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Sex and Christianity: 2,000 years of love and fury
00:39:50
Diarmaid MacCulloch delves into the complex, contradictory and endlessly fascinating history of Christian attitudes to sex
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- [00:01]
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- [02:05]
Rob Attard
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What were Jesus views on sex? Why did so many Christians choose a celibate life? And has the church ever been tolerant of homosexuality? These are some of the questions explored by Professor Dermot McCulloch in his new book Lower Than the angels, a sweeping 2,000 year history of sex and Christianity, which Dermot expects will annoy a great many people. In today's episode, Rob Attard caught up with him to find out why, and he began by asking Dermot whether he had any trepidation about writing a book on such a potentially contentious topic.
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Dermot McCulloch
I have written on contentious topics before, like the history of all Christianity everywhere. You're going to annoy someone and the great thing is to annoy several different groups at the same time. So I think there will be people, I can guarantee there will be certain groups or outlooks who will find this book very difficult. One will be conservative evangelical Protestants. They won't like the fact that I don't agree with them that there is a single infallible book called the Word of God, the Bible. They won't like it. Conservative Roman Catholics won't like it because they believe that there is a continuous authoritative tradition about all matters which is in the property of the Church. It's magisterium is the technical jargon phrase. They won't like it because I don't agree with that. But a third group I think will, may be angry with the book. And that is a set of people all over the place who have been damaged by Christianity, who often hate it. And they will be cross because they will feel I've not put the boot in enough to Christianity. And you see that all these groups have different agendas, they're contradictory agendas. And if I can annoy them all, I will be best pleased because it will show that I'm sort of in the middle of all these what I would regard as extreme positions.
- [04:24]
Interviewer
Is it fair to say then that your view is that there is not a single Christian view of sex and sexuality or one that's been consistent over the centuries?
- [04:33]
Dermot McCulloch
It's exactly right to say there is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex. There are numerous Christian theologies of sex over centuries in, in different places, at different times, and very often they contradict each other. And the fascination of the research I did for me was to trace just how contradictory they were and why they were contradictory. What had happened to make the Church do a complete U turn on important subjects through its history?
- [05:05]
Interviewer
What does the Bible actually have to say about sex?
- [05:09]
Dermot McCulloch
All sorts of different things. Because the Bible is not a book. It is a library of books written at different times, in different places, with different agendas. And you wouldn't expect a library to speak with a single voice. It is a cacophony of opinions and perceptions of God over different times and stages. So what does the Bible say? Well, it can say in some parts of it that religion is a matter of pursuing purity. In ancient Israel, this was a big theme of the prophets, that what had gone wrong for the Israelites with their frequent disasters and being conquered by other people was that God was angry with them for losing their purity, for losing the purity of their worship of God going off after false gods. A very important thought was injected on that theme by the early prophets such as Hosea, Ezekiel, that the symbol of purity in Jewish history was a matter rather like marriage, that within marriage there could be infidelity, the woman could go off with other men. It's usually the woman actually in these prophetic remarks. And such a woman was like Israel going off after other gods. So purity became associated with fidelity in marriage and any other sort of sexual activity was condemned as impurity. And that spread out from what you might call adultery or fornication in a heterosexual way to masturbation or same sex relationships. These were sort of collateral damage of this central idea. And so it's there in the Hebrew prophets. It went down into Christianity, because the Christians took the Hebrew scripture over and made it the prequel to their own experience of Jesus in the first century of the common Era. You can trace the intellectual genealogy of this. First the prophets, then theologians and philosophers in Judaism of much the same sort of date as Jesus, such as Philo of Alexandria or Josephus, historian and philosophers. And from them you can see which Christian writers of the early centuries picked up that thought. Principally as in Philo's case in Alexandria. The early Christian theologian, Clement of Alexandria ran with this idea. So there's one strand within the inheritance. Another would be the Song of Songs, this peculiar book of the Hebrew scripture, which is love poetry. Love poetry spoken by both men and women. Often thought to be a book about marriage, but there's no mention of marriage in it. So that fits rather uneasily with this other theme of sex and purity. So that's some of the contradictory materials to start with in the Hebrew Scripture.
- [08:15]
Interviewer
Do we get much sense of Jesus view on sex or certainly Jesus view that is included within the Bible?
