There’s a certain admirable honesty in those rebellious souls who turn away from religion entirely: the preacher’s daughter who gets a lip piercing and declares herself polyamorous, and libertarian firebrands such as the late Christopher Hitchens, who relished verbal battles with befuddled clergy. Stranger, however, are those cases who choose to remain in their chosen or inherited church, and while professing to seek its improvement, actually receive pleasure from undermining it. Such a case is Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, a distinguished Oxford historian whose latest doorstopper is Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. At almost 700 pages, the account of Christianity’s origin and its flowering into the Christendom that defined the West also tells the story of the faith’s attitude toward human sexuality.
MacCulloch declares that “there is no such thing as a Christian theology of sex. There are multiple Christian theologies of sex.” He talks about the emergence of marriage in Christian life as a middle way between promiscuity, which has traditionally been viewed as something that separates us from God, and the professed chastity of celibates such as monks and nuns, who sublimate their erotic desires to enter a mystical bond with Christ. He provides an exposition of the ancient cultures that influenced Christianity and the thrust, if you will, of its mainstream teachings on sexual behavior. MacCulloch illustrates how “self-control was a prime masculine characteristic in the Classical world,” and how early Jewish reflections on the Hebrew Bible emphasized wedlock as “the only permissible setting” for physical pleasure. The idea of intercourse happening only for the purpose of creating new life, or the “procreational rule on sex,” was a principle of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras.
Despite present-day American Christianity’s somewhat pushy emphasis on pronatalism, MacCulloch demonstrates how the faith has historically been built and upheld by childless celibates. He talks about the ascetic practices of early Christian monasticism, and his detailing of the progression from eremitic renunciation to the establishment of clerical celibacy in the 11th century is indeed prodigious. An ax-grinding Anglican, he has little patience for the deep Catholic tradition of abstinence in pursuit of higher spiritual goals, and in typical modern fashion, he characterizes sex as mere “fun” instead of a force of mystic power and significance. It could be said that all religion, deep down, is a search for the proper attitude toward sex — it is our orientation toward eros and its meaning, more than anything else, that determines our spiritual beliefs. Celibacy should not be equated with sex-negativity, and the notion that Christianity is not sex-positive is a profound misconception.
Sex-positivity in the contemporary sense implies cherishing sex as a good, even seeing it as a gift, perhaps. This is precisely what traditional Catholic theology emphasizes, both in works such as Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and in the catechism itself, which calls human sexuality a rightful “source of joy and pleasure.” The body is a way to God. Is it salutary for our sexual fulfillment, however, to deny all necessity of restraint, and to regard all attempts at regulating erotic decisions as delusions? One gets the impression that for MacCulloch, the many inquiries into how Christians should constrain their sexual choices are so many flies on his crème brûlée.
He is equally uncomfortable with passionate displays of emotion, calling D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover a “pretentiously overheated celebration of integrating mind and body in human love.” Lawrence was not a practicing Christian in any conventional sense, but he knew how to defend the earthly, pre-Protestant Church. MacCulloch vigorously defends the Reformation, calling its hero, Martin Luther, a “great man,” but for Lawrence, and for perhaps all faithful sensualists, this was the moment when our tradition lost its “togetherness with the universe, the togetherness of the body, the sex, the emotions, the passions, with the earth and sun and stars.” It is essential, Lawrence writes, to have “a proper reverence for sex.”
MacCulloch seems to have been radicalized by an experience in his youth. The son of an Anglican clergyman, he was ordained a deacon before withdrawing his application to the priesthood when his homosexual relationship became a problem — the Church of England has since allowed gay and lesbian priests in civil partnerships. Admitting that he envisioned Lower Than the Angels as a “well-placed hand grenade,” the historian has long devoted his considerable energies to sneering at conservatives and traditionalists. The book is sprinkled with tired oppositional language: “problematic,” “subversion,” and “resistance” all make an appearance, and MacCulloch sighs wistfully over the horrors of the “male gaze,” a concept the poet and critic Alice Gribbin astutely calls a conspiracy theory.
Most tiresome of all is MacCulloch’s insistence that women are perpetual victims in Christian religious history. After hundreds of pages of reading about how oppressed I am by the faith that has saved my life, I was also struck by the omission of numerous female saints such as the 16th-century Carmelite Teresa of Avila: Not only a prolific spiritual author and enterprising founder of monasteries, she is something of an erotic icon, having been depicted in sculpture at the heights of mystical ecstasy.
MacCulloch similarly considers but ultimately dismisses groundbreaking work by the late gay scholar and Catholic convert John Boswell, whose 1980 title Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality suggested that much of Christian tradition was not as antagonistic toward sexual minorities as is commonly portrayed. This was “wishful thinking,” he declares, and Boswell was simply “overexcited” — perhaps admitting that many Christians throughout time have not been as concerned about gayness as the author insists would give him less of a reason to continue his bitter drumbeat.
The book is funny, especially in passages outlining the genesis of the codpiece, or recalling outrageous quotes such as Samuel Johnson’s insistence that “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs.” MacCulloch is amusingly dry, and defends a scholarly sense of detachment as “an ideal to which to aspire” — he intends to treat the Bible “with all the skills of critical textual scholarship.” Something is lost in this approach, however, and one is left wondering what a similar account by an unequivocally believing writer would sound like. For all MacCulloch’s picking apart of religious history, he provides little genuine explanation for the phenomenal growth of Christianity or why so many people have risked their respectability and even their lives to spread it throughout the world.
His explanations for historical developments, particularly those having to do with folk spirituality, are unrelentingly cynical. The purpose of Creeds, he states, was “to eliminate alternative lines of argument,” not to ground and comfort the faithful; clerical celibacy was about defending property and held no deeper meaning concerning chastity or holy vocation; and evangelical revivalist passion was simply a reaction by beleaguered people who had “little sense of agency” due to “economic or political revolutions.” MacCulloch uses coldly transactional language to describe popular devotion to beloved Christian figures such as Saint Joseph, calling increasing affection for the Savior’s earthly father an example of his “stock” rising “higher.”
HOW ROMANCE, RELIGION, AND PUNK CREATED GOTH
Toward the end of the book, the author gloats that “American churchgoing is now belatedly following European patterns of decline.” But some recent studies reveal a turnaround. Analyst Ryan Burge released data in 2024 showing that the number of religious “nones” in the United States has stopped increasing, with Generation Z in particular turning toward affiliation with faith. An April report from the United Kingdom, titled The Quiet Revival, alerted the public to a dramatic increase in church attendance by British youth. Growth in Catholic and Pentecostal congregations is outpacing that of the Church of England. “Many in the generation coming to adulthood decide that their parents’ religious practice and moral outlook are not for them,” MacCulloch smugly notes. This is true, though not in the way he’d like. Many of us are turning away from the empty permissiveness of the recent past and embracing conservatism instead.
There is unmistakable acrimony toward Christianity in this scholarly offering, an odd posture for a man who claims to be a friend of the faith. In recent years, spiritual and political writers such as Charles Taylor and Rod Dreher, among others, have spoken of the concept of enchantment — the notion that society ought to consider a sacramental view of life once more, and that frigid rationalistic inquiry isn’t enough to satisfy the human soul. For such enchanting subject matter, MacCulloch’s history of sex and Christianity is a remarkably disenchanted book. I don’t recommend it: neither for Catholics, whose ascetic inclinations it drains of meaning, nor for evangelicals, whose rapture it dissects. If you’re a foe of religious tradition, however, with a bee in your bonnet or a bone to pick, it just might scratch your itch.
Emma Collins is a writer based in Washington. You can find her newsletter, A New Heaven, on Substack.