The Christian view of sex contains multitudes

Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating subjects, religion and sex – but you do have to take both bits of the agenda. This is Christian history with an eye to marriage, sexual acts, sexuality, celibacy, feminism and gender. Diarmaid MacCulloch is primarily a historian of the Reformation but, as his A History of Christianity (2009) demonstrates, he’s up for the bigger picture. This history takes us from early Jewish concepts of God and sex (I was startled to find the God of Abraham was once assigned a spouse, Asherah) right up to current Anglican rows about homosexuality.

Clerical celibacy only became the western norm after the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century

If there is a theme to such a capacious book it’s that the Christian view of sex is more multifarious than we might have thought. The author has his sights set on the notion that ‘a single true Church has preached a timeless message on the subject’. You can see where he’s going. He has fun in his final chapter demolishing the Moral Majority movement’s view in America that Christ was all about the nuclear family. Plainly he wasn’t.

Christ was single (MacCulloch dismisses the nutty idea that he was married to Mary Magdalene). He gave us the most exalted idea of matrimony, of husband and wife as one flesh, but his mother was a virgin: he was conceived outside marriage (something MacCulloch accepts, though he makes a convoluted bid to read the gospels to escape the Virgin Birth). Christ condemned fornication but ignored homosexuality and detested divorce – a prohibition that hasn’t had much appeal to Protestant evangelicals. His approach to the woman taken in adultery was startlingly at odds with the punitive culture of the time: ‘It subverts the ethical expectations of its age,’ observes MacCulloch.