: that whatever she might believe about her own agency, Phillips is a commodity in a male-dominated industry. 

If our reaction to adult actors is one of disgust, then we are not inhabiting the mind of Christ. He feels a deep unfathomable love towards every one of them, male and female, gay and straight, cis and transgender. Truly knowing that doesn’t just help us to accept and welcome those people into the Church when the desperation of their lives leads them to our doors. It also helps us to have a perspective on pornography – as the degradation of God’s image, His children and His gift of sex – which might actually motivate us to permanently close that private browser window.