How odd Christian beliefs about sex shape the world

Despite their shaky grounding in scripture

Read time: 6 minutes

A painting of Adam and Eve, obscurred and censored by pixelation

Illustration: Carl Godfrey

Sep 13th 2024

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. Allen Lane; 688 pages; £35. To be published in America by Viking in April 2025; $40.

The worry was the Virgin Mary’s vagina. Early Christians were very clear on some things. They knew that the Holy Spirit had made the Virgin Mary pregnant but that she was still a virgin. What they were not quite sure about was how those two things could both be true. How, in short, had God got in?

Theologians set about solving this riddle with great debate—and a healthy disregard for biology. Almost no orifice was off limits. God had entered Mary through her eyes, suggested one text. Another scholar thought He had come in through her ear. A third suggested that He had impregnated Mary through her nose—which was inventive, if hard to imagine being incorporated into the annual school nativity play.

God is odd about sex. The Bible and Christian writings are odder yet. If all this weirdness affected only believers, it would be important enough. With more than 2bn adherents, Christianity is the world’s largest religion and—though it might not always feel like it in the smugly secularising West—is still growing in many regions.

But Christianity’s sexual hang-ups—on everything from celibacy to contraception, homosexuality and more—carry consequences for more than the faithful. In America abortion could sway the election. In Russia Vladimir Putin signed legislation against “non-traditional sexual relations”. In Britain a fight over ending restrictions on abortion is brewing. This is a good time to try to understand sex and Christianity.

Modern Christians often look to the Bible for clear answers to sexual questions. But clear answers are impossible to find, argues a compendious new book on sex and Christianity. Its author, Diarmaid MacCulloch, is an Oxford academic whose big, fat books on Christianity are almost always a big deal, winning him awards and starring roles in television series.

The problem is that the Bible, which comprises 60-odd books composed over a period of a millennium and more, is less a book than a library—and displays a correspondingly broad range of sexual attitudes. Its pages offer monogamous marriages, polygamous ones, rape, racy poetry, fulminations about homosexuality and tender descriptions of a man’s passion for his male lover. There is, Mr MacCulloch writes, “no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex”.

Not that such an inconvenient truth has ever stopped Christians from claiming that there is—or getting cross with those they see as deviating from it. From those who burned “sodomites” at the stake in the 12th century to those who flame “deviants” on social media today, Christians have a habit of getting angry about this stuff. Where once they argued about transubstantiation, now they are far more likely to argue about trans issues, notes Mr MacCulloch.

He has a point: the entire Anglican Communion, the third-largest club of Christian churches (after Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox), has for years been in danger of a schism. Its members are sparring about whether or not to allow gay marriages in churches. Add the horror over the scale of Catholic priests’ sexual abuse of children, as well as arguments over contraception, abortion and the ordination of women, and it is possible to see why Mr MacCulloch writes that sex and gender are currently causing more arguments within the church than “at virtually any time over the last two millennia of Christian life”.

Any religion is as much almost random accretion as actual doctrine. Christianity’s sexual obsessions are no different. Much of what people “know” about Christianity is, to put it mildly, hard to find in the Bible. There was, for example, no apple in Eden (it reputedly grew out of a translator’s pun: the words for “apple” and “evil” are almost identical in Latin). As a fiery place of torture, hell is similarly almost entirely absent from the pages of the New Testament. And the word “daily” in the Lord’s prayer—often the only Christian prayer that many know—is pure bunkum. (No one has a clue what the Greek word that appears before the word “bread” actually means.)

Christians may have banged on about sex, celibacy and homosexuality for centuries, but, in truth, Jesus had precious little to say about any of them. Though he was fiery in his condemnation of greedy people, he had absolutely nothing to say about gay ones; yet, as one modern theologian pithily pointed out, “No medieval states burned the greedy at the stake.” There is, similarly, little in the way of Christian “family values” to be spotted in the life of this man who was rude to his mother and who himself never married.

Christianity’s oddness about sex and families can be traced, in part, to Christ’s odd start in life. The Mary-Joseph-God ménage à trois was unusual enough for Mary—and was not much fun for Joseph either. While all that was going on between his betrothed and God, St Joseph had to sit on the sidelines—sometimes sanguine, occasionally annoyed, eventually sanctified. Rarely has a man deserved his sainthood more. There were, as Mr MacCulloch puts it, “three of them in that marriage, so it was a bit theologically crowded”.

To understand where the various Christian sexual hang-ups come from, Mr MacCulloch goes on a quick tour of the heroes and villains of two millennia of Christian theology, from St Paul (whose angry epistles inspired centuries of homophobia), via St Jerome (who championed celibacy), and on to St Augustine (who, having screwed around in the fleshpots of Carthage, then helped screw up the ensuing 16 centuries of Christians with his doctrine of original sin). Things finally brighten up a bit with the humanist scholar Erasmus, who in 1518 published a pamphlet championing the pleasures of marriage, dedicated to a patron with the improbable if unimprovable name of “Lord Mountjoy”.

Mr MacCulloch offers other similarly pleasing titbits. It is, for example, interesting to learn that the word “buggery” is a corruption of the word “Bulgarian”, because medieval Christians accused heretics who were thought to come from Bulgaria of it. But far too much of this book is heavy going. Mr MacCulloch’s great strength is that he knows a vast amount. His great weakness is that he has written it all down, over 497 pages, in a tiny font. Doubtless there are some who will thrill to discover that in 451AD, at the Council of Chalcedon, a non-Chalcedonian church “proudly adhered to the ‘Dyophysite’ theology of the displaced Patriarch of Constantinople Nestorios”. Many more will be left scratching their heads.

Does it matter that many will buy Mr MacCulloch’s book, but perhaps not finish it? Christian attitudes to sex are so important in world politics at the moment. But it feels like a mistake to take this oddness towards sex too much on its own terms. Why are American conservatives currently crushing women’s reproductive rights? Why is the Russian Orthodox church inveighing against homosexuality? The writings of St Augustine and St Paul offer one answer. Perhaps a simpler answer is provided by the old saying that everything in the world is about sex, except for sex, which is about power. The Christian church, which has been described as the most powerful persecuting force that the world has ever seen, knows this well. ■

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Christianity’s sex addiction”