Lower than the Angels:
A History of Sex and Christianity
by diarmaid macculloch
viking, 688 pages, $40
I think religion has got everything appallingly wrong,” Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch told an interviewer in 2015, “and it has been terrible for us in sexual terms.” Now here is the book to prove it, and you could not find a more distinguished historian to make the case. Along with scholarly works on Tudor England, MacCulloch has written major biographies, acclaimed reflections on Christian history, and two epics, The Reformation: A History and Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. The prose is lucid, the arguments bold, the bibliographies heroic, the humor arch. Even Professor MacCulloch’s emergence as a gifted TV presenter, bobbing up in front of sun-drenched monasteries in a Panama hat to raise his eyebrows at the camera, has not diminished his grand reputation.
The brutal reality, MacCulloch tells us (twice), is that “there is no such thing as a Christian theology of sex.” Christian history is full of self-contradictions and abrupt reversals; the implication—which MacCulloch eventually spells out—is that if today’s churches introduce novelties into their teachings, that itself is no novelty; and that conservatives forlornly appealing to “perennial doctrine” might as well call upon Odin and Thor to help them. There is, MacCulloch wants to show, no such thing as unchanging tradition. His task is “demolishing the myths of the past,” however much it “will displease those confident that they can find a consistent view on sex in a seamless and infallible text known as the Bible, or those who with equal confidence believe that a single true Church has preached a timeless message on the subject.”
In short, this is the historian as teller of hard truths. The words “embarrass,” “embarrassed,” “embarrassing,” and “embarrassment” appear roughly every twenty pages, nearly always to describe doctrinal conservatives who must shy away from some awkward reality. Persistently, the book evokes tradition-minded Christians as frantically stuffing facts down the back of the sofa, hiding away historical details in the attic, flushing incriminating documents down the toilet, and dreading the knock at the door of the intrepid, the undeceivable Inspector MacCulloch.
Early on, however, doubts creep in regarding the inspector’s methods. When he comes to some endlessly debated detail of Scripture, instead of arguing the point, MacCulloch will assert a view—generally the view most annoying to conservatives—add a phrase like “evidently” or “obviously” or “of course,” and then move on. When David and Jonathan weep together in 1 Samuel 20:41, the “most obvious” interpretation of one particular verb is “physical and sexual: either as erection or orgasm.” Pursuing this interpretation into the footnotes, the curious reader finds MacCulloch citing his “enjoyable conversations” with other academics, plus a notably eccentric PDF (“alas not yet in print”) by the late independent scholar Bruce Gerig, whose highest academic qualification seems to have been a master’s in art history. Well, no disrespect to independent scholars, but it’s not quite the remorseless battery of facts we were promised.
As with other subjects—the correct translation of the verses about Jesus’s “brothers”; the nature of female authority in the early Church—MacCulloch does not acknowledge that he is dealing with questions that have produced shelves (if not aisles) worth of scholarly controversy. The issue of divorce in the New Testament has, needless to say, been tussled over since the beginning. Interestingly, as Kyle Harper wrote the other month in these pages, recent scholarship seems to give some support to the traditional blanket prohibition on remarriage (“Divorce in the Gospels,” January 2025). In any case, there have been many versions of a reconciliation between Christ’s words and St. Paul’s. MacCulloch, however, airily informs us that Paul offers a “contradiction of Jesus.” That is indeed one reading of the text. But it is unlikely to persuade anyone who knows that these questions have a long intellectual history.
Perhaps it is unfair, with a book written for a general readership and spanning thousands of years, to expect MacCulloch to digress into the nitty-gritty of textual debates. But in fact the book is highly digressive—just not where you would anticipate. MacCulloch gives us sometimes lengthy, though never tedious, treatments of matters such as the conversion of England, the rise of monasticism, the historiography of childhood, the psychology of the Reformers, the preservation of chancels in English churches, the nature of the Enlightenment, and the rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher. Often these passages are highly insightful. But the notion that this is all necessary “background” begins to wear thin. You feel the lack of an overarching narrative to this book, even to some of the individual chapters.
Which, of course, reflects his argument: that the history of sex and Christianity is a succession of reversals and contradictions, that the reality is more a chaotic polyphony than a single story. Once again, however, the point is more asserted than demonstrated. People from other traditions can speak for themselves; as a Catholic, I couldn’t find any serious challenge here to the view that the magisterial Church has consistently taught that marriage is good (even if vowed celibacy is better); that it is lifelong and monogamous and unites man and woman; and that sex is forbidden only outside marriage or when the act is deliberately closed to life. Although you can have some fun pointing out that St. Jerome disparaged the married state in a way St. John Paul II never did, this is not the same as locating a direct contradiction on a matter of fundamental teaching.
