The Church's Take on Sex Has Always Been Complicated

The Atlantic

29-04-2025

Over many centuries, interpretations of the Bible have led kings and elected leaders alike to, among other things, set prohibitions on divorce, criminalize homosexuality, and ban contraception. Theological rules still affect people's private lives—whether they are Christian or not—in modern America, where biblical values are often cited in efforts to outlaw abortion and restrict gender expression. Now a new book on the stormy relationship between God and lust has arrived from the scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch, who argues that Christian ideas about sex have been 'startlingly varied' and not always so inherently punitive.
MacCulloch, a professor (now emeritus) at the University of Oxford since 1995, is a preeminent historian of Christianity. He does not shy away from dense topics, having attempted to distill centuries of debate into lengthy books about Thomas Cromwell and the Protestant Reformation, for example. If this makes him sound stuffy, be assured that he is not. In his newest book, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, he wryly remarks: 'If sex is definitely a problem, it is also great fun.' Often, MacCulloch writes, the Bible is a 'blunt instrument' that is not necessarily ideal for such a slippery topic as lust—and on that subject, he is both sincere and playful.
Although he doesn't address it explicitly in his new book, MacCulloch is gay; after he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England in the 1980s, he decided against the priesthood because of the Church's attitude toward homosexuality. Today, he describes his relationship to the Anglican Church as that of a 'candid friend of Christianity'—one who is not afraid of taking a wrecking ball to preconceived ideas of religious history. 'I think religion has got everything appallingly wrong and it has been terrible for us in sexual terms,' he told New Humanist when promoting his 2015 television show, Sex and the Church. But because Christian views of sexuality—already varied across denominations—have fluctuated over time, MacCulloch argues, it might therefore be possible for even the most stringent Christian institutions to evolve and display an elastic tolerance yet again.
In Lower Than the Angels, MacCulloch describes several issues across Protestant and Catholic history that today appear settled but were once subject to intense clerical debate. Not all Christian clergy members were in favor of the priesthood becoming celibate, nor of declaring contraception to be immoral—such institutional decisions were always political, MacCulloch argues. Allowing room for such perspectives is part of MacCulloch's project, as he aims to unsettle those who think there has always been a 'consistent view on sex in a seamless and infallible text known as the Bible.'
Of course, this means some critics will find MacCulloch's methodology flawed from the outset. To him, the Bible is a 'library,' a collection of enduring texts that are not necessarily the inerrant word of God. He believes that the book is meant to be interpreted much like a living document, rather than how an originalist might approach the Constitution. (His reading of King David and his close companion Jonathan may be particularly irksome to fundamentalists; MacCulloch argues that the text fairly clearly suggests an intimate physical relationship between the two.) In this way, MacCulloch diverges from Christian orthodoxy on many points. For instance, he argues that Jesus was hardly a family man, and that his Gospel held no special fondness for the modern nuclear family: 'I have come to set a man against his father,' Christ said, invoking a passage from the Book of Micah.
In the early Church, divergences between Christian theology and Roman law created anxieties about the role of women—for example, the power that widows, whom the nascent Church encouraged not to remarry, might wield. Around the first century C.E., a few churches attempted to restrict women's movements and political activities. Still, ordinary women were able to negotiate some power for themselves. MacCulloch suggests that, for female believers and mystics, abstaining from sex was a means of exerting agency in a world that wanted to marry them off. He delights in chronicling examples of such figures, many of whom were denounced as heretics for their bizarre epiphanies. (One medieval Viennese celibate described herself 'swallowing the foreskin of Christ' in a vision.)
But no one proved to be entirely safe from the threat of sexual panic. The fourth-century theologian Jerome argued that even sex within marriage could be contaminated, such that (in MacCulloch's words) 'a man who loves his wife excessively is an adulterer.' One was expected to be devoted to God above all, and some Church leaders considered mandated restraint to be the only way of truly becoming close to God. In modern Christianity, contraception became similarly divisive within the Catholic Church—and some laypeople and priests were disappointed by papal decrees against its use. But the Church has at times changed its teachings on moral issues, including some that would seem baked into the text of the Bible itself. Across Christian denominations, views on divorce have been anything but stable—even as state and Church officials have searched for ways to defend the institution of heterosexual marriage, many Christians now get divorced without fear of eternal damnation.
MacCulloch tells the stories of many Christians who went against popular belief. Some 18th-century Moravians interpreted the Protestant emphasis on faith over action as a sign that they were free to sin, because they were already forgiven by God. (These sins included extramarital sex and even some minor homosexual behavior.) These examples are meant to show us the mutability of religion: that nothing was (or is) certain, and that numerous institutional beliefs may be the result of centuries of misreadings and willful disengagement with doctrine. Many of MacCulloch's examples hinge on issues of translation, literalism, and poetic metaphor—and what modern fundamentalists leave out of their interpretations. For instance, he notes how little the Bible says about homosexuality compared with how much it says about greed, even though contemporary religious thinkers focus far more on the former.
Institutions often teeter between freedom and restriction—and these oscillations are what make history interesting. What MacCulloch wants is for modern readers to put down their certainty, even if they're not entirely won over by his wide-ranging claims: 'What passes for theological and ethical reflection in many Christian quarters is an exercise in ignoring the reality of present imbalances that disfigure divine creation, usually through strident repetition of old certainties,' he writes. It's not that queer Christians were actually a commonplace, frequently accepted group, but that even small deviations from doctrine are instructive for brokering more fruitful encounters between religious bodies and those who seem categorically outside them. If some issues that now appear settled were once up for debate, might the floor be reopened to consider modern perspectives?
Read: The greatest contribution of Christianity
MacCulloch takes on both Protestant and Catholic history with bombast, stretching his theories thin across thousands of years. This is always a danger with wide historical surveys, and MacCulloch's final section, on contemporary Church history—passages on the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandals, the Gay Christian Movement's fight for acceptance, and the relationship between homophobia and colonialism—ends up feeling rushed as a result.
But when MacCulloch does take the time to hook into case studies of Christians bucking consensus, he provides moving stories of how believers can let their guard down and move through the world with humility. In one chapter, MacCulloch gives a stunning example of a woman who transcended prejudice: the American televangelist Tammy Faye Messner. In 1985, years after she became famous as a conservative talk-show host, Messner staged an interview with Steve Pieters, a minister of a gay-affirming congregation who was dying of AIDS. Her 'tearful acceptance of Pieters on screen as a fellow Christian' was momentous for many (and enraging for others). By the time she died, in 2007, her first husband had gone to prison for fraud, and she'd become a gay icon. 'When we lost everything,' she told Larry King, 'it was the gay people that came to the rescue, and I will always love them for that.'
Such grace, when given, can illuminate the question of how to traverse difference instead of merely quashing it. Although historically the Church may bend toward definitive stances and protocols, many believers are simply getting on with their dutiful prayers. Resolving tangled questions over how sex and gender fit within a religious framework may be a losing battle—one littered with examples of both fundamental ire and liberal wishful thinking—but the fight itself contains many surprising interludes.