Best known for his snarky celebrity gossip blog, famous for its vicious takes on Hollywood’s biggest dramas, Perez Hilton recently returned from a grueling hospital ordeal with a shocking message: God is not only real — He is good.
After a bout of the flu that escalated into a perforated stomach ulcer and ultimately sepsis, Hilton was hospitalized for 21 brutal days of procedures and surgeries. During this tumultuous time, he claims he encountered God — not in the kind of drug-induced delirium we often hear about from people in near-death situations, but while he was apparently fully conscious.
‘He is in my heart, and He is the main reason why I am healing so quickly.’
“God presented himself to me,” Hilton said in a 25-minute video released on March 23.
“I was very lucid. It was real, and this has been life-changing,” he added tearfully.
Even though Hilton had a religious upbringing — baptized, confirmed, and schooled in the Catholic faith as a youth — he was “never a believer” until this “miraculous” experience turned his world upside down.
After two weeks of invasive procedures, stubborn infections that wouldn’t heal, new complications picked up in the hospital, and the humbling ordeal of needing help with basic bodily functions, Hilton reached a rock-bottom place he described as “hell.”
But it seems God met him in that darkness and not only spared his earthly life (Hilton is now home and steadily recovering) but, I pray, his eternal one as well.
The 48-year-old, openly gay single father of three surrogate-born children says he’s now “excited to start taking the kids to church” and hopes to enroll them in a local Catholic school near their Las Vegas residence.
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What’s more, his spiritual experience has compelled him to make adjustments in his personal life. “I’m ashamed of myself,” Hilton admitted. “I felt this need to produce for my family so much that I was doing this and that … and not doing the little things,” he said, calling himself a “workaholic.”
“It was Grandma who would do dinner with the kids every night. No more. I’m gonna have dinner with my kids and my mom every night from now on,” he vowed.
In an even more recent video, Hilton announced that he has “zero desire to drink” alcohol after his encounter with God.
The video, captioned “goodbye and good riddance,” highlighted how “clear” his eyes look now.
“The future is bright. God is good. I’ve continued my journey with God, and I’m speaking to Him, and He is in my heart, and He is the main reason why I am healing so quickly,” he said, smiling.
Despite his rapid weight loss and exhausted countenance, Hilton appears to be a changed man.
A deeper standard
But if you’re anything like me, these kinds of sudden, highly emotional conversions give you pause — especially when they happen to people with large platforms who depend on clicks and clout.
You may recall the story of 24-year-old British OnlyFans model Lily Phillips, who publicly converted to Christianity and was baptized in December 2025 after going viral for completing the horrendous challenge of sleeping with 101 men in a single day.
I was thrilled to see what initially looked like repentance from Lily. I celebrate when anyone accepts Christ but especially people with grimy, dark backgrounds. If genuine, their testimonies become some of the most powerful, compelling cases for God’s incomprehensible grace — drawing broken people who believe they are unredeemable into the family of God. I love to see it.
But tragically, Lily immediately returned to making, and posting pornographic content, even justifying her pornographic content, saying, “I understand that my faith and my work don’t fit neatly into everyone’s expectations of what a Christian ‘should’ look like,” she recently claimed. “… Christianity, for me, isn’t about pretending I have everything figured out or meeting other people’s standards.”
You won’t ever hear me make the final call on someone’s heart or salvific status. That is God’s role alone. But Scripture does give us instruction about evaluating the legitimacy of our own and others’ faith.
Trees can be judged by their fruit (Matthew 7:15-20). Some seeds sprout quickly and then wither shortly after (Matthew 13:5-6). Faith without works is dead (James 2:17). Obedience — not simply claiming to know the Lord — is the primary indicator of true faith (Matthew 7:21).
These instructions, of course, must be weighed against the grueling process of sanctification — that painfully slow stripping away of our innate bend toward sin. But from what I have witnessed and personally experienced, the process of sanctification doesn’t begin until we let God reign.
When we do, that doesn’t mean we suddenly stop sinning altogether, but it does mean that we’re no longer comfortable in our rebellion. It means we want to stop doing the things that nailed our Savior to a cross — even if it takes years to actually stop doing them.
Time will tell?
I pray that’s the case with Lily — and I pray for the same for Perez Hilton. His public statements of faith in the aftermath of his spiritual encounter initially read, at least to me, as authentic. Not just because he sounds sincere in the videos he’s posted, but because there already seems to be the beginnings of fruits in his life.
Choosing sobriety, taking your kids to church, and setting intentions to put family above work are all promising signs that his professed faith is deeper than the emotional and physical trauma he just survived.
I’m tempted to say time will tell, but it won’t, because, again, hearts can only be read by God. But time will give us clues. Once the emotions of contending with his own death stabilize, once trials and tribulations return, as they always do, once he reckons with the reality that parts of his lifestyle are in rebellion against God — then perhaps we will have a better understanding of what Perez Hilton really believes in.
In the meantime, we should sincerely pray for him. It isn’t easy for a public figure — especially one whose platform is intertwined with the sick and twisted world of Hollywood — to come out as a Christian. I imagine the road ahead of him will be difficult if his faith is sincere. I hope we can ease some of that burden by contending for him in our prayers.
