THAT the Virgin Mary appears less in the Bible than in the Qur’an was one of the startling observations in Start the Week: Sex and Christianity (Radio 4, Monday of last week). Fleshing out an argument for less judgement in relation to sex, the historian Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch (Feature, 20 September), ordained deacon in 1987, the classicist and General Synod member Dr Helen King (Feature, 4 October), and the poet Ruth Padel interrogated Christian texts and traditions. Eve “was on a quest for knowledge”, Dr King said. “That’s why she took the fruit from the tree. She shouldn’t be condemned. She should be praised.”
Offered as a rebalancing of the Bible’s “stories written by men for men”, by the presenter Amanda Vickery, the programme tilted more to Professor MacCulloch than to the three women. “Back to Diarmaid,” Vickery directed, as her guests discussed the teaching of Jesus on marriage, and the radicalism of championing one-to-one lifelong marriages in the Eastern Mediterranean context of polygamy.
“Jesus didn’t say a thing about same-sex relationships,” Professor MacCulloch said. The ambivalent portrayal of David and Jonathan’s relationship was about the transfer of power, he continued. Power also accounted for the scant mention of Mary in three of the four Gospels, as the Early Church wrestled with questions of succession, and whether Jesus’s heirs should be his family or the men chosen as apostles.
Sex and Christianity is unlikely to be on the playlist of the 70 per cent of white Evangelical Protestants who voted for Trump. In The Christians Who See Trump as Their Saviour (BBC Sounds, Sunday), the BBC’s religion editor, Aleem Maqbool, examined surveys indicating that white Protestants and Latino Roman Catholics supported the President-elect as a bulwark against social progressivism, not for the man himself.
“One of the crown jewels of British cultural life,” was Eleanor Oldroyd’s description of cathedral choirs in Sunday Feature: Cathedral music in crisis (Radio 3, Sunday). A clergy daughter and a singer at her local church in Barnes, south-west London, Oldroyd had skin in the game. Focusing on a Cathedral Music Trust report warning of a choral crisis, she first travelled to Exeter Cathedral, with its 1000-year tradition of “playing melody day and night to the praise of God”, supported by a fee-paying choir school. Oldroyd then went to Sheffield, which disbanded its choir in 2020 to follow an outreach model of cathedral singing.
The Precentor at Exeter, Canon James Mustard, advised: “Know the people with resources on your patch” to create a trust fund similar to the one that covers half of Exeter’s £440,000 annual music budget. The Dean, the Very Revd Abigail Thompson, spoke of bringing music lessons to Sheffield schools with no piano. Sheffield Cathedral’s former singers have become the Steel City Choristers, and perform at churches all over the city: “The ones with a worship-band tradition, they lapped it up and were quick to invite us back.” Demographics do not have to be destiny, but so often they are.