Sex and the Church

Review of Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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Soon after Jorge Mario Bergoglio assumed the papal name Francis in March 2013, rumors began to swirl of a powerful “gay lobby” in the Holy See. Priests from Latin America let slip that the new pope had confirmed its existence, and several months later Vanity Fair published reports that the issue had been raised already under Francis’s predecessor Benedict XVI over concerns that gay prelates were being blackmailed. Francis acknowledged the concerns, but he struck a far more conciliatory—and humorous—note than Benedict, telling reporters that he hadn’t yet “found anyone with an identity card in the Vatican with ‘gay’ on it.”

Although Pope Francis made headlines a decade later for using the colorful slur “fraggiocine” to refer to gay seminarians, he dedicated much of his pontificate to welcoming LGBTQ people into the Church. His actions—from speaking with trans Italian women to supporting same-sex civil unions to asking “who am I to judge” gay people—enraged conservatives, while giving progressives hope that the institution might be salvageable. At the same time, he struck decidedly revanchist notes on other issues related to sex and gender, categorically rejecting abortion, insisting that gender-affirming surgery violates human dignity, and rejecting a measure that would allow married men in the Amazon to be ordained as priests. A man of contradictions, he embodied the difficulty that Christians have in articulating a coherent view of sex and gender in the twenty-first century.

To believers and non-believers alike, it can seem difficult to pin down what, exactly, Christianity teaches when it comes to the body. The Anglican Communion, a loose grouping of Protestant denominations that dates back to Henry VIII’s schism with Rome in the early sixteenth century, has nearly fractured in recent years over the issue of LGBTQ rights. Likewise, while most Christian churches have remained opposed to abortion—though a growing number of progressive denominations equally oppose legal restrictions on it—the questions of marriage (for clergy) and divorce (for the laity) continue to rive Christian from Christian. All the while, partisans for this denomination or that insist that their way of interpreting Scripture is the one—the only one—sanctioned by God.

While these divisions over sex may seem something new—a product of the internet age, modern morals, or a post-truth society—they are, in fact, a core feature of Christianity, writes Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in Lower Than The Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. “There is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex,” he insists, and “Christian societies and Church bodies have at different times believed totally contrary things about sexuality.” Yet, while MacCulloch tells an often-amusing story about Christians’ many sexual contradictions, he never answers a far deeper question: why should any of us care?

By turns sparkling with wry wit and drearily encyclopedic, MacCulloch takes delight in pointing out the absurdities of Christian dogma. From the start, the religion was an uncomfortable amalgamation of older traditions. Take the Infancy Narratives of Jesus Christ’s birth. Contained in the Gospels of the disciples Matthew and Luke, they are a tangle of contradicting agendas and historical antecedents. Both insist that he was born in Bethlehem, even though his mother Mary and her husband Joseph hailed from Nazareth, nearly one hundred miles to the north. MacCulloch suggests that both mis-locate his birth because Bethlehem was “the city of David,” in which the prophet Micah had foretold the Messiah would be born. Likewise, both include a detailed genealogy of Jesus. They tie him, through Joseph, to King David of the Israelites. But why, MacCulloch wants to know, should we care about Joseph’s family tree, when both texts “lamely make [it] clear” that Joseph “cannot be Jesus’s biological father.”

Indeed, the patrimony of the Messiah presents a conundrum for the authors of the Gospels. The language of Luke, MacCulloch writes, suggests that Mary may have been “the victim of rape.” A different story began circulating early in the first millennium, after relations between Christians and Jews soured, that his father had, in fact, been a Roman soldier named Pantera. The point, MacCulloch writes, is that “the Holy Family, so apparently familiar from Christmas cards, makes an uneasy fit with the many different views of family that Christian Churches have constructed over the centuries.”

Sandro Botticelli’s c.1485 The Annunciation (Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons)

Longstanding belief in Mary’s virginity comes from Matthew’s words, when he quotes the prophet Isaiah that “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” For centuries after Christ’s death, it was commonly held that Mary, in the words of the second-century theologian Tertullian, was “a virgin as regards her husband, not a virgin as regards child-bearing.” In a Church that would become increasingly prudish and hostile to sex, however, it would be necessary not only to insist upon Mary’s virginity at the time of her son’s birth, but also her virginity throughout her entire life. Over the years, the cult of Marian devotion grew, and, alongside it, “a centuries-long and risibly solemn Christian debate as to which of Mary’s bodily members or orifices the Holy Spirit employed” to inseminate the mother of God.

Ironically, as Mary’s significance to Christian dogma grew, the role of women in the Church shrank. Here too, nothing in the early teachings suggested that strict gender divisions had to be the way of things. Some of Paul’s epistles refer to female Church leaders. Centuries after Christ’s death, the Eastern Church still ordained female deacons and as late as year 600, women helped to lead the Church on the British Isles. Even after the Western Church—which would become the Roman Catholic Church—banned the ordination of women, they could still play important roles, whether through convents or by participating in the pilgrimages that had become a standard ritual of the faith by the dawn of the second millennium. In fact, nearly half of all pilgrims in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were women.

