In February 2025, the media personality and born-again Christian Russell Brand recorded an episode of his podcast, Stay Free, with the OnlyFans star Lily Phillips, who is best known for engaging in a kind of shock-porn arms race with Bonnie Blue. A year ago, Phillips’ successful attempt to have sex with 100 men in a day was documented for YouTube by Josh Pieters, and she later claimed to have broken Blue’s record by sleeping with 1,113 men in 12 hours.
By his line of questioning, Brand clearly hoped he could use their roughly comparable experiences (he is a former sex addict) to find in Phillips some chink, some quiet sadness through which he could persuade her of his views. The word “questioning” is generous: what he actually did was talk about himself for most of the episode, barely referencing the potential impact of his behaviour on anyone else. (This was after the episode of Dispatches alleging a history of rape and sexual assault, but before charges were brought against him.) In his verbose style, Brand quoted scripture (“Your body is a temple”), described sex as “when we are perhaps most like God” and relayed the darkness he had felt after some of the most extreme acts of his sex addiction. Phillips, looking bored and at times a little lost, could not be drawn: in fact she said very little, but stressed that no, actually, she does just really enjoy sex.
I wonder if Brand saw some personal victory, then, in Phillips’ announcement on 30 December that she has been baptised. She told Us Weekly that events in her personal life had pushed her back towards the faith she grew up with: “I think for a while I’d kind of deviated from religion, and I think I was kind of in denial for a lot of it.” Quite what this means for her career is unclear, but she says adult content creation will take a “back seat” and she will try to “prioritise other things going into 2026”.
For every social media user congratulating her and offering their prayers, there were two questioning the depth of her conversion or accusing her of ridiculing a sacrosanct rite. This is a fair response to a woman whose X bio declares a “WORLD RECORD SLUZZA!!”. After all, conversion requires repentance, and there is an admission in Phillips’ statement that she is “definitely not claiming to be a traditional Christian” that she may not yet be fully signed up as a tradwife.
Why fake it? Fewer logical leaps are required to view Brand’s own conversion – which came in the wake of the Dispatches episode – as conveniently timed reputation-washing. But as a bid for attention, the pivot from “backdoor challenge” to baptismal pool takes some explaining. There are other, more readily available currencies in the attention economy. Or perhaps Phillips is planning to break into the “Mormon wives” corner of PornHub?
She joins a growing list of recent converts – Tommy Robinson, the former UFC fighter Conor McGregor, the former OnlyFans creator Nala Ray, Brand himself – whom many Christians may find distasteful, or whose conversions they may regard with cynicism. Many of Jesus’s contemporaries felt the same: the Gospels are full of accounts of Him ministering to the destitute, the afflicted and the outcast, sitting with those no one else dared touch and restoring their dignity. There is ample precedent in the Bible for conversions such as Phillips’. God uses the most unlikely people – Moses, David, Mary – for His purposes. None is beyond saving. The Christian speaking circuit has long been populated by redeemed addicts and criminals. In this context, the porn-star-to-believer pipeline makes complete sense.
Pieters’ documentary made headlines for obvious reasons, but also because, despite Phillips’ blithe enthusiasm in the run-up to the event, she cried afterwards. The experience was more intense than she expected and, at certain points, she dissociated. “It was hard. I don’t know if I’d recommend it.” Speaking to Brand, she said her tears were the result of exhaustion and guilt that not all the men had been satisfied. Brand clearly didn’t believe she was being fully honest, with him or herself. I find myself in the uncomfortable place of agreeing with him.
It is a cliché to pathologise a woman who chooses sex work – to assume there must be some great damage in them, as though no one could genuinely want or enjoy such a life. (There is misogyny in that assumption too: where was the condemnation of the men who queued for their turn in that condom-strewn bedroom?) Our bodies and our minds do not always want the same thing, and perhaps Phillips’ physiological response was a betrayal of her true desires. But watching her eyes fill with tears, I could not help thinking of the swingers episode of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, in which a husband fondles other women in a hot tub while his wife loads the dishwasher.
It does not seem difficult to imagine that someone who has sought validation in a person or a pursuit that ultimately fails to satisfy might turn instead to a different, higher source. Every Christian has their own – admittedly less extreme – version of this story. Yet it is often easier for believers to reach for moral censoriousness than to engage with the uncomfortable idea that God might love Lily Phillips, or Russell Brand, just as much as He loves them.
In this space where sex and religion collide with the online world, several things are true at once: a woman can be financially empowered and yet feel a darkness lapping at the edges of her life; she can seek comfort in both likes and prayer. No one knows the private position of Lily Phillips’ heart except Lily Phillips – and, perhaps, her God.
[Further reading: Keir Starmer’s crisis of faith]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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