Jerome, as it happens, gets a lot of airtime here for his uproarious rudeness about marriage—with the implication that the early Church had little time for the “family values” preached in recent decades. MacCulloch refers to Jerome’s rhetoric on this subject about two dozen times. He conveniently omits to mention the letter to Pammachius in which Jerome heavily qualifies his earlier remarks and pays several extravagant compliments to holy matrimony.
That imbalance is typical. Instead of demonstrating novelty, MacCulloch tries to suggest it rhetorically, telling us again and again—on matters sexual and otherwise—that such-and-such a phenomenon is a dramatic, out-of-the-blue “U-turn” or “innovation.” For MacCulloch, the landscape of Christian history is not a gently developing garden, but a building site repeatedly flattened by meteor-strikes. He writes, for instance, of the eleventh century:
In the background was a new rhetoric of classifying Christian society three ways: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured. . . . The threefold classification occurs quite suddenly around the year 1000, to be found in the devotional and pastoral writings of one of the Anglo-Saxon monastic reformers, Ælfric of Eynsham Abbey.
Hang on, you think: Didn’t King Alfred use the same threefold classification a century before? And then you look it up on JSTOR and find that, not only did Alfred use it, but it appears to have related antecedents dating back well beyond that, to Isidore of Seville and perhaps further. All quite boringly continuous.
There are, obviously, disjunctions and internal tensions in Christian history, as in the history of every tradition. Just think how many doctrines have been associated with “Marxism” in the last 150 years. (Even in his own lifetime, Karl Marx himself said he wasn’t sure he counted as a Marxist.) We can’t be that surprised if Christians spoke differently in the fourth-century Roman Empire than they do in twenty-first-century America. What’s remarkable is the extent of continuity: the fact that, on the essential matters, the Church has gone on saying the same thing for twenty centuries. Sure, St. Augustine and Cardinal Raymond Burke might have differed, if you could use a time machine to bring them together, about just how highly one should praise Christian marriage. But on a thousand other points, you would find them in complete agreement. Only by distorting the record can you suggest otherwise.
The other distortion is, if you like, one of atmosphere. MacCulloch draws our attention to the more outrageous and garish aspects of the story: the heretics, renegades, eunuchs, misogynists, mavericks, abusers, inquisitors, rabble-rousers, crossdressers, fabulists, false prophets, out-there mystics, cult leaders, and online flame warriors of Christian history. They certainly deserve a place in the picture, but here the strange eclipses the ordinary.
For instance, when MacCulloch comes to the Irish monks of the sixth century, he has a choice of anecdotes. He could give us, for instance, the touching episode from Adomnán’s Life of St. Columba about the deformed maritime pilot, Lugne, whose wife was so disgusted by his disability that she refused to sleep with him. Columba pleads with the wife on the basis that “the Lord says, ‘They shall be two in one flesh.’” The wife replies that she will happily enter a convent, or do anything Columba asks, but she won’t do that. “It would be impious,” the saint replies, “to separate those whom God has lawfully joined together.” So no convent. Then he proposes that they all pray together.
The woman replied: “I know it is not impossible for thee to obtain from God, when thou askest them, those things that seem to us either difficult, or even impossible.” It is unnecessary to say more. The husband and wife agreed to fast with the saint that day, and the following night the saint spent sleepless in prayer for them. Next day he thus addressed the wife in presence of her husband, and said to her: “O woman, art thou still ready to-day, as thou saidst yesterday, to go away to a convent of women?” “I know now,” she answered, “that thy prayer to God for me hath been heard; for that man whom I hated yesterday, I love today; for my heart hath been changed last night in some unknown way—from hatred to love.”
As well as being theologically interesting, this story is from a major text and one based on accounts composed within fifty years of Columba’s death. The story is richly suggestive about everyday life in the Christian centuries, and the trusting relationship between clergy and laity. MacCulloch surely knows the text. But his choice of anecdote is, instead, a bizarre yarn about an obscure saint from around the same period proving his chastity by sharing his bed with two attractive women. MacCulloch’s source for this “splendid tall tale” is a legend written approximately four centuries after the supposed event.
Repeatedly, the lurid and marginal are privileged over the normal and important. MacCulloch makes sure to cover Aquinas’s more dubious opinions—in favor of legalized prostitution, against the Immaculate Conception—but basically ignores the saint’s massively significant writings on marriage, sex, and family. He makes no mention at all of St. Thomas More—although both More’s domestic life and his martyrdom loom so large in the history of Christian marriage—but eagerly discusses Jeremy Taylor’s thoughts on (for some reason) breastfeeding. There is no room for Dorothy Day—a towering figure of twentieth-century Christianity and an astonishing writer on the subject of sex—but plenty of space for vignettes of the forgotten child preacher Uldine Utley and the minor biblical scholar Jane Schaberg.
Having said all that, academic historians could learn a lot from MacCulloch’s storytelling abilities. Big books like this often spit out one fact after another like a malfunctioning printer, or dissolve into a soup of abstractions. MacCulloch, by contrast, speaks human. He is alive to the varieties of ambition; he is illuminating about politics, in a broad sense—the conflicts, compromises, conspiracies, and coalitions through which people try to get their way.
