Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex and Christianity

If you want a good sex book, I recommend Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2025). And it never rises to the level of titillation. The history of Christianity from the point of view of sex or sex from the point of view of the history of Christianity turn out to be both interesting and insightful. This is a long book, but sex is an exhausting topic.

MacCulloch’s primary scholarship concerns the Reformation, especially the English Reformation. He authored the well regarded Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. He has spent his academic career at Oxford, including as University Professor of the History of the Church. The son of an Anglican clergyman, he is sympathetic to Christianity, yet he maintains a critical and often sardonic eye. He brings his experience as a gay man to his historical judgments. Although an ordained deacon of the Church of England, he refused ordination to the priesthood because of the church’s positions on homosexuality..

MacCulloch takes an expansive view of sex—male and female, the family, marriage, asceticism and celibacy, same-sex relations. He follows the twists and turns of his topic with great skill. He has a sharp and critical eye for inconsistent positions and overlooked contradictions. His grasp of history is sure, and he repeatedly demonstrates that things are never as simple as they seem. History always complicates matters. As he notes, “the historian’s reminder of things forgotten is hardly ever welcome in the religious sphere.”

The book’s principal thesis is that the church has relentlessly attacked the pleasure of sex, maintaining that the act of love making itself is sinful, unless done solely for the purpose of procreation, and even then, has the taint of sin. He argues that “The general message was that it was simply easier to obtain salvation as a celibate than as a sexually active married person.” But if this is true, why did God make sex so pleasurable? This tension is acerbated “in the snappy phrase of the historian Dyan Elliot, ‘a clerical celibate elite requires a copulating laity.’” This tension drives MacCulloch’s narrative.

In dealing with the Bible, on the questions that matter most, MacCulloch gets the evidence correct. He explodes the idea of a biblical view of marriage, and points out that polygamy is well attested, not only in the Bible, but also well into the Christian period. Finally, he gets Paul right. He correctly understands that in 1 Corinthians 6 Paul understands sexual relations between a couple as based on mutuality, a view that is at odds with most of the Christian tradition.

So where did the church go wrong? As always, it’s complex. Every time there was an advance, a backlash was almost immediate. Patriarchy, dominant in the culture, made resistance futile. Paul in 1 Corinthians based sexual relations on mutuality, but the author of Ephesians went right back to the master/slave model. Early Jesus followers resisted the Roman empire’s ideology of marriage, valued asceticism, and held up virginity as a positive value, all anti-imperial moves. But viewing virginity and marriage as binaries led to devaluing marriage. Augustine’s inability to control his sexual urges led him to view sex as sinful, out of which he invented the notion of original sin. The very act of our conception is sinful, passing on sin. Jerome appeared repulsed by sex, thinking it always sinful, even in marriage. He repeated the Pythagorean argument “that too much marital affection was as bad as adultery.” The gradual emergence of belief in Jesus’ divinity further complicated matters. Divinity overwhelmed humanity, regardless of what the compromises at Nicaea and Chalcedon proclaimed. That divinity needed to be protected from the messiness of humanity, especially sex. Therefore, Jesus had an immaculate conception and Mary’s virginity was protected. Theologians even speculated how the baby emerged from the womb without breaking the hymen or how the Holy Ghost gained access to the womb. Oh, the mysteries of theology unbothered by facts. MacCulloch is excellent at tracing out all the threads of connection in this web. Sex makes an excellent vehicle for seeing connections where you would never suspect them.  

The decisive turn away from the ancient church’s negative view of sexual pleasure begins for MacCulloch with Luther’s Reformation. In his understanding, justification by faith was not the most important outcome of the Reformation, “but more permanently momentous was his [Luther’s] repudiation of compulsory clerical celibacy” and the celebration of clerical marriage. The Enlightenment and modern medicine reshaped the understanding of sex. As expected, MacCulloch is especially good on the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Once Luther celebrated the joy of sex and the Enlightenment equally celebrated the individual’s expanding rights, only one thing was lacking: “the most fundamental change in the experience of human sexuality over the last century and a half has been the development of reliable methods of contraception.”

The Enlightenment recognized the equality of women and reliable methods of contraception freed women from the fear of pregnancy. Similarly, if procreation is no longer the primary or sole purpose of sexual intercourse, but the pleasure of the couple, the argument against homosexuality collapses. This has changed the discourse between and within the various Christian churches. “Once upon a time, ecclesiastical explosions were fueled by such matters as the nature of the Trinity or the Eucharist, the means of salvation or patterns of church authority; now human genitalia overshadow most other organs of ill-will.”

MacCulloch is a sure and engaging guide. His conclusion is noteworthy: “The consequence is that contrary to many assertions over the last two centuries, a sustained journey through Christian history reveals that there is no such thing as a Christian theology of sex.”

MacCulloch has an engaging style, making the book easy to read. I admit that it drags a bit in the first three chapters, which deal with sex in Greco-Roman societies and the biblical evidence, but that may well be because he was trespassing on my territory. His biblical scholarship is informed and always critical. Once MacCulloch arrives in the third century, things pick up and move right along. He also has a sharp wit and a jaundiced eye. For example, in dealing with the Pastoral Epistles and Didacalia’s efforts to control widows and senior women, MacCulloch notes, “it is rather charming to find that the earliest known epitaph anywhere for any member of the Christian Church’s hierarchy, predating anything for bishops, priests or deacons, is for a formally enrolled widow from the second-century church in Rome: Flavia Arcas, ‘the sweetest of mothers according to her daughter Flavia Theophila, who financed the inscription.’”  

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