SEX is perhaps the last thing that you would expect Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch to want to write about, especially in relation to the Church. Having grown up in a clerical family, he set off to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather in the mid-1980s, and was ordained deacon.
The problem, though, was that he was gay, and had a partner, and was disinclined to dissemble. The subsequent row about his priesting got into the tabloids, and, in the end, he withdrew.
He says now that he can look back on it with “a certain degree of equanimity”. But, at the time, he says, it was “really traumatic. If you if you want to lose weight, I encourage you to not get ordained in that sort of fashion. It was very, very difficult.”
There was, though, a television series on sex about ten years ago. He turned down the idea of a spin-off book, but says that, now in retirement, he was persuaded to return to the topic by his agent, Felicity Bryan: “She nerved me to do it. And I’m very pleased that she did. I think it’s an important book to do at this moment.”
MacCulloch’s output can be divided into two genres. There is the meticulous searching-out of primary sources in his favoured Tudor period, culminating in his biography of Thomas Cromwell. (There is a transcript and recording of his conversation with Hilary Mantel in the Church Times archive.)
The other aspect of his writing he describes as “what you might call windy-generalisation books about huge areas”. In 2009, he published the 1100-page History of Christianity: The first 3000 years (Features, 11 September 2009); and now, after three years of reading and a year of writing, comes Lower Than the Angels: A history of sex and Christianity, a mere 500 pages, though with another 150 pages of notes and index.
When we spoke about it at the end of last month, I suggested that the topic did not conform to the usual linear view of history, since people periodically referred back to the Bible as a source book and guide.
DM: Well, the Bible isn’t a book, as we know. It’s a library of books with a huge babble of opinions in it. So you can’t look to the Bible and get a Christian theology of sex. It’s just not possible.
There is a big mistake hanging around the Bible, that it is “the word of God”. I’m not sure why anyone has ever thought that, because it is clear from the Bible that Jesus is the Word of God. So, the Bible is a commentary on that Word of God, and it draws on previous texts which Christians have seen as part of the story.
The Jews were already disagreeing about sex before you get the theological hand grenade, which is Jesus throwing various new opinions into the story.
There are two big things which Jesus did say about sex: one, that marriage has to be monogamous and between a man and a woman. Well, conservatives rather like the sound of that. But the other is: no divorce at all. And conservatives are often a little worried by that, particularly Evangelical American Protestants, because they frequently get divorced.
So, the Church has always had to cope with the disconcerting person that is Jesus. And, right from the start, it started disagreeing with Jesus. The earliest Christian texts we have are the genuine epistles of Paul of Tarsus, and he disagrees with Jesus about divorce. He says, to paraphrase, Jesus says no divorce, but actually I say in these circumstances you can get divorced.
Then Matthew’s Gospel, which is about four decades later, also slips in a qualification. Jesus in that Gospel says no divorce — except in case of adultery. That’s an editorial addition, quite clearly.
So, it is not possible to read off a clear Christian theology of sex or marriage from the Bible.
PH: Are you able to give us a a grand sweep through the history?
DM: Well, the vital starting point is that there are two starting points. There is a Greek starting point and a Hebrew starting point. They’ve got different cultural assumptions. They have different things to say about sex — radically different in some cases.
There is the Greek tolerance, or embracing, actually, of same-sex relations —nothing like today’s same-sex relations, because they’re lifestyle-specific: it’s something you do at one stage of your life in a general heterosexual career.
But that’s something that the Jews hated, absolutely hated. And so Christianity is torn between those things. It plumps very strongly for hostility on that one.
Then marriage: the Jews are polygynous. They do have one-to-one-couple marriages, but they are also very happy with polygyny, and their biggest heroes are polygynous: Abraham, King Solomon. . . And Jesus turned away from that. He said, No: marriage is about monogamy, and Christians say, Well, Jesus said it — although in so many other ways Christians have ignored what Jesus said.
There are all sorts of complicated ways in which the story goes forward from Jesus. It goes mostly through Paul, because that’s the sort of Christianity which has survived. It goes into Syria, but also into the Mediterranean, where monogamy is the way that the Greeks and the Romans structured their society.
To go for polygyny would have been disastrous as Christians expanded into the Mediterranean: they’ve got to do what the Romans and the Greeks expect in terms of marriage. So, the future became monogamous. And also, let’s face it, anti same-sex relations. Those are parts of the story.
The next big thing is the discovery of monasticism and the ascetic life. There is really nothing that looks like a monastery in either a Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. Where’s it come from? Syria, second century. That suggests that it’s actually imported into Christianity from where the Syrians trade: in India, where they see Hindu monasteries, they see Buddhist monasteries.
