THE subtitle of Lower than the Angels: A history of sex and Christianity suggests that there are other possible histories and that this is not the final word on the Church’s tangled and often fraught relationships with sex and sexuality. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch suggests that other versions may exist; indeed, one of his main concerns in this book is to show that the Church has never been univocal in speaking about sex, and that there is not one unbroken line in its approach to marriage and celibacy. He writes: “there is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex. There is a plethora of Christian theologies of sex.”

Like his earlier History of Christianity, Lower than the Angels reviews 3000 years, the first three chapters here discussing the Hellenistic (both Graeco-Roman and Jewish) matrix out of which the Church developed its doctrines and ecclesiologies concerning sex and sexuality. At about half the length of MacCulloch’s earlier panoptic History, this suggests that sex has held a disproportionate place in the Church’s thought, although whether this space has been disproportionately great or small is left for the readers to decide.

MacCulloch argues that such a study is timely, because sex and gender have become prominent in contemporary church conflicts, whereas once disputes centred on matters such as the nature of the eucharist or the Trinity.

Again, as in the earlier volume, MacCulloch provides some refreshing revisions to assumptions that have been made about Christian origins and developments. He sites, for example, emerging monasticism and asceticism in Syria rather than in Egypt, and he provides nuance and context to the more misogynistic pronouncements of the church Fathers. Tertullian’s observation that women were “the devil’s gateway” was, MacCulloch claims, a criticism of lustful men wanting to enter the vagina rather than a sweeping denigration of the female sex.

Indeed, readers searching for the salacious will be mostly disappointed. A history of the Church and sex will dwell mostly on marriage and celibacy, those predominant goods of Christian life. MacCulloch charts the ebbs and flows of their respective popularity and of the characters that they assume throughout Christian history.

There is much in this history which isn’t specifically about sex, or marriage and celibacy, but which furnishes a rich context out of which attitudes and doctrines developed: the several rebirths of classical thought before the Renaissance, the occasional re-emergence of encratic movements, various sexual revolutions, and the development of the individual self and of homosexual identities in the wake of the Enlightenment.

On this last, MacCulloch contends, against much modern scholarship, that gay identity developed before it was pathologised rather than that it was constructed as a pathology when it was first labelled “homosexuality” in the 19th century.

Even in such a generous and wide-ranging treatment, MacCulloch focuses on some histories more than others. This is largely a history of the Western Church, although the earlier chapters do consider the Eastern Empire and Church and the latter’s prominent theologians. Likewise, with various excursuses such as to revolutionary France or mainland Europe in the Reformation, this is largely a history of the effects of doctrine and teaching on England and the British Isles, and on the effects of those attitudes on British colonies and former colonies up to the present day.

This is a book for the generalist rather than the specialist; Church historians and theologians who work on Christian approaches to sex and sexuality will be familiar with much of this material, though they might, as I have suggested, be refreshed by some of MacCulloch’s wry and original contributions to what has often been well-trodden ground. But, as a compendious and rigorous guide to the histories which underlie current Church debates on sex and gender, this work is invaluable. MacCulloch writes persuasively and with a lightness of touch which illumines his subject.

In his last two chapters — 1950 to the present — MacCulloch writes that he must “abandon any spurious claim to historical objectivity, having become a participant observer in events”, but he is, despite the disagreements over sex and sexuality which mark contemporary ecclesiologies, cautiously hopeful. As he reminds the reader in his concluding chapter, “A Story Without an Ending”, “if sex is definitely a problem, it is also great fun.”

Dr Penelope Cowell Doe is the author of Queering the Church: The theological and ecclesial potential of failure (SCM Press, 2024).

Lower than the Angels: A history of sex and Christianity
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Allen Lane £35
(978-0-241-40093-7)
Church Times Bookshop £28

Read an interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch here.