- [08:22]
Dermot McCulloch
Yes, we do. Jesus is a recognisable personality whom we have to see through a filter because he spoke Aramaic. He may have spoken broken Greek, but that wasn't his chief language. Whereas what the Christians call their New Testament was a collection of books in Greek, sort of rather common Greek. I mean, it's technically known as Koine Greek, sort of Greek you'd hear in the street in the marketplace, but it's still Greek. And so the writers of the New Testament were picking up Christian memories of Jesus originally in Aramaic. Given that, it's remarkable that we can hear particular things about Jesus views on sex. Two big ideas. One, one is about divorce. No divorce, Jesus says. And that's really countercultural in Jewish terms because divorce is fairly easy in Judaism. It was fairly easy among the Greeks and the Romans as well. The cultural matrix in Which Judaism sat Jesus said no divorce. And that clearly was an uncomfortable message for early Christians, an embarrassment, because really quite quickly, writers and thinkers in the Christian tradition started thinking, perhaps there ought to be some provision for divorce. And you get that in the very first Christian writer who survives, Paul of Tarsus, who didn't know Jesus in his earthly life, but had an intense encounter with him as he saw it after Jesus death. Anyway, Paul says that actually there are things which are causes for divorce. And he says, well, the Lord says no divorce. But actually I say, for instance, problems of a non Christian partner come into this. So that's within 10, 20 years of Jesus death. Christians already saying, no, we need to alter that a bit. And then in the Gospels, which are written about 40 years, 50 years after Jesus death, end of the first century of the common era, you get different reasons from those of Paul in saying, actually there are reasons for divorce. And in the Gospel of Matthew, that no divorce command of Jesus is actually modified by an editor. He says, in the case of a wife's infidelity, yeah, divorce is okay. It can be okay. So there's a constant tension right from the start about divorce. Now, the other big issue is the nature of marriage. One woman, one man has been a Christian tradition. And it goes back to the sayings of Jesus once more. We've got to notice that this is countercultural in Jewish terms, because Jewish culture allowed for polygamy. That is polygyny. More precisely, one man and several women. And this is not just a sort of optional extra. It's there for some of the biggest names in Jewish history. The patriarch Abraham, for instance, and the great King Solomon. They have more than one wife. And that's a problem for Christianity because they've got to cope with the fact that Jesus clearly does not think that polygyny is okay. He went to a command in Genesis which talks about a man leaving his parents to go to live with his wife, and they will become one flesh. That is modifying what Genesis said, which had none of that idea of just two people involved. So that's again, authentically Jesus. Now, Christians ran with that one. So they invested in monogamy against Jewish tradition. Now, why did they do that? Why did they listen to Jesus on this? Because the Greeks and the Romans were monogamous, the society into which they were expanding away from Judaism. So that's one thing to notice about Christians listening to Jesus. Very often they are selective in what they want to hear.
- [12:34]
Interviewer
Now, one huge theme in this story is that of celibacy, which we can Think of monks, nuns, and then of course in many cases clergy as well. Is that there from the start or does that come in later on?
- [12:47]
Dermot McCulloch
It isn't there from the start. It comes in in the second century, which is after the time that the so called canon of scripture was created, which is sort of early second century. By the end of the second century we can see a world of celibate people, both men and women, some living in community, some just on their own. But look back at the New Testament, you can't find them. There is one incident in the book known as the Acts of the Apostles where the congregation in Jerusalem are said to have shared their goods in common. But the thing about that story is that it's a story of failure. It didn't work. And there is no other mention of that sort of thing in the New Testament. So this idea of celibacy as a way of organizing Christian life isn't there in the Bible. It's not there in the Jewish tradition behind the New Testament of Christians. So you've got to ask, where did it come from? Well, one good place to start in doing that is to see where it started and that is Syria. And Syria by the end of the second century. So you've got to say, well, why Syria? And the most important fact about Syria is that the Syrians were the great traders of the eastern Mediterranean. They traded westwards into the Roman Empire, but they also traded eastwards into what we would think of as Iran and beyond that as far away as China and India. And in India, what did our Syrian Christian traders find? They found monasteries. They found monasteries of monks and nuns and these were both in Hinduism and Buddhism. So here was a borrowing, a sort of trade in which Syrian Christians thought this is a good thing, this idea of celibate, living in community. We will take it back with us to Syria. And so you get the beginnings of Christian monasticism in that setting. And of course it was a huge success. It may be a borrowing, but it has become one of the great institutions of Christianity.