So, that’s the story looking forward from the second century of the Common Era: the ascetic life, the celibate life, the virgin’s life, are better than marriage — something that modern Christians have conveniently forgotten.
Thus, the normal Christian life for half the Church’s history has been celibacy. And marriage? Not so big, not so good: it’s too messy, it’s too close to sex.
And the other forgotten fact about Christianity is that, in the first 600 years in some places, 1200 years in others, there was no such thing as a wedding in church.
It’s something about which the modern Church argues endlessly: can people of the same sex get married in church? Well, the fact is that no one got married in church for centuries.
The big fat book the Church of England recently produced, Living in Love and Faith, which says a lot about marriage, never once mentions in 487 pages that there was no such thing as a church wedding for century after century. That seems to me to be a deliberate act of forgetting.
PH: So, you’ve got us through the first millennium. . .
DM: I’ll take it on then, shall I? Well, by 1000 CE, the Church had clearly divided. It was threefold by that stage: the non-Chalcedonian Churches of the East; what we call the Orthodox Churches; and the Western Latin Church.
And now we’ve got a new fact about the Western Latin Church: that it imposed universal celibacy on its clergy, something which no other branch of the Christian Church had ever done.
You had the specialist celibacy of monks and nuns: there’s a lot of that. But here, for the first time, in about the tenth century, the church authorities were saying [that] no clergy — no priest, no deacon, no bishop — can get married. And, for the next 500 years, that was supposed to be the norm, though it wasn’t in practice.
But then the 16th-century Protestant Reformation seized on that, and made it perhaps the most important thing about the great rebellion against the Western Latin Church.
We look to Luther, and we think of justification by faith alone — which sounds pretty technical nowadays — but, actually, getting rid of clerical celibacy was the big thing, the thing that all Protestants agreed on without qualification.
That made a huge difference. Now, it’s not celibacy which is central and the norm. It is marriage, and celibacy is even regarded with a good deal of suspicion by Protestants. They got rid of virtually every monastery that they could.
And you’ve got to look hard to find a better model than the Holy Family. I suggest in the book, and I think I’m right, that the model then becomes the clergy family, the sort of family I grew up in.
All right, you don’t need to be as high-minded as the parson and his family, don’t need as many books on the shelves, but that gives you the model of how people can have families in an honourable, Christian, chaste way, and with all the sort of moral seriousness that I can testify is part of the clerical upbringing — and also the wish to interfere in other people’s lives. So, the clerical family: a big discovery, big invention for Protestants.
Of course, Eastern Orthodox Christians had known about the clerical family all through all this. Their parish clergy are married almost automatically, married with families.
So, it’s a very different story by the 16th century and, I feel, really with the clerical family, who brought us up into the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
PH: Are there any further notable developments within the Church?
DM: The big extra fact in the West is the Enlightenment, and everything that accompanied the Enlightenment that wasn’t actually the Enlightenment.
And part of that was the privatisation of sex. No longer did people necessarily look to the Church for everything they thought and did about sex. That’s a hugely important development. The Church had lost this monopoly, which it had created during the tenth, 11th, 12th centuries. It had had a good innings, about 800 or 900 years.
But it wasn’t a necessary part of Christianity to boss people around in their private lives in sex. And that was the great discovery of 18th-century Europeans: that you could actually make choices about your sexual identity: you didn’t need to accept the clichés that the Church had constructed from the Bible and custom and tradition.
Even Christianity took up the rhetoric. Evangelicalism is a religion of choice: “Choose to turn to Jesus to make him your personal Saviour.” Instead of being a rather corporate thing, Christianity now becomes individual. And some individuals said: “Well, I’m actually not attracted to people of the opposite sex. I’m attracted to people of my own sex. That’s my choice; that’s my identity.”
So — perhaps mischievously — I say that Evangelicalism and modern homosexuality are part of the same phenomenon.
PH: Which pushes us into the 20th, 21st centuries. Is there anything particularly significant that we should note on this grand scale?
DM: Lots of new things: a larger role for women. Women discovered that through various social causes, starting with the abolition of slavery at the end of the 18th century, but then there were waves of greater personal choice for women, which are still going on. We’re in the middle of this process.
One of these other extraneous things is the development of Brazilian rubber plantations in the 19th century, which meant reliable contraception in the form of condoms. It’s the beginning of a huge industry of being able to control your own procreation and your own fertility.
Now, in the West, and I think across the world, most sexual, heterosexual acts do not lead to conception. These have been prevented by mechanical means and latterly medical means, the pill, etc. That’s a huge revolution in how people organise their lives, and it’s something which the Church has only partly grappled with yet.
The Church of England, or the Anglican Communion, has a rather forward-looking, pioneering part to play. It’s one of the most remarkable things about the 20th-century Anglican Communion: that it moved from fierce condemnations of contraception to “OK, well, it’s all right in marriage” in 30 years. That’s very, very quick.
