
Mark Bratton’s review highlights key elements of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new history pertinent to the mission of LGB Christians.
Diarmaid McCulloch’s monumental tome on Christianity and sex sometimes reads more like a general history of the West and its Near Eastern neighbours from the classical period to the modern era. This is not a criticism but rather a testimony to the range and depth of McCulloch’s historical learning. I was reading Chris Wickham’s fine volume on Medieval Europe at the same time and noticed considerable areas of overlap in the accounts of the ‘Carolingian moment’ and ‘Gregorian Revolution’. The broader historical canvas is the necessary backdrop against which Church history and social attitudes towards sex can be more profoundly understood. MacCulloch’s previous, even more monumental History of Christianity (2009) has provided him with the foundation in scholarship and composition for the impressive exercise in compression and synthesis that characterises this book’s five parts and twenty chapters. MacCulloch is the most elegant wordsmith among current notable historians writing in English (on par perhaps with Ronald Hutton), allowing the nearly five-hundred-page narrative to carry one comfortably to the end.
The book’s main title encapsulates MacCulloch’s anthropological premise (Psalm 8) that human beings, though not quite angelic, nevertheless in the sight of God, have an inalienable dignity and the promise of a transformed angelic existence in God’s eschatological kingdom, transcending the normative practices and institutions of sex and marriage (cf. p.497). Its rich, detailed narrative tells how humans throughout history have untidily worked out and thought about their intimate arrangements in the sub-angelic sphere. The book’s subtitle underscores an intriguingly persistent ambiguity: the relationship between sex and gender. Nowhere does MacCulloch clarify the relationship between them precisely.
unlike some modern claimants who construe gender identity as a transcendent psychological instinct, or ‘inner sense’, there is no suggestion here that gender varies independently of sex
One reason he does not may be due to the historically complex way they have intertwined, defying neat categorisation. The classical idea, influenced by Galen, of men and women expressing gender along a physical continuum of single humanity under the influence of Enlightenment natural philosophy gave way to more stringent concepts of sexual differentiation and the gender roles associated with it (cf. p. 380). However, unlike some modern claimants who construe gender identity as a transcendent psychological instinct, or ‘inner sense’, there is no suggestion here that gender varies independently of sex. MacCulloch does not seem to differentiate sex and gender in such a revolutionary manner. However, at points, he does exhibit the influence of genderist philosophy, adopting, for example, the ideological idea of sex as something ‘assigned at birth’ (cf. p. 359) or identifying the current era as one of ‘gender fluidity’ (cf. p. 73). MacCulloch acknowledges the cultural reality of gender and trans-identities (p. 4) and recognises the seriousness of the psychological distress caused by the perceived mismatch between a person’s sense of gender and their sexed body (p. 17).
From the time of the Counter-Reformation, young boys were ‘puberty-blocked’ via castration to preserve their soprano voices for musical purposes in the Vatican liturgical cycle
While issues of gender identity and gender dysphoria currently intersect in contested ways, MacCulloch demonstrates that there is ample precedent for gender-incongruent behaviour throughout Christian history. Jesus of Nazareth deeply influenced the development of the idea that angels are genderless beings or a ‘third gender’. For example, he outlined the different causes of eunuch life (natal, coerced, and vocational, cf. Matthew 19:12) and placed angelic existence beyond the categories of sex and gender (cf. Matthew 22:30 and pp. 149-54). Those seeking Christian perfection in the post-Constantinian period sought to imitate the angels by surgically modifying their bodies as the great theologian Origen of Alexandria reputedly did (cf. pp. 115-16, 151) or renouncing sex and the social expectations associated with it. From the time of the Counter-Reformation, young boys were ‘puberty-blocked’ via castration to preserve their soprano voices for musical purposes in the Vatican liturgical cycle (p. 360). These practices raise profound ethical, philosophical and theological questions relevant to modern discussions of gender identity. For example, some ideologically motivated organisations have recommended castration for boys and men who identify as eunuchs (cf. WPATH, SoC8).
MacCulloch identifies an emancipatory principle in St. Paul’s baptism theology that led to a radically new understanding of the nature of marriage. The proposition that in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28; cf. pp. 85-7) is a ringing endorsement of gender equality that subverted the conventional gender expectations of antiquity. This provided a rational basis for Paul’s concept of ‘marital debt’ (1 Corinthians 7:6), advancing the unprecedented idea that spouses owe each other obligations of sexual reciprocity with corresponding claims grounded in the couple’s consent (cf. pp 91-2, 351-2). This idea represented a radical departure from the previously contractual basis of marriage rooted in ancient patriarchy and has hampered the regular re-emergence of male-centred norms subsequently. The 12th-century canon lawyers (whose contributions to political philosophy and theology are not yet fully appreciated) entrenched the idea that marriage is constitutively an act of freely undertaken sexual consummation (cf. p. 271). This understanding was enshrined in the Church’s liturgy and Britain’s seminal marriage legislation in the 18th century (cf. p. 351).
once it was accepted that same-sex attraction was a phenomenon, rather than a perversion, of nature, then the logic of consent opened up the possibility of covenanted same-sex unions.
The growing emphasis on consent encouraged the liturgical recalibration of the order of priority amongst the constitutive elements of marriage, favouring union over procreation. The disaggregation of consent from the requirement for consummation was assisted by the acceptance of contraception (cf. p. 451). Moreover, once it was accepted that same-sex attraction was a phenomenon, rather than a perversion, of nature, then the logic of consent opened up the possibility of covenanted same-sex unions. The process has been incremental and costly. There is no more poignant illustration of the personal cost of the fight to advance gay rights in this country than the redoubtable Revd Richard Kirker’s confrontation with the Nigerian Bishop of Enugu at the Lambeth Conference 1998, depicted on page 480. For all its flaws, the current Living in Love and Faith process is one fruit of those courageous efforts.
Current debates about gender and the proliferation of myriad gender identities prompt the question of whether Paul’s emancipatory logic has been taken too far. For some, the current culture of ‘expressive individualism’ has bound up notions of personal identity inextricably with the idea of inner truth, ironically conferring on gender the fixity, immutability, and importance once assumed of biological sex, with profound implications for gay and women’s rights. However, as MacCulloch points out, Paul wanted to eliminate inequality, not the distinction between the sexes (cf. p. 106), and the new forms of inequality implied by the social and political aspirations of some gender ideologues would surely have attracted the great apostle’s forceful cry, ‘By No Means’. If this is right, presumably, the angels would have approved.
Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane, 2024 ISBN: 9780241400937