- [15:02]
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- [15:31]
Interviewer
Why do you feel it has become so successful and so Instrumental in the development of the faith.
- [15:37]
Dermot McCulloch
The main reason for its success seems to me to be that it gives people agency, the ability to choose for themselves. And in the ancient world, that is not common. Society is fixed. You are either an elite person who does have choices, or you're everybody else. And in such circumstances, the act of withdrawing from normal society and establishing a different sort of society is a real and act of liberation. And I think for women, it's particularly liberating because ancient society, whether it's Jewish or Greek or Roman, is organized for men by men. Women are not on the same level. They are not citizens as men are. And if they enter marriage, they are surrounded by male privilege. This is a society set up for male privilege. Now, the religious life is not like that. A woman going off into a celibate community escapes the expectations of her world, and she escapes the, I think, often uncomfortable responsibilities of marriage. She is now declared to be a person who's off limits for sex. And although in our society that might seem a restriction for many, I think it was liberating.
- [17:03]
Interviewer
So we've talked a bit here about ideas of rejection of sex or restrictions around sex, which is a common theme actually, in many religions, not just in Christianity. But is there also a tradition of celebrating sex and love and relationships in Christianity?
- [17:20]
Dermot McCulloch
There isn't really. In the early years, for instance, there is no ceremony in church to celebrate marriage until at least the 5th century of the Christian era, by which time the church found itself increasingly in charge of all society. So you have to recognize the reality of that. But in the early church, there was no such thing as a church wedding. And Christians of the present day assume that Christianity has always been a religion in which the family is celebrated and marriage is celebrated. No. At the start, because of this input about celibacy, because of that particular prophetic Jewish tradition about purity, sex was a problem, and the church was not going to celebrate it. The early Christian theologian Origen, who was alive in the third century, said that you should not pray in a building where people have had sexual activity. I wonder whether that is the origin of Christian church buildings, which began to appear in the third century. Then you needed a separate building for worship, and you certainly weren't going to contaminate it with a wedding. There are all sorts of Christian ceremonies for worship, but not a wedding until much later on in the Western Latin Church, as late as the 11th and 12th century. So for more than half Christian history, in many parts of the church, there is no such thing as a church wedding.
- [18:50]
Interviewer
Now, over the course of the past 2000 years, many different forms and traditions of Christianity have developed around the world. How consistent have they been in their attitudes towards sex and sexuality?
- [19:00]
Dermot McCulloch
Christian churches, as they have developed, have been extraordinarily inconsistent in their attitudes to sex. That big divide, particularly on celibacy versus living in the world and therefore entering the world of families. In the New Testament, the picture is of families. They are taking up the Christian message. Then we have this development in the second century, starting in Syria, spreading around the Eastern Mediterranean, going west of monks, nuns, monastic life, hermits. And in that circumstance, those churches think that celibacy is better than sex and married life, married life is a second best. Now, that attitude was extraordinarily widespread in Christianity from increasingly the 3rd 4th century through to the 16th. In the west, there was then another revolution, the Protestant revolution, in which Martin Luther and his fellow theologians, former clergy of the old church, felt that their clerical status was part of a corruption, a cheat, a lie, and that they must shed their special status as clergy, which by that time in the west had been centered on the specialness of being celibate. So they rejected celibacy, they became married men. And most of them, I think, found this was really rather enjoyable. So they invented or rediscovered a Christian theology of married life, married joy, and they celebrated it. And they also denied the idea that celibacy was the best thing, marriage was the second best. They reversed these centuries of assumptions about the monastery, about sex. So there's a huge U turn. And you also have one big distinction before that in the churches of the east and the Church of the West. The Church of the west, which you might call the Catholic Church, the Western Latin Church, did something really remarkable in the 11th and 12th centuries. It said that not just monks and nuns should be celibate, but all priests should be celibate. And you have to realize that monks had not been priests in the early church for the most part. Now, priests were being asked to do the same thing as monks and nuns. But that's a Western thing. It is not equalled in the Eastern Church, which came to a sort of compromise about marriage and clergy. If you were going to be a bishop, you had to be a monk, so you were celibate. But if you were going to be a parish priest, virtually all parish priests were married and are married to the present day. So the Greek Orthodox priest will have his wife and family there in the clergy house. Very different from the Catholic priest in the West. So it's where you look as to what sort of Christianity and its attitudes to sex. You will find we've talked quite a.