It’s down to a set of public schoolboys who were bishops talking to doctors who’d been public schoolboys, I think; and through several Lambeth Conferences, this amazing U-turn was done.
The Roman Catholic Church didn’t like it. Its hierarchy still doesn’t. But it is a real revolution: a moral revolution based on a physical revolution.
PH: This question of the privatisation of sex: as a historian, you must be pushed to find evidence of what couples in any period in history do in their spare time. What evidence base do you have for the whole of this book?
DM: A very good question. Most of the time, people do not tell you what they’re actually doing. They conform to the clichés that they think are going to get them through life and stop them being interfered with.
But, the more sources you have, the more that consensus breaks down. I’ve looked at literature as well as legal texts, as well as sermons, as well as theological works. And the law is not always church law, and it may have other priorities to churchpeople.
Printing makes such a difference, because there are so many ways of writing down for the first time what you actually think, beyond the control of censors.
There are the sorts of evidence produced by anthropology, by social history. The big example is the way in which [Pope] Paul VI dismally failed to persuade the Catholic laity to listen to him about contraception.
The demographic facts just show it to you: Catholic families got smaller during the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s of the 20th century, and they’ve gone on doing so. In other words, they’ve conformed to the general Western patterns of family rather than to what the church authorities wanted them to do. That’s just incontrovertible.
And it was such a shock for poor Paul VI when he saw this. I think it ruined his papacy. He just didn’t do anything of any significance once he’d lost on Humanae Vitae.
PH: You say that the first evidence of a church wedding was in 676. . .
DM: That was when the first authority made it compulsory. And that’s because they want to keep the Church distinct from Islam.
The best way of making a difference between Christians and Muslims is that Christians have monogamy. “So, come to church, and we’ll make sure you’re monogamous.”
PH: Tell me more about clerical celibacy.
DM: It’s clear that, in the first few centuries of the Church, most clergy were married. And that’s the case up to the fourth century. Then, monks come along. They’re not, of course, clergy to start with. So, there is a creative confusion between clergy and monks, which is resolved in favour of monasticism — and the gradual supposition is that the clergy should not be married.
But it’s very gradual. And there is a sort of middle position, whereby clergy got married, had kids, and, in later life, it was quietly assumed that they had stopped having sex within their marriages while still being married. No one was really going to investigate that too closely.
But, by the eighth and ninth century, there’s far more pressure from monks to become priests, and that affected the whole clerical order by the 11th century. This is a very strong ideology of preserving the purity of the mass, which is the action of the priest. And so, to preserve purity, keep priests away from sex.
That’s that gradual development in the West. But all the time, we have to note that, in the East, it’s not. There’s a career process in the East: in the Orthodox Church, if you’re a parish priest, you’re going to get married and have a family. If you’re going to go for a bishop, you become a monk, and you go up that route.
PH: Let’s move on to same-sex relationships.
DM: The Church has not been in favour of these at any stage, or not really, with the exception of monasticism, which is an interesting phenomenon. It’s big explosion, a big expansion in the fourth and fifth century, which is more or less precisely at the same time that the Greek or Roman world started feeling negative about same-sex relationships.
There is a suspicion that some of that same-sex emotional energy was transferred to the monastic life, and had to be dealt with. You had to find boundaries: you don’t want any sort of sex within the monastery. But what do you do with intense male friendship?
Well, you have to control it in some ways, and the Orthodox controlled it in a very interesting way, by creating a ceremony of brother-making, adelphopoeisis, which some 20th-century gay historians mistook for marriage. No, it’s a very careful setting of spiritual boundaries around an intense relationship.
That’s about the only example of a positive attitude to same-sex relationships until you get to the 12th-century Western Church, and the huge expansion of monasticism with something very distinctive about it: for the first time in centuries, the people who were becoming monks and nuns were adults, grown-ups.
During the seventh, eighth centuries, most people going into monasteries were kids. They were children given by their families to the monastic life; so they would never experience sex.
But the people who became Cistercians, Premonstratensians, the Friars — these are grown-ups who probably have experienced sex. So you’ve got to do something with that.
And there’s a lot of same-sex literature in the 12th-century Western Church written by monks, who talk about their emotions. And they have to build that — and they do it seemingly quite successfully — into the renewal of monastic life.
The famous one, of course, is Aelred of Rievaulx, who’s excited a lot of gay people in the 20th and 21st centuries — but no: he’s writing about a very specific monastic situation, on friendship and so on.
But let’s face it: on the whole, Christianity has not been positive about same-sex relationship.
