On Friday, February 20th, the German translation of the book Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Más bajo que los ángeles. Historia del sexo y el cristianismo) by British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch (1950- ) has gone on sale. Originally published in 2024, the Spanish publishing house Debate, part of the Penguin Random House group, previously published in 2011 the author’s monumental A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009). However, this important and revealing work on the sexual history of Christianity does not yet have a Spanish version.
We have a precedent with theHistoria sexual del cristianismo(Editorial Yalde, 1993) of the German historian and essayist **Karlheinz Deschner** (1924-2014), which, although it contains abundant and erudite information, is weighed down by a marked anti-Catholic bias. Nevertheless, it is a valuable book to keep in mind.
MacCulloch’s perspective is more friendly, but it is far from dogmatic and complacent. **With admirable erudition, he objectively presents and with agile and amusing language the contradictions that Christianity has had regarding sexuality in its more than two thousand years of existence.**
Well, if we talk about church and sexuality, we find ourselves facing a permanent conflict that sometimes is dealt with very emotionally, from the practice of “free love,” going through the controversy over the birth control pill and contraception, to the debate about the causes of sexual abuse by clergy, religious, and church personnel. Sexuality, society, and the Church maintain to this day a highly problematic triangular relationship.
Against this backdrop, Diarmaid MacCulloch wants to encourage a new look at the subject. The Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, a deacon in the Church of England and openly homosexual, shows in his book clear paths through more than 2,000 years of debate among Christians about sexuality, gender, and family.
Their conclusion is that there has been, and continues to be, no unified Christian doctrine on sexuality. Rather, a multitude of teachings are found that partly contradict each other strongly. Therefore, MacCulloch addresses self-proclaimed guardians of a “true” doctrine with warnings. Self-proclaimed traditionalists often know very little about the traditions they defend.
In the author’s words, Christianity—like all successful world religions—is a **”chameleon faith”**, notable for its ability to reinvent itself in changing times. MacCulloch argues that the conflict over sexuality has been carried with so much acrimony in recent decades because of the worldwide sexual revolution, in which the Church had to accept a dramatic loss of power. Sex and gender have been weaponized in internal church conflicts more intensely in the last half-century than at any other time in church history, he writes. Previously, Christians debated the essence of the Trinity, the ways of salvation, or the Eucharist.
Today, the conflict over sexual morality and sexual identity divides believers among themselves.
And what about homosexuality? In the author’s opinion, opposing positions can appeal to the Bible only to a very limited extent. **MacCulloch emphasizes that Jesus and his disciples did not even concern themselves with questions of sexuality, let alone homosexuality.** The only thing clearly stated is a prohibition against divorce. However, Paul already relativized Jesus’s requirement that marriage should not be dissolved, through an exception known as the Pauline privilege.
That the Sacred Scripture does not make clear statements about sexuality is not, from the author’s perspective, a great problem: historically, the Church has dealt with questions of sexual morality not by interpreting biblical texts, but by resorting to natural law.
Anyone who wants to approach historically the attitude of the Churches towards sexuality and the family must, according to the author, first deal with Judaism and Greco-Roman culture. The answers that Christians drew from this were polyphonic. It is clear that voices that particularly valued abstinence from sexual activity and virginity as ideals superior to marriage became particularly strong.
At the same time, MacCulloch opposes the theory that in the first millennium of Christianity there was something like a uniformly defined Christian marriage. Only from the 11th century did the Church increasingly claim influence in various spheres of private life. “Until then, a couple could marry whenever they wanted. The oral promise of marriage only had to be sealed by the sexual act,” explains the Church historian.
Starting in the late 12th century, with Pope Gregory VII, clerical-sacramental marriage became the obligatory norm, which allowed the pope to exert great influence over the nobility through his marriage policy. Increasingly, even the marital sexual act was stigmatized as sinful. The fact that the 16th-century Reformation rejected celibacy and valued sexuality in marriage led, on the Catholic side, to a greater tightening of its sexual morality.
From the 18th century onwards, a slow privatization of life decisions, including sexual relationships, took place. Furthermore, women gradually gained influence. A development that increasingly put Christian churches on the defensive.
Christians are only just beginning to discuss again the topic of sexuality in the modern world, MacCulloch writes. He urges churches and theology to discuss moral issues “through a more flexible and creative consideration of natural law.” To do so, they must take into account current scientific knowledge about human behavior and biology. These are valid arguments in favor of an urgent reform of Christian, and in particular Catholic, sexual morality.
Martin Scheuch
Digital Religion
English version translated with AI