- [22:10]
Interviewer
Bit about some of the attitudes and rules around sex in Christianity. Can we get a sense of how well these were actually followed and observed?
- [22:18]
Dermot McCulloch
Well, we can get some sense about how well they were observed by the frequent and fierce prohibitions against whatever you might be looking at. So prohibitions on having wives in the clergy house, it's odds on that if something is prohibited, then people are doing it. And in the medieval period we can see in the west that clergy did have female partners in their house because we know that bishops fined them for doing so. And in some parts of the Western church that became a regular sort of tax system. In, in the Catholic Church in Switzerland, for instance, bishops simply find their clergy because they had female partners. And I think often in the medieval Western world, villagers were quietly happy about that because if a priest has a wife, it's less likely he'll look at your wife in a lascivious way. So that's the situation in the medieval church. You have a rule and it is very quietly not observed all over the place. The same is actually true in the modern Catholic Church in Africa where it's considered just ordinary, normal, essential for everyone to get married. So the Catholic priesthood is a problem and very often therefore there is that same quiet acceptance of the reality. So you look around for all sorts of different evidence of realities versus what should be happening.
- [23:50]
Interviewer
One aspect of this story we haven't really touched upon a huge amount yet is homosexuality. And I think there's a widespread belief nowadays that the Christian Church for most of its history has been quite hostile to homosexuality. But is that true from your research?
- [24:05]
Dermot McCulloch
Yes, it is. And it's all going back to that purity issue from Judaism, that there is a very strong idea that sex has to be associated with marriage. And although marriage might be a second best, well, homosexuality is way beyond the pale. Whereas of course it's normalized, it's structured in Greco Roman society. And that's one thing which Christianity overturned By the time of emperors in the late 5th century, they are for the first time in Roman history making really strong savage penalties for same sex activity which had been normalized before. So there is something where Christianity was making a real difference. When gay historians started looking at the history of same sex relations in the 1980s, they tried to say, no, it's not really like that. There's a much more mixed story. I'm afraid that's not so really. There are circumstances in which same sex love and affection were celebrated in The Church. And the most remarkable period was in the 12th century in Western Europe, in the Western Church, where there was a sudden outpouring of literature around love. And a lot of it was same sex love. Very little, incidentally, of this love literature was associated with marriage. And in the same way the same sex business was the literature of monks. And there's a reason why I think it's the 12th century this happens, that a whole set of new monastic orders were created during the 12th century in the West. But the big difference between previous monastic life and this 12th century monastic life was that now adults were going into the monastic life. From about the 6th, 7th century, a custom called oblation had arisen, wherein families sent off children to become monks or nuns for life. These, in other words, were people who never had sex in their whole lives. But in the 12th century you're getting grown ups, perhaps in their 20s, coming into the monastic life with huge enthusiasm, but they've had a love life at least, and probably a sex life. And so they need to talk about what happens next, what emotional life they could have. In their new austere celibate communities, they could express very intense emotion in terms of marriage quite often, certainly in terms of love. So there was a culture which, for very understandable, good reasons, did develop a literature of same sex relationship.
- [26:55]
Interviewer
Now, your own experiences in your early life connect to this story in some ways, and I wonder if you'd be happy to tell us a little bit about your own background in this regard.
- [27:05]
Dermot McCulloch
Yes, I can. I came from a clerical family and my father was a clergyman and his father before him in the Anglican tradition. And that's one reason I decided to go in the same way. And so I was ordained deacon in the Church of England and was sort of, I guess, in many ways the ideal candidate, from university, et cetera, historian, serious. But there was a problem that I was actually an openly gay man with a partner, and the church in the late 1980s found that impossible to interact. They were perfectly happy with gay men and increasingly women who kept quiet about their sexuality, but someone to be open about it just didn't fit. So having been ordained deacon in the church, which would normally lead on to priesthood, I could not go forward to priesthood. So that was a very educational experience, you might say, and an extremely uncomfortable one in the short term. But it taught me a lot about what could be said, what couldn't be said, and what ought to be said in the church. So that is part of my story. And any reader of my book would need to Know that really no work of history is unbiased, but what it can be is a work which recognizes its own biases and sees what other people's biases are and endeavors to find something which looks a bit like truth in the middle of all those particular personal positions.