For all that modern-day Christians harp on the family—J.D. Vance, for one, seems to think “childless cat ladies” are a scourge of the modern world—MacCulloch underscores just how dismissive early Christians were about it. When Mary and her other children came to hear Christ speak, for instance, he gestured to his disciples as his true family. Luke similarly relays how Jesus contradicted a follower who cried, “Blessed is the womb that bore you.” In fact, there was something undeniably queer about Christ and his disciples, as they rejected their biological relations and associated instead with a chosen family. Hostility to family and marriage would become a ubiquitous trope in early Christian thought and comprises the key sexual preoccupation of Lower Than the Angels. While MacCulloch also traces sodomy laws and fluctuating concern with abortion, the tension between marriage and celibacy is at the book’s heart.

For many centuries, there was no clear Church doctrine on the matter. Priests could be wedded, although they were typically expected to live in chaste marriages, while Christian writers advised even the laity against marriage and the sin of sex. The fourth-century theologian Jerome of Stridon, who detested sex and marriage alike, urged his widowed readers not to remarry, telling them that marriage is “like unwholesome food, and now that you have relieved your heaving stomach of its bile, why should you return to it again … ‘like a dog to its vomit’?”

It was not until the Gregorian revolution of the eleventh century, named for Pope Gregory VII, that the question of marriage was resolved. It was then too that the divide between priesthood and laity was established, as Church leaders set about codifying religious dogma and constructing what Pope Pius X described in the twentieth century as an “essentially unequal society […] comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock.” It was then that the principle of a celibate priesthood was firmly established—which, in turn, necessitated that the laity marry and reproduce. This is the moment too that Western Christianity set upon becoming what the great medieval historian R.I. Moore once termed a “persecuting society.” Sodomy laws began to proliferate, Jews became targets of systematic persecution, heretics were rooted out by a newly founded Inquisition, and eventually a witch craze would take tens of thousands of lives.

In 1517, the equilibrium between a chaste clergy and procreating laity set by the Gregorian revolution was thrown off its axis by an unknown monk in the German university town of Wittenberg. The Protestant Reformation reimagined the place of the priesthood, as clerics insisted that they not only could be married but, in fact, should wed in order to set an example for their parishioners. In 1525, Martin Luther set the precedent by marrying Katharina von Bora, an ex-nun who would bear him six children. Soon the norm was established that we live with today—Catholic priests are celibate while Protestant ministers marry and multiply. Of course, within the different Protestant denominations debate still raged, particularly over polygamy. While some Reformers embraced taking multiple wives—the Anabaptist leader of Münster in southwest Germany had fifteen—most sects ultimately rejected the practice.

In today’s debates over same-sex marriage and its place in the Church, MacCulloch suggests, we can see the echoes of these older divisions over heterosexual marriage. They are simply another iteration of the religion’s longstanding, ambiguous relationship with matrimony. “Same-sex couples throughout much of Western Christianity,” he suggests, “are now in much the same position as heterosexual married couples were in the second-century Church: following a civil ceremony formalizing their relationship, they can come along to their worship community and receive a blessing.” Of course, not everyone is pleased with this state of affairs.

Well into Donald Trump’s second term, we are likely to hear such arguments intensify, as believers with the ear of the President and access to the courts insist that faith is incompatible with LGBTQ identities and rights. Indeed, the Supreme Court was recently asked to revisit its Obergefell ruling that established a nationwide right to same-sex marriage. The ordination of a new pontiff earlier this year has likewise stirred up questions about the Catholic Church’s approach to queer issues. Will Leo XIV continue Francis’s relatively welcoming policies, or will he revert to more exclusionary teachings on matters of gender and sexuality?

These questions, MacCulloch contends, are not an invention of the modern age, but rather products of divisions that existed even in Christianity’s earliest years. But for all he does to deconstruct the idea of a singular Christian approach to sex, MacCulloch does not grapple with the conundrum at the heart of the book – and, indeed, at the heart of faith in the twenty-first century. If there is no single or consistent Christian teaching when it comes to sex, gender, and sexuality, then why should anyone believe this version or the other? And, if there is no particularly good reason to believe in one flavor of Christian dogma over another, then why should we care about any of them?

At the end of the day, there is something mysterious about faith, which Søren Kierkegaard once aptly described as “the paradox of existence.” There is a divide between those who believe and those who do not, for no rational argument will convince the faithful and no amount of faith will convince those who do not believe. While those of us who have not attended a service in years may be willing to accept MacCulloch’s suggestion that “a more comprehensive understanding of historical process” could help settle religious disagreements, those who believe that they comprehend the Scriptures are unlikely to do so. It may not be a problem unique to our time or to our country, but the divide between those who think and believe differently has once more widened into an unbridgeable chasm.