The maverick historian revolutionising our view of sex and Christianity

Telegraph

23-02-2025

After we've spent the morning talking, Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the Church at Oxford University, sends me on a 'church crawl' – a favourite pastime of his. First to St Barnabas, a High Anglican church near his home in Jericho, north Oxford, where he takes morning prayers most weekdays; then down a single-track lane through Port Meadow to St Margaret of Antioch, a 13th-century church, simple and beautiful, without electricity, open all hours.
MacCulloch is the kind of thinker who makes you want to embark on a pilgrimage. His mighty books range from biographies of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer to A History of Christianity: The First 3,000 Years. 'Context is all,' he says about the latter: the story of a religion can start a thousand years before its arrival. His latest work, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, entreats a similar response: follow every possible road from the present back through history, to find the true heart of things. Over several mugs of tea in his living room, MacCulloch explains that this book is ostensibly the result of three years of research and a further one of writing, but really it's 50 years in the making: the whole of his adult life, as a historian, a gay man, and a Christian.
Priesthood was the MacCulloch family business. His grandfather was ordained into the Scottish Episcopal Church in the 1890s, then his father was an army chaplain for many years before leading a rural parish church in Suffolk, where young Diarmaid grew up. As a teenager, he kept a lid on his sexuality, but once he'd arrived at Cambridge, he began exploring its meaning, both through historical enquiry and new experiences. After meeting his first boyfriend, he says, he thought: 'What's the problem? This is lovely.'
Per our standard picture of Christianity, we might expect this to have prompted a crisis of religion; we might think that MacCulloch would have felt himself exiled, and wonder how he became a leading historian of the Church at all. But in Lower than the Angels, MacCulloch argues that there has never existed a single, totalising Christian theology of sex. Instead, from the religion's first years to its present, what we see is a set of shifting and competing stances on the matter. These theologies don't just come from the Bible; they're also emergent constructions by ordinary people.
'Human beings are extremely complex,' MacCulloch says. 'So if you're going to take a simple story of the past, you are underselling what it is to be human. We need resources, and they're all there in the past. Some [practices], like burning sodomites at a stake' – which emerged in the Western Church in the 12th century, in tandem with the doctrine that all sexual intercourse must be kept within marriage – 'we can look at and think: 'We don't want to go down that path again.''
One major problem for Christianity today, MacCulloch argues, is that 'self-styled traditionalists rarely know enough about the tradition that they proclaim.' For example, it's now mostly forgotten that church weddings have only been the norm in Christianity for half of its history; in Western Christianity, he says, up until about the 11th century, marriages were 'jolly occasions with no church involvement'. And contemporary conservative evangelicals, who tend towards the belief that all non-heterosexual relations are sinful, often squirm when presented with the fact that Jesus Christ didn't say a word about homosexuality – even though it was prevalent, and within limits accepted, in Roman society around him.
'Jesus is a bit of a wild card, frankly,' MacCulloch smiles. Christ's silence on homosexuality has particularly bothered Christian thinkers, and MacCulloch mentions some of the creative excuses that they've offered. Take, for instance, the Christmas Eve 'sodomite' massacre. An extra-Biblical belief dreamt up at the start of the 13th century, it posited that on the day before Christ's birth, all the 'sodomites' of the world instantly died, hence there were no gay people on Earth while Jesus lived.
Why has sexuality been such a perennial lightning rod in Christianity's history, and why does that seem truer today – in our era of 'moral majorities' and evangelical preachers across the West, Africa and beyond – than ever before? 'The Church,' MacCulloch says, 'has become so male in its rhetoric, and that incorporates antique attitudes about male privilege. It's about male insecurity, as simple as that – men wanting to hang on to the power which traditional religion has handed to them.' This may explain why contemporary Christianity appeals to many, especially a young generation, who align themselves with alt-Right politics.
In the penultimate chapter of Lower than the Angels, MacCulloch covers Christianity's recent history, from the 20th century to now. 'It's quite depressing, really,' he confesses. For instance, as well as tracking the treatment meted out to LGBT+ people – which neither is straightforwardly justified by Scripture, nor has been constant through Christian history – he tracks the sexual-abuse scandals that have darkened both the Catholic Church and the Church of England over recent years. Take the latter's handling of the case against John Smyth, for instance, who from the 1970s onwards used his role in a Christian charity to abuse, often sexually, more than 100 young men; the revelation that Church authorities knew about Smyth's deeds and took no action led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in November.
And yet, despite all this, MacCulloch isn't pessimistic about the Church of England's future. He urges us not to pay heed to the doom-laden voices; he points to the modest recovery in church attendance rates since the pandemic. People can distinguish, he says, between 'criminal stupidity and cliquishness and in-groups and public-school archbishops, and what they encounter in a parish church, which is so different – on the whole, a very hardworking conscientious clergy doing a job for ordinary people.'
'So often in Christian history, light may come through sudden unexpected reversals,' MacCulloch writes near the close of Lower than the Angels. I ask him if his own relationship to his Christian faith has changed over the years. 'Oh, completely!' he replies. 'I was a conservative Christian. I think it was being scared of the modern world – I just wanted to stay in my Georgian rectory and keep the barriers up.' What changed him, he says, 'was being a historian, being a gay historian, and being battered about by the church authorities. It has made me a better historian. I see what it's like to be excluded.'
Later, at St Barnabas, I'm drawn to a mural on the north wall of the nave: as well as saints and martyrs, it depicts two ambiguously gendered angels with frothy pink wings. Until the fourth century, MacCulloch had told me, angels wore beards, and were represented as more indisputably male.
Every weekday, MacCulloch comes here, sits down and probes the often contradictory verses of the ancient book that is the centre of his, and billions' of others', faith. The form taken by the angels of St Barnabas is frozen in time; that of the humans who observe them is not. The relation between the two is one of constant flux. And that fact, MacCulloch suggests, isn't anathema to Christianity – rather, it has always been central to its power.
Diarmaid MacCulloch will be speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival, in partnership with The Telegraph, on March 31. Tickets: oxfordliteraryfestival.org; Telegraph readers can save 20 per cent with the code 25TEL20.