The recently baptised OnlyFans star Lily Phillips claims that because Christianity is all about “non-judgement”, she can continue sleeping with thousands of men. Lois McLatchie Miller explains why this fundamentally misunderstands the grace and freedom offered by the gospel of Jesus Christ
Few women have caused Western society to look at itself in the mirror more than Lily Philips. The 25-year-old “Only Fans” porn star rose to national notoriety in 2024 after hosting an event in which she had sex with over 100 men within 24 hours.
At the time, I hailed it as the rock bottom of the sexual revolution. A culture which insisted that “consent” alone is the only legitimate moral boundary to sexual conduct was bound to lead here. The 21st century champions “my body, my choice”, and Lily had chosen to glorify this ultimate degradation.
Then, things took an interesting turn. Lily surprised us all in 2025 with a public Christian baptism, claiming to have found faith. Pandemonium erupted online. A certain strand of “red pill bros” cosplaying as “Christians” brutally and wrongfully declared her unsalvageable – as if Jesus’ sacrifice is not great enough to redeem promiscuous young women.
Others rushed to blindly defend Lily and shout the apparent transformation from the rooftops – perhaps without the prudence of asking any further questions about her apparent transformation. The right response for onlookers probably lay somewhere a step back from there – a lovingly optimistic stance of hope for true redemption, while watchfully awaiting signs of spiritual fruit.
Spiritual fruit in such situations, after all, shouldn’t be hard to spot. Baptism is an outward symbol of what an individual professes to have happened internally – an abandonment of the old “self”, washed away, giving way to a rebirth of a new creation in Christ Jesus.
But a new interview one year on reveals that Lily may not have fully grasped the truth of the gospel yet. Speaking to Holly Willoughby on a podcast recently, Lily spoke of her continued work as a porn star post-baptism, upping her game from 100 men in a day to 1,000.
The right to judge righteously
When challenged about the tension between her actions and her claim to be a Christian, Lily claimed that Christianity is “fundamentally” about “non-judgement” – and that, by implication, her work as a porn star should not be subjected to moral condemnation or Christian accountability.
The question is not about whether God can save Lily. Of course He can. The apostle Paul was a murderer and persecutor of Christians – naming himself the “chief among sinners” – before he was rescued by the blood of Christ. In Romans 5, he wrote, “For while we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person one would dare to die – but God shows His love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (v6-8)
But when Christ told his disciples, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1), he was not abolishing moral discernment or declaring that nothing can ever be called sinful; indeed, only a few verses later he instructed them to exercise discernment about false prophets. The Christian life requires both humility about our own sin and the courage to take God’s moral standards seriously.
Judgement isn’t foreign to Christianity – in fact, it’s at the core. A good and righteous God cannot turn a blind eye to what is hurtful and wrong. We wouldn’t want Him to.
From infancy, we humans crave justice and fairness when we are harmed or wronged. When somebody cheats on us, or steals from us, or mistreats us to the point of causing psychological harm, we want the wrongdoer to pay for the consequences. That instinct means that when we do wrong, we equally deserve judgement before the throne of the moral God of the universe.
Lily’s attitude to Christianity is that it grants her cheap grace on tap for the sins she gets to profit from.
Lily’s actions as a porn star grieve God because they degrade the body that He created, made in His image. Far from instructing us to ignore it, so serious is sexual sin that Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 5:9-12 that while we must evangelise to committers of sexual immorality outside the church, we must refuse to even associate with those who continue to perpetrate this evil while proclaiming to be a brother in Christ inside our Church.
The consequences of Lily’s sin don’t only hurt her. Her work dismantles sex – a good thing – by yanking it out of the context of love, commitment and marriage, and making it into a thing that destructively hurts people and breaks relationships.
Regular porn use by men is linked to high levels of infidelity and family breakdown. The people actively downloading her content are being harmed – and so, indirectly, are their innocent wives and families as they engage in this form of adultery. Watching porn can double or even triple the likelihood of divorce.
What good God could turn a blind eye to this harm against His people?
A misunderstood grace
God’s judgement against sin doesn’t only condemn Lily – it condemns every one of us. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (see Romans 3:23). What a miracle, then, that each of us – all as guilty as Lily for breaking God’s law – can be restored and redeemed through the love of God, with a perfect Jesus having taken our deserved punishment on his own shoulders!
Because judgement exists, so can grace. We can’t have the latter without the former. Christ died for Lily’s sin that she may be redeemed. But given her new freedom in Christ, is it ok that she continues in sin?
“By no means”, answers Paul in Romans 6. “How can we die to sin but still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the father, we too might walk in the newness of life.”
Lily’s attitude to Christianity is that it grants her cheap grace on tap for the sins she gets to profit from.
Many individuals in our churches might be mimicking this approach by clinging on to their own life of sin Monday-Saturday. But that’s a very poor imitation of the goodness of God. Grace is free, but came at a great cost – Jesus bore the penalty for our sins so that we might break away from the chains that bind us, and live in the light of His goodness.
In coming to Christ, Lily should bury her old “self” and allow God to transform her into a new creation. In continuing her work, Lily is actively choosing to remain shackled to the darkness of this world. Whoever has taken responsibility for discipling Lily has recklessly and cruelly failed her by refusing to point her towards the true meaning of repentance, redemption and recreation – very likely, in the vain hope of appearing “non-judgemental”.
As a Church, we should not be so uncaring that we refuse to condemn sin. We must pray instead in love that those chains would be broken, and that Lily would leave that darkness behind to find new life in Christ.
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