Crash Course

Lower Than the Angels weighs in at five hundred pages (not counting notes); the account of the churches and sex is embedded in a crash course in the history of Christianity and cultures in which it emerged and developed. A non-academic can skip the footnotes and enjoy MacCulloch’s writing, although they may wonder anew in each chapter when he’s going to get to the sex.

The background material, however, shows that the author has done his homework. Like many other medievalists, my first reaction to such a broad history is to cringe, because the medieval period so often becomes a caricature, a “before” against which the excitement and change of an “after” can be seen. The author, however, is well informed about the medieval period, even though he possibly underestimates the existence of self-defined identities at the time.

Professor Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch is a distinguished historian of Christianity who started out working on the English church in the sixteenth century and expanded to encompass the entire history of the Christian churches. The book is surely shaped by two aspects of MacCulloch’s own life. As he says, “We are all participant observers in matters of gender and sexuality.”

First, he grew up as the son of a Church of England clergyman in a rural parish and was active in the church himself, receiving ordination as a deacon. That aspect of his identity ran head-on into the other aspect.

As a gay man who came of age and came out in the late 1960s and early ’70s, he found that efforts to make the Church of England more welcoming had gotten nowhere and resigned following a homophobic (my word, not his) synod vote in 1988. This experience no doubt contributes to the sympathy he shows in the book toward women and LGBQ people (unfortunately somewhat less for the T).

One of the most striking points in the book overall — besides the big takeaway of “it’s complicated” — is the deep mark that Augustinianism has left on Western Christendom’s ideas about sex. The idea that sex for pleasure is somehow a bad thing, while sex can be justified by the need to bring children into the world, is part and parcel of Christian teaching across denominations. It’s an important part of my own research on medieval sexuality.

Thus it is salutary to be reminded that this attitude is not a biblical one. As MacCulloch writes, “Centuries of Christian pronouncements making marriage a second-best to celibacy do originate in Paul — but not in any link to procreation.” Of course, many Protestant denominations distrust celibacy, in part because they perceive a certain impurity around sex that can be kept at bay by marriage — especially a marriage without contraception, so that the sex cannot be thought of as being simply for the sake of pleasure.

However, Paul and other early Christians, believing that the second coming of Christ was imminent, did not concern themselves with perpetuating the species. Early Christianity essentially was an interlude in a line of continuity from Hellenistic culture (Jewish, Greek, and Roman) via Augustine to the present, in which the bearing of children was key. For Paul, MacCulloch argues, the sexual aspect of marriage was important because it made the couple “one flesh” in a more egalitarian way than Jesus himself had taught.

Infidelity and Impurity

Also leaving a deep mark on later cultures was the use of sexual infidelity or other misconduct as a metaphor for infidelity to God. Not a Christian innovation, this way of thinking can be traced to the Hebrew prophets.

In a similar way, sex with outsiders, even as a part of marriage, was connected with idolatry — it was Solomon’s foreign wives who led to his downfall, and by the end of the Middle Ages, manuscript illustrators were depicting these idolatrous wives as black. This connection has shored up the walls between in-groups and out-groups for millennia, as has the general conflation of foreignness or difference with sexual deviance, deployed against early Christians themselves by Roman moralists.

Hebrew scripture also bequeathed particular concerns with the sexed body. Christianity did not take up the practice of circumcision, and it only took up the idea that menstruating women were to be deemed impure unofficially. But it did adopt wholeheartedly the condemnation of sex between two males, which was considered acceptable as a life-cycle phenomenon in other ancient cultures. On the other hand, Christianity chose Greco-Roman monogamy, or a stricter form of it, over Judaic polygyny, arguably improving the status of women.

To consider that the original story behind the Gospels may have involved an illegitimate birth, as MacCulloch suggests modern scholarship ought to do, is to realize the radical nature of Christian claims about the purity of the Virgin Mary. Patristic theologians as well as later ones had to explain away the brothers of Jesus by saying that they were Joseph’s sons by an earlier marriage or that the Bible meant “cousins” when it said “brothers.”

The veneration of Mary provided a feminine aspect that Judaism had had to create with concepts like the Shekhinah (divine presence) or Hokhma (divine wisdom). This feminine presence, however, underscored the impossibility of anyone else ever achieving the pinnacle of ideal womanhood, as both a virgin and a mother.

Reforming Sexuality

MacCulloch is at his best when he gets to the Reformation, holding that Martin Luther’s rejection of clerical celibacy was more significant than his theological direction. Protestantism also brought with it a search for married exemplars, as opposed to the saints who were largely virginal. It even found such exemplars among polygynous patriarchs, although the brief experiment with polygyny by the Münster Anabaptists was a failure.

If the Reformation was, as MacCulloch suggests, a dispute over a shared Augustinian theological legacy, there was also a shared basis to the various churches’ approaches to marriage: they agreed “that marriage should remain the business of all society and of Church institutions.”