The trouble is that Christian history is about a lot of other things, too. The search for truth, the agonies of conscience, the longing for union with God, the courage to throw one’s life away for something beautiful, the horror of sin, the hatred of injustice, the compassion for one’s fellow creatures, the ordinary peace of submitting to a trusted authority, the ordinary happiness of Christians in their vocations, married or celibate: Very little of this makes itself felt in MacCulloch’s pages. As soon as it threatens to, the drily satirical voice takes over. Here he is on the Song of Songs as an inspiration for vowed religious life:
One major witness to the way in which early Christianity skewed the balance between virginity and marriage is that asceticism commonly annexed marriage as a metaphor. This had two chief biblical sources, though many others were creatively added as scriptural ballast. The first was a wholesale allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, based on the textually unwarranted assumption that the relationships celebrated in it were those of husband and wife. Given that initial false premise and a good deal of imagination, its startlingly erotic imagery could illuminate the inner life of the ascetic.
Notice the number of value-laden assertions here—Christians “skewed” reality, relied on an “unwarranted assumption” and a “false premise”—and the triumphant mockery audible in “creatively added,” “a good deal of imagination,” “startlingly erotic,” and so on. All very droll, but if ever a literary interpretation has been vindicated by experience, it is the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs. All over the world, for almost two thousand years, Christian men and women have given up everything for God and their neighbor with those lines running through their mind. (“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. . .”) To see only a “creative” rereading and an attempt to avoid admitting that the Bible has naughty bits in it is to see nothing.
Literature is the usual road to the inner life of people from the past, and this is a strangely unliterary book. No Dante and Beatrice, no Shakespeare or John Donne, basically nothing on the twentieth-century Catholic novel, which—whether orthodox (Undset), liberal (Lodge), or a bit of both (Greene)—did not exactly neglect the topic of sex and Christianity. Brideshead Revisited earns a brief nod, but only to get in a laugh about Cousin Jasper calling Anglo-Catholics “sodomites with unpleasant accents.” Even with philosophical texts, MacCulloch seems rather uninterested. We are told that the modern Church’s account of sexual morality is “not at root especially profound,” but MacCulloch’s one-sentence summary of that account does not imply any familiarity with the sophisticated and influential arguments of John Paul’s theology of the body or Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est.
One reason those arguments remain influential, by the way, is that sexual modernity has not worked out entirely as intended. Take a handful of recent stories from mine and MacCulloch’s country. There has been much debate about the rape gangs responsible for systematically destroying the lives of young girls in perhaps fifty British towns. The right emphasize that certain migrant groups are disproportionately responsible; the most plausible riposte from the left is that, in fact, organized sexual exploitation of children is so routine in British life that it entirely transcends ethnic differences. Two important enabling factors in the abuse were that local authorities assumed underage sex was normal, and that Britain’s level of family breakdown leaves so many children vulnerable to manipulation. In other news, there’s controversy over the appointment of Britain’s US ambassador, Peter Mandelson, because of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein—the notorious financier whose connections to the rich and powerful mean that much of the world’s elite have been one degree of separation from a pedophilic sex trafficking ring.
Epstein was, of course, also friendly with Donald Trump, the great political cult figure of the modern West, who has boasted of his skill at sexually assaulting women. The recent contest for leadership of the free world pitted Trump against Kamala Harris; her campaign revolved around her ardent dedication to America’s abortion regime, in which a million babies a year are lethally poisoned or ripped apart. Meanwhile, Trump is practically angelic compared to another icon of the post-Christian West, the British influencer Andrew Tate, who earns around $5 million a month through videos in which, among other things, he enthuses about “the basic moves of pimping”: “slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up bitch, sex.” Elsewhere in the headlines, a Frenchman called Dominique Pelicot has been convicted of drugging his wife and inviting fifty men to rape her over a nine-year period. The group met through a porn site—now an industry worth about $70 billion.
Sure, post-Christian sexual modernity wasn’t meant to be like this. It was meant to be about consenting adults joyfully exploring their own and one another’s bodies and all that. But then Christianity was meant to be about the perfect love of God and neighbor and, as MacCulloch reminds us, it hasn’t always worked out. At some point you have to look reality in the face. Christians should be honest enough to admit to scandalous abuses and hypocrisies, to be embarrassed by the occasional brutality of the Middle Ages and the occasional scapegoating of gay people today. But the critics of traditional Christianity have some embarrassments to consider as well. To many of us who have grown up amid the long, withdrawing roar of the sexual revolution, it kind of looks like a warzone out there. And to some of us, the old scriptural verses about marriage, or the diamantine injunctions of the Catholic Catechism, or an icon of the Holy Family, retain a certain appeal.