- [28:38]
Interviewer
Of course. And actually the recent decades, certainly in the west, have seen a period of. Since 96, is what you might call the era of permissiveness. A lot of changes around attitudes to sex and sexuality and nowadays gender as well. How has the Church grappled with all of these over the past half a century or so?
- [28:57]
Dermot McCulloch
The Church, like everybody else, has had to do a lot of learning very quickly. It's really my lifetime that one can talk about a permissive society, a society where gender became a much more problematic thing than the conventional picture suggested. And it is understandable that churches have been rather cautious about changing their attitudes. But change they have in some parts of the Church, in some aspects, contraception is the obvious one. Contraception, which in its modern form is really a 19th century thing, and it's associated with the development of rubber plants, plantations in Brazil to start with. Suddenly you have reliable mechanical contraception. The Church had no theology of that impeding contraception was a sin. That had become quite clear in Western theology during the 12th and 13th centuries. So the first reaction, of course, was, this is awful, this is sinful. But some parts of the Church began seriously thinking about it, particularly the Anglican Communion, the Church of England and its associated churches who get together, get their bishops together from worldwide, once every 10 years or so. And in 1908, the bishops assembled in this conference which is held at Lambeth, the Lambeth Conference. And they said contraception was awful, it was sinful, that's 1908. But by 1930, remarkably quickly, when the bishops got together in that year, they said, well, actually contraception can be all right and morally justified within marriage to limit families. That is an extraordinary turnaround. It shocked contemporary Roman Catholicism. And the Pope was very well aware when he in 1930, forbade all contraception. He was very aware of what the Anglicans had just done. And another Pope did the same thing in the 1960s, again with reference among his theologians to what the Anglicans had done. So it's been very uneven. And that's just one example of all the things the Church has had to cope with. Same sex relationships is another. And different parts of the Church have moved at different times. Some churches have been formed in sheer anger against change. And that's a phenomenon of the modern world. That now, churches have split about sex really for the first time in their history, where in the past they split about things like the nature of the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, or the nature of the Trinity. Well, those aren't the issues now.
- [31:41]
Interviewer
Why do you think that is that sex has become this big dividing line in recent decades.
- [31:46]
Dermot McCulloch
The important thing about sex as being the issue now is that within it has been a revolution in the position of women. From around the end of the 17th century, women were making choices about themselves and they were questioning the assumptions handed down by men that there were lots of things they could not do. And it turned out in the course of time that lots of things women could do. After all, to begin with, they could get themselves involved in moral campaigns against slavery, for instance, abolishing slavery. But also they apparently could, after all, become doctors or lawyers, or in the end, even ministers of the church. So once you do that, a lot of male privilege is shredded, and that is terribly threatening for men. So much of the emotional energy and anger against modern changes comes from men who see their traditional position as set out, for instance, in biblical literature, eroded. And so much of this is a huge global adjustment in the position of women. It is not just a Christian thing. You can see it within Islam as well, in the way that Taliban in Afghanistan have tried to stop women being educated because it's threatening for them. They dress it up in terms of the Quran, which doesn't actually give them much justification at all.
- [33:16]
Interviewer
And as you suggest here, there are a lot of live debates and discussions nowadays around sex and Christianity. Do you think these discussions could be better informed if people understood some of the history that you write about in your book?
- [33:29]
Dermot McCulloch
Well, I would say that, wouldn't I? Of course they will be better informed if they read this book. But more than just better informed, what I would like them to be is calmer about it all, that they should just, well, to put it crudely, lighten up on the subject by seeing just how many different attitudes Christianity has had to so many different things. It's an extraordinary story. Some of it is deeply discreditable, some of it is quite funny. And occasionally it can be touching and positive. You just need to lay it all out there. It seems to me that knowledge is a medicine against not just ignorance, but against the prejudices which feed ignorance. So that's what this book is about. It is trying to bring sanity to a debate which is constantly threatened by the insane, the uninformed, the ignorant and the angry.
- [34:28]
Rob Attard
That was Dermot McCulloch, his book Lower Than the A History of Sex and Christianity is out now, published by Alan Lane, and you can read a piece by Dermot about Christian celibacy in the Christmas issue of BBC History magazine. For more on Christianity's enduring impact on Western society, then check out our episode with Tom Holland, which examines the religion's legacy in the world Western mindset. The link is in this episode's description. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.