Paul Chan
Diarmaid MacCulloch’s latest book calls for an openhearted vision of sexual variance within Christianity.
Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Viking, 660 pages, $40
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In the 1740s, the Moravian Church, a Pietist movement within Protestantism, went through a period known as “sifting time.” Church leaders pushed religious principles to extremes, declaring that sexual intimacy, including same-sex coupling, should be practiced outside of marriage as an expression of divine union. Similar outbreaks of sexual liberation had occurred in the 1520s, during the early reformation. In Northern Switzerland, women began practicing an ecstatic sexual promiscuity, offering themselves to their prayer groups. “Why do you judge?” one devotee said. “We have passed through death.”
In Russia, a peasant prophet named Kondratii Selivanov founded a dissident Orthodox Christian sect in the late eighteenth century whose members committed to “eliminating sexual lust” by cutting off their own breasts and genitals. St. Jerome in the fourth century CE wrote that showing too much affection (sexual or otherwise) with a marriage partner constituted adultery. Church legal documents from the thirteenth century onward informed couples just one type of sex act is allowed. Today, we know it as the “missionary position.”
“There is no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex,” Diarmaid MacCulloch writes in Lower than the Angels. “Christian societies and Church bodies have at different times believed totally contrary things about sexuality, depending on the structure of their society and the individual doing the thinking.” MacCulloch has written about many of those individuals before, like in his audacious and celebrated Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009), and Silence: A Christian History (2013), which explores the intersection of religious protest and spirituality in asceticism. But now they are being fleshed out anew, so to speak.
A professor emeritus at Oxford in ecclesiastical history, MacCulloch is a deacon in the Anglican Church, and openly gay. He has described himself as “a candid friend of Christianity.” This is an interesting way to think about Lower than the Angels. It is as if MacCulloch were trying to have a healing conversation with Christianity itself, like a friend. He has listened to what all Christianity has to say about sex, and now has responded as thoughtfully as he can. To speak, as Ephesians (4:15) implored, “the truth in love.”
The real mystery is: Why does Christianity insist on dogmatic unity about sex, against the wide-ranging multiplicity of views and ideas its own history testifies to? Why is it obsessed with regulating sexual identities and behaviors? Given that this book spans over three thousand years and every inhabitable continent on Earth, it’s surely forgivable that MacCulloch doesn’t give a definitive answer. But it strikes me that there is a distinctive pattern. Men seem to love distilling their sexual preferences and fears into doctrines—then prop them up as if they were God’s will. Sex is reduced and abstracted into metaphysical systems that masquerade as theological commandments.
Metaphysics is ancient play, pioneered by the Greeks, who were fundamental to Christianity. The original New Testament was written in a colloquial form of Greek. Early Christian thinkers enshrined their own sexual views in a similar fashion to philosophers in antiquity. They took aspects of their lived experience and idealized them into timeless and absolute insights from what they imagined as a more essential reality. Sometimes the fit was the same. MacCulloch traces Jerome’s inspiration for his coldhearted views on marriage back to Pythagoras, who was recorded to have believed that any sex outside of the purpose of procreation was abominable.
The other decisive influence on Christianity is, of course, Judaism. Here, MacCulloch shows a lineage of thinking from Jewish prophets and commentators that further constricted views of sex. Hosea, from the eighth century BCE and one of the earliest prophets, set the tone, making direct connections about how sexual misconduct puts the Jewish people in jeopardy because it is tantamount to betraying the God of Israel. And who does Hosea think is most susceptible to sexual misdeeds? All women. Never men. The all-consuming fear of sexual faithlessness and humiliation at the hands of women is a recurring theme in the Hebrew Bible.
As is how bearing children to fulfill God’s promise of “fruitfulness” to the patriarchs is the greatest expression of faith. This is why any sexual activity not bound by marriage for producing children is condemned in the book of Leviticus, including same-sex coupling and masturbation. Marriage was a contract not just between two people, but with God, which neatly captures how metaphysical innovations served to protect old male interests.
What does any of this have to do with now? Here I quote MacCulloch at length:
Throughout the modern world, the most easily heard tone in religion (not just in Christianity) is one of angry conservatism. Why? The anger centers on a profound shift in gender roles traditionally given a religious significance and validated by religious traditions. It embodies the hurt of men at cultural changes that have handed a share of power to women and made room for a variety of sexual and gender identities. That threatens to marginalize heterosexual men and deprive them of dignity, hegemony or even much usefulness—not merely for those who already enjoy male privilege, but those who in traditional cultural systems would expect to inherit it.
Today, the president of the United States is a convicted sexual abuser, who has a long history of supporting and promoting men who have been either accused or convicted of sexual harassment or abuse. Women’s rights have been rolled back since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Trans people are openly under threat, as is anyone who does not identify as heterosexual. All thanks to the ascendency of a toxic, male-centered Christian nationalism.
If it seems self-evident that Christianity is nothing but this, I’m pretty sure this book isn’t for you. On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine this book finding readers among believers, either. So who is this book for?
Here’s my guess: someone who believes this, here, now, cannot be it. Someone who is not ready to submit to theocratic rule in this country (or any other), and not willing to participate in service of a notion of God that glorifies cruelty against strangers, neighbors, and friends. And is prepared to redescribe God, from tip to tail, as a semblance of the highest order of existence, which inspires and accommodates the flourishing of all who live and breathe.
If you are this reader, know that Lower than the Angels is more than men mansplaining sex and behaving badly. MacCulloch writes with fellow-feeling for those who found new and innovative ways to heed the call of the spirit outside of, and at times against, dominant authorities. There was Epiphanes, who in the second century CE argued marriage was a racket designed to protect property rights. Perhaps taking a cue from Paul in Galatians (3:28), urging Christians to tear down what divides “female and male, slaves and free persons,” Epiphanes proposed replacing marriage with polyamory, alongside a general communalism that would form the basis of a more just society. During the twelfth century and after, women living in single-sex devotional communities began producing writings and other works that imagined new kinds of relationships with the divine—often sexually frank. Hildegard of Bingen, the polymath and Benedictine abbess, wrote theological treatises, musical compositions, even medical texts, to express her “unio mystica,” or mystical union with the highest one.
I’m grateful to MacCulloch for highlighting the pioneering historical and religious scholarship done by women, like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Kathy Gaca, and, especially courageous, Jane Schaberg. Schaberg’s radical take on the Biblical “infancy narrative” spells out the possibility, as evidenced in at least one of the four Gospels, that Christ was not the product of a virgin birth, but of rape. Among the typical forms of harassment meted out to those who dare to think against the grain, Schaberg’s car was firebombed in a university parking lot in the 198os.
Political violence, then or now, has only slowed—but will never stop—people from asking the more essential questions about the nature of things, which invariably gives rise to more questions, and fresh opportunities to meet them, by transforming lives. In 1973, the Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles was burned down, only two years after it had moved into its first permanent building. The MCC was founded by Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal pastor who in 1969 performed the first public same-sex wedding in the modern era. MacCulloch tells us toward the end of his book that today, MCC congregations exist in nearly forty countries, serving and ministering to members of every sexual identity.
The idea of free will, Theodor Adorno believed, is only as strong as the will of those who want to be free. This sentiment, it seems to me, captures the spirit animating Lower than the Angels. More discerning and openhearted visions within Christianity are available to those willing to accept, and perhaps even find strength in, the varieties of sexual ideas and experiences the religion itself has been a party to in the world. Men ordained misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ethnic and racial intolerance, and offered them up as timeless Christian values. Why not choose to ordain something else?
Paul Chan is an artist who lives in New York.