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Lower than the Angels: a history of Sex and Christianity DIARMAID MACCULLOCH

 

 


‘Lower than the Angels: a history of Sex and Christianity’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch, published by Allen Lane, 2024. This review first appeared in the patronal issue of The Parish Paper at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne, June 2025.

 Anyone familiar with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s breadth and depth of research and his powers of synthesis is inspired anew by his latest big-picture history of Christianity. His confessed purpose is to unsettle settled ideas. Indeed, when it comes to his chosen subject of sex, the reader must reconsider all manner of lifetime assumptions, left wondering what conclusions can be drawn.

 

Just two assumptions are enough for starters.

1.     There have always been church weddings. This assumption is flatly disproven by MacCulloch. The church in early centuries had remarkably little to do with the ceremonies of marriage, a fact supported by a complete lack of any liturgical evidence. Blessings of marriage evolve, with a noticeable respect for and compliance with the social norms in which a church found itself. Marriage as a sacrament is slow to appear, noticeably in the Eastern Church. This interplay between the civil and ecclesiastical expectations continues through time, as for example in the debate over same-sex marriage today where observers, including many in the churches, think it high time that the laws about marriage should belong entirely with the state. Traditional church weddings only evolved, in various cultural fashions, in the past third of Christian history.     

2.     The clergy will be celibate and unmarried. MacCulloch explains that this assumption can be traced to what he declares ‘the first sexual revolution’ of the 11th century and Pope Gregory VII. By conflating (or confusing) two separate Christian vocations, celibacy and priesthood, his reform remedied certain questions of clerical property, ritual purity, and social conformity, while instituting a change that is unique in Christian history and has never been attempted by any branch of Christianity. When the Protestant Reformation occurred three centuries later, the author remarks pointedly that emphasis may have varied on Luther’s influential teaching of ‘faith alone’ but everyone agreed entirely that clergy marriage be restored, with celibacy as a choice not a rule. And as he adds, this question vexes many in the Roman Catholic Church to this day.

 

Some reviewers have teased the author for writing a book palpably by an educated Anglican of a certain age. Half his luck, and ours. After all, he is part of a culture where these questions can be revised and reappraised. His perspective is not limited, or controlled, by the church in which he belongs. Moreover, at many turns MacCulloch’s concerns are sparked by arguments with his own Church of England. While its grand scheme is to describe the intersection of two of the world’s biggest questions – religion and sex – underneath there is a subtle polemic about how a local church (the English one) addresses, or more often fails to address, the common experience of human sexuality. His own gay identity, including attendant trials by church, are catalysts for the text. A reader may marvel at the book’s measured, even droll, tone as well as his sympathetic long view of the complex tangle people get into over sex. A subject, as the author reminds us, that is not even a doctrine.  

 

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