This view contrasts with a situation that existed before the eleventh century in which marriage was much more of a private affair, although the church still had opinions on it. Such an outlook persists today even in highly secularized societies, in the idea that the state should decide what marriages are valid and that certain benefits (or harms, as in the case of some tax systems) should accrue to those who are married.

In medieval Latin Christendom, a marriage could be created by two individuals saying particular words to each other. After the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, Catholic marriage required a priest, and in Protestant jurisdictions, it required either a clergyman or a civic official. By the eighteenth century, civil marriage was spreading across Europe and the state had a say.

Ironically, MacCulloch points out,

same-sex couples throughout much of Western Christianity are now in much the same position as heterosexual married couples were in the second-century Church: following a civil ceremony formalizing their relationship, they can come along to their worship community and receive a blessing.

MacCulloch argues that the regulation of marriage and of sex in general was not merely imposed from the top down during the Reformation but aligned with “the general population feeling sympathetic to a change in sexual standards.” In an era when more people listened to the teachings of the churches, it’s hard to know whether the chicken or the egg came first.

By the eighteenth century, of course, people listened a good deal less. One of the big changes at this time, flying in the face of church teaching, was the emergence of what he claims can be given the label “‘homosexuality’ or gay identity without complication,” even if those terms had not yet emerged, which “represented a coherent self-recognition, rather than the miscellaneous collection of deviant acts that Western Christianity labelled sodomy.”

It is hard to argue that fifteenth-century Florence, for example, did not see any coherent self-recognition among men who had sex with other men, but only a miscellaneous collection of acts; or that there were no moral panics in an earlier period. But something certainly did change at this point in time.

Angry Alarms

In the modern era, MacCulloch traces the effects of Western definitions and prohibitions on the rest of the world. He argues that Islamic reform movements like Wahhabism and Deobandism, although they were a reaction against imperialism and intended to defend Islam from the West, might “effectively adopt . . . Victorian prudery and family values,” or at least strive to establish their own set of strict values to compete.

The book ends on a somewhat pessimistic note, particularly with regard to same-sex activity, as leadership in many international churches, as well as the weight of numbers of regular congregants, moves outside Europe and churches experience “an angry alarm at what the liberal West is saying and doing about sex and sexual expression.” The author compares the way Christian and Muslim regimes in Africa compete as to who can be most hostile to homosexuality to the way Catholics and Protestants competed as to who could be the most punitive toward witches.

Churchmen who feared that the widespread ability of contraception, which allowed the dissociation of sex from reproduction, would lead to arguments for the acceptance of homosexuality have been proved right. Today, worldwide, “the most easily heard tone in religion (not just in Christianity) is one of angry conservatism.” This is an attitude that “centres on a profound shift in gender roles traditionally given a religious significance.”

The one area where MacCulloch seems to have a blind spot is trans history. He repeatedly refers to stories of female-bodied people in male monasteries as “disguised as men,” or to women in the modern era who “decided to take advantage of the greater life-opportunities offered to men, and to present themselves as males.” He ignores the recent scholarship that raises the possibility that these people had an identity other than “cross-dressing woman.”

As the author discusses ideas with which he does not agree elsewhere in the book, the absence of any reflection at all on these questions is striking. He finds it “telling that there are no complementary stories of male ascetics passing as women,” but just why is it so telling? Eunuchs are certainly a good example of “gender or sexual ambiguity, right up to a literal reconstruction of sex and identity,” but there are others.

Sexual Battlegrounds

Sex has played a major role in a variety of splits within Christianity: between those groups who have come to be considered as heretics (gnostics, Marcionites, Cathars, etc.) and those who won out and have therefore come to be considered orthodox; between the Western and Eastern churches; between Protestants and Catholics.

In none of these cases was sex the main or precipitating factor. But different practices, with different philosophical and theological justifications, allowed sex to become a battleground and a means of casting the other as not just different but also depraved.

Currently sex is a point of tension within several major churches: the deprecation of Pope Francis for his “wokeness” by conservative Catholics was in part because of his perceived lenience toward LGBTQ people, and the reasoning behind the current schism in the Anglican church is much the same. In previous generations, questions about divorce or contraception served as potential breaking points.

My Irish students, mostly cultural Catholics, were in primary school when the country voted to legalize same-sex marriage and abortion. In their parents’ generation, however, unmarried pregnant women were still being sent to unspeakable mother and baby homes and having their infants taken from them. That generation also had their attitudes to the church shaped by the clerical sexual abuse scandal.

The universalizing morality of Christianity — the idea that it does indeed have the right to judge, to make rules for everyone — seems likely to ensure that sex will remain a bone of contention in the future, both within and between churches and between Christians and non-Christians.