Over the past few weeks there has been constant media attention to the accusations against Andrew Mountbatten Windsor contained in Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl and his dramatic loss of royal status and privilege as a result of these accusations.
We need to be clear that Andrew continues to deny the accusations made against him and that he has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing. We also need to be aware that serious questions have been raised about the reliability of Giuffre’s posthumous memoirs (see Michael Tracey’s article ‘Should we believe Virginia Giuffre?’ published in Unherd on 30 October 2025).
However, in the court of public opinion none of these caveats seems to matter. ‘Mud sticks,’ and in the case of the former Duke of York, the mud of the accusations about his alleged relationship with Virginia Giuffre, and wider accusations about his relationship with the convicted American child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has meant that someone who, at the time of his marriage to Sarah Ferguson in 1986, seemed to have everything going for him, has now lost everything in a downfall of Shakespearean proportions.
He lost his marriage in 1996, and he has subsequently lost his reputation, his employment, his standing as a member of the royal family and even his home. He has become (whether justly or not) an icon of public disgrace.
For Christians the issue raised by the downfall of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is how we should react in a distinctively Christian way when someone becomes publicly disgraced because of the things that they have done (or are alleged to have done).
In my view there are three key principles, drawn from the teaching of the New Testament that we need to apply.
The first principle is that while we should be ready to say that particular actions were wrong and contrary to the will of God, we must nevertheless never sit in judgement on other people. Jesus was absolutely clear on this point in the Sermon on the Mount: "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgement you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get" (Matthew 7:1-2).
As John Stott explains in his study, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, what Jesus is warning us against in these words is the temptation to censoriousness. In Stott’s words:
‘... To be censorious is to set oneself up as a censor and so to claim the competence and authority to sit in judgement upon one’s fellow men. But if I do this, I am casting both myself and my fellows in the wrong role. Since when have they been my servants, responsible to me? And since when have I been their Lord and their judge? As Paul wrote to the Romans applying the truth of Matthew 7:1 to their situation: ‘Who are you to pass judgement on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls’(14:4). Paul also applied the same truth to himself when he found himself surrounded by hostile detractors: ‘It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgement before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.’ (1 Corinthians 4:4-5). The simple but vital point that Paul is making in these verses is that man is not God. No human being is qualified to be the judge of his fellow humans for we cannot read each other’s hearts or assess each other’s motives. To be censorious is to presume arrogantly to anticipate the Day of judgement, to usurp the prerogatives of the Divine Judge. In fact to try to play God.’
Not only are we not the judge, but we are all among the judged and shall be judged with the greater strictness ourselves if we dare to judge others. Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgement you pronounce you will be judged and the measure you give will be the measure you get.
The rationale should be clear. If we pose as judges, we cannot plead ignorance of the law we claim to be able to administer. If we enjoy occupying the bench, we must not be surprised to find ourselves in the dock. As Paul puts it, ‘Therefore you have no excuse O man, whoever you are, when you judge another; for in passing judgement upon him you condemn yourself, because you the judge are doing the very same things’ (Romans 2:1).
To summarise, we can, and where necessary should, judge the particular actions of others, deciding whether they are right or wrong - this is why we have courts of law, for example, or people in positions of authority. What is forbidden, however, and will bring God’s judgement down upon us, is playing God, by judging others as people. That judgement is the prerogative of God alone, for it is he, and only he, who ‘knows the secrets of the heart’ (Psalm 44:21).
The second principle is that we must not entertain the idea that we are somehow better than some other person who has become the subject of public opprobrium. Jesus makes this clear in his parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14:
‘ He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others: ‘Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.’
As the nineteenth century Evangelical commentator Thomas Scott explains, what Jesus teaches us in this parable is that:
‘The man, who abhors and condemns himself, who approaches God with deep self abasement and reverence of His holy majesty; who looks into his past life, his present conduct, his heart, his duties, with humiliation of soul; who thinks everyone better than himself and must despair, were it not for the gospel message of free salvation; who applies for mercy with a trembling heart and with earnest desires, in the way, and through the name that God hath revealed: this man will sooner be heard and accepted, when he breathes out ‘God be merciful to me a sinner’ than any ostentatious pharisee with his long prayers or boasted services: this is the path to honour, glory, immortality and eternal life; whilst pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. Let us then take heed not to glory in ourselves or to despise others ….
'The best obedience of mere man to the holy commandment of God must leave him under condemnation, instead of entitling him to the inheritance of eternal life. Men may compliment one another as good; but in fact there is none good, no not one, our glorious Emmanuel alone excepted: the more confident they are that they have kept all the commandments, or any of them from their youth, the plainer it is that they lack understanding in the spiritual meaning of them and that they are strangers to repentance, to faith, to their own true character, their own hearts, and their need of a free salvation.‘
The danger we run into when we read the public reports of the misdeeds of some person who has become the object of public disgrace is that we become tempted to entertain the idea that we are somehow better in the eyes of God than that person, because we have not behaved in the way that they have done. This lie in turn encourages us to forget that the only reason we can be acceptable before God is because of his free mercy offered to sinners in Christ and undermines that necessary ‘humiliation of soul’ referred to by Scott which is the only basis on which we can rightly come before God.
We need to ask God to help us to discipline ourselves so that every time we hear about the wrongdoing of someone else our reaction is not ‘God, I thank you that I am not like that’ but ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’ The Devil will always seek to instil in us the pride that will cut us off from God, and he will use the reports of other people’s bad behaviour to this end. We need to ask God to protect us from the Devil’s activity in this regard.
The third principle is that if we can hope that God will show mercy to us, even though we are sinners, then we must also hope that he will show mercy to everyone else, including those who public opinion currently judge to be the ‘bad guys.’
In 1 Timothy 1:15 Paul declares, ‘The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ and in Romans 3:22-24 he likewise declares: ‘For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.’
What Paul tells us in these passages is that through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ all human beings, sinners though they are, have been objectively delivered (‘redeemed’) from the power of sin and death. There is no one for whom Jesus Christ has not acted in this way.
However, this does not mean that everyone will automatically be saved in the sense being rightly related to God in this world and in the world to come. Human beings have to freely accept what Jesus has done for them. In Paul’s language, the redemption antecedently achieved by Jesus Christ has to be ‘received by faith’ (Romans 3:25). Sinners have to accept that they are sinners who need salvation and that God has already met this need in the work of Christ, and Christians need to pray that they will do so.
The key point to grasp is that this is true for every single human being. The Christian message is not, as is sometimes thought, ‘good guys go to heaven.’ The Christian message is ‘bad guys can go to heaven’ provided they accept the truth that they are bad guys, but that God has provided the solution to this problem. The radicalness of Christianity is that it really does mean ‘bad guys can go to heaven’ without qualification concerning how bad they have been.
A German theologian who had met Adolf Hitler was once asked what he was like. His reply was ‘a human being like any other.’ Theologically this was the right answer and meant that if Hitler, prior to his suicide, had accepted his need to salvation and put his faith in Christ, then he too could have been saved - the terrible evil of his deeds notwithstanding.
In conclusion, what we have thought about in this article means that when we hear in the media about the disgrace of some public figure, our reaction, if we are Christians, should not be to sit in judgement over them, or thank God we are not like them, but to thank God that he has provided salvation for them and pray for them that they will open their hearts to receive it.