In fact, the Western Church, as you may notice in the book, invented the most horrible myth about what it called sodomy. It was about little Baby Jesus on Christmas Eve, who refused to come into the world until all the sodomites had been destroyed by God. And so God dutifully destroyed all the sodomites, and Baby Jesus could go to Bethlehem and be born. Isn’t that monstrous?
PH: You write that this was part of a regular Christmas sermon.
DM: Yes, on Christmas Day. It’s funny how this has disappeared from school nativity plays, isn’t it? You have children becoming shepherds and angels and things, but not sodomites. And this story is very long-lived. We don’t quite know who made this monstrous nonsense up, but the Friars took to it in a big way, and they are the preachers of the medieval Church. So you get it scattered across the medieval world in the West.
It sort of died in the 16th century; but you look around the nastier corners of the internet, and you’ll find this story still there lurking.
PH: Does this not make the present liberal attitude towards same-sex relations an anomaly in historical terms?
DM: In historical terms, yes. But then the historical record of Christianity is a mere 3000 years. This is like an evening gone in human history. So we’re in the very early stages of trying to understand human sexuality.
And in my lifetime now, I’m rather pleased with myself being an openly gay man in the 1970s and 1980s. And now I’m completely outflanked by trans identities, the world of non-binary. I’m doing my best to understand it — rather as conscientious heterosexual people tried to understand me in 1970; but it’s a bit of a struggle.
And, heaven knows, the Church has a duty to be very careful about its way forward in all this. It’s made big historical mistakes before, but it must be open to the possibility that human life presents new interesting variants, new challenges, new shapes. That’s the way human life is, and, you might say, this is how the Holy Spirit works. We shouldn’t think the Holy Spirit is something confined in a box and brought out for the ordination of clergy, but something much more disruptive than that, as Pentecostals have reminded us in the past 120 years.
PH: What has surprised, and pleased or shocked you most in in this research?
DM: Well, I think that the great sodomite massacre of Christmas Eve is the most surprising and shocking thing — which I had no idea about, just came across a casual reference in a book on medieval sexuality, and then I started probing, and it’s all over the place.
But the surprises can be quite good surprises. I started this phase of four years of research with a fairly negative attitude towards Paul of Tarsus and Augustine. There’s a sort of Western liberal cliché that they made everything nasty and horrid.
But you read what they say about marriage, and, all right, it’s not what I might say, but 1 Corinthians is full of fascinating things, particularly the astonishing idea that, in a marriage, the couple have equal sexual responsibilities to each other. Now, that’s so unlike most ancient society, where the man has privilege and the woman has to go along with it. No, Paul says startlingly: they have equal duties to each other, sexual duties.
The Church has never been very happy about that line. The Orthodox have sort of spiritualised it out of the way completely. But the West actually hung on to that idea.
And other unlikely heroes in my story are Western canon lawyers of the 12th, 13th, and 14th century. They picked this up, and all those families in the Christian world were pretty cross that they enforced this in law — because, after all, virtually all marriages in Christian history have been a contract between two men: the father of the bride and the father of the groom.
But Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 said, No: it’s the couple. Couples have rather liked this in history, but the Church has not always reminded them of it.
And that’s why I like Augustine. He wrote a very carefully balanced work, De Bono Congiuali — “On the good of marriage” — which is full of things we might not like today: about how sinful people are, and how sinful Adam and Eve were, but hung on to the idea that marriage is actually part of God’s creation. It’s not something satanic; it’s not something caused by the Fall, which is the attitude of Orthodox Christianity.
In the West, thanks to Augustine, we’ve hung on to the idea that, although marriages may be flawed — because human beings are terribly flawed after the Fall — there is something which is God-given in them.
PH: You’ve already written a history of Christianity; so this is your second bite. I’m just wondering whether there’s this is not just a subsection of this history, but more an explanation of some elements in the bigger history.
DM: I think that’s right. It’s as if I had simply walked around the building and looked at it from a different viewpoint, which freed me from having to do everything. I mean, in the History of Christianity, a lot of it has to be, inevitably, institutional.
And some of this is institutional, but the institutional history is here with a particular purpose: to see how an institution interacts with the problem of being human.
It’s not just Christianity with added sex. It is a way of exploring the same themes in a different way. After all, I did the same thing about silence: I looked at the whole history of Christianity through the prism of silence and/or lack of silence, or bad silence, good silence.
So, I’ve got form on this: it was silence there; it’s sex this time. Can’t think of another one. Perhaps food? Who knows? But I may just sit back and enjoy the garden after this.
Lower Than the Angels: A history of sex and Christianity, is published by Allen Lane at £35 (Church Times Bookshop special price £28). Review here.
Professor MacCulloch will be appearing at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature in Winchester, 28 February to 2 March 2025.