Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts
Diarmaid MacCulloch — Oxford historian of the church and author of Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity — joins Tyler Cowen in Episode 268 to trace how Christianity’s relationship with sex, monogamy, celibacy, and equality has shifted across two millennia, and why the historian’s job is to unsettle every settled fact.
Key ideas
- Christianity’s egalitarian impulse was real but quickly reversed. Baptism — open to men and women alike — marked a genuine break from the male-centred entry rite of Judaism, and Paul’s Corinthian letter asserts that each spouse owns the other’s body equally. Yet almost every subsequent generation of the church worked to suppress that impulse, restoring the subordination of women that the ancient world took for granted; the reversal has only partially unwound since the 19th century.
- The 12th century restructured Christian sex and marriage from the inside. Changing theology of the Eucharist drove clerical celibacy; celibacy in turn created a new category — the copulating laity — which forced the church to insist that marriage must be open to procreation. Spousal consent followed as an afterthought, 1,200 years into Christian history. The 12th century also gave Western Christendom the parish system, purgatory, and the great cathedral-building boom, all arising from a single shift in how the mass was understood.
- The Protestant Reformation inverted the Christian sexual model. Luther’s insistence on clerical marriage overthrew the celibate priest as the ideal Christian life and replaced him with the married minister and his family. Monasteries, the embodiment of the old ideal, were almost entirely destroyed; the parish parsonage took their place. That single reversal transformed expectations about marriage and family across the whole of European culture.
- Foucault’s history of sexuality is seriously flawed. His assertion that homosexuality was invented in the 19th century because the word was coined in 1869 rests on a category error. Relationships that look indistinguishable from modern equal, life-long same-sex partnerships appear in ancient sources; the classical unequal, age-structured institution of pederasty is a different thing entirely. Foucault, Boswell, and Bray were pioneers whose work was also distorted by the specific anxieties of their Catholic formation.
- Historians exist to unsettle settled facts. MacCulloch quotes an Indian civil servant’s 1937 complaint that public archive access would ‘unsettle many settled facts’ — and endorses it. That unsettling is the historian’s purpose: not to cure cancer or reach the moon but to maintain the epistemic hygiene that keeps human societies from being destroyed by lies.
Content
Monogamy, monotheism, and the Greek inheritance
MacCulloch’s opening move is to deny the assumed correlation between monotheism and monogamy. Judaism practised polygyny well into the 20th century among communities embedded in Islamic cultures; it was only Western Christian pressure, by the 12th century, that pushed Jews into monogamy. Conversely, Greece and Rome — neither remotely monotheistic — were already monogamous, making them unusual in the ancient world. His thesis: early Christianity adopted monogamy not from Judaism but from its target audience. To make an impression on Greek and Roman society, you had to meet them where they already were.
The egalitarian impulse: baptism versus circumcision
The key test, MacCulloch argues, is the initiation rite. Circumcision is structurally male; to be fully Jewish in the primary ritual sense is to be a man. Baptism has no such restriction. Its origins are obscure — not a prominent feature of pre-Christian Judaism, yet present at Christianity’s very beginning — and its gender-neutrality is, he insists, a genuine innovation.
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians compounds the point. In the conventional move of the ancient world, chapter 7 states that a wife’s body belongs to her husband — but then immediately reverses it: the husband’s body belongs to his wife. MacCulloch calls this ‘really extraordinary and new.’ What followed over two millennia was a ‘stealthy march’ away from it: Eastern Orthodox theologians spiritualised the passage away from bodies entirely; Western canon lawyers turned it into a requirement of procreative possibility; most subsequent generations simply ignored it. The egalitarian foundation was almost always buried under the normal patterns of male-centred ancient society.
The 12th-century revolution: Eucharist, celibacy, and purgatory
Asked why so much changed in the 12th century, MacCulloch traces everything to a single theological shift: the intensified belief that the Eucharist literally transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and that only a priest can accomplish this. Once the priest became uniquely powerful as a liturgical agent, purity requirements followed logically, and sexual purity came as a short conceptual leap from there. For the first time in Christian history, all Western clergy were required to be celibate — a role previously reserved for monks, now imposed on every ordained man.
The consequences were structural. Monasteries were redesigned with multiple side altars to multiply masses; prayers became the premium service that aristocratic endowments purchased, funding both monasteries and cathedrals. Purgatory emerged as a middle state between heaven and hell — ‘wonderfully useful’ because it is a space where prayer can still do work, driving demand for exactly the liturgical industry the church now supplied. The parish system — one priest, one patrollable area — gave every person in Europe pastoral access, not merely the nobility. MacCulloch calls it ‘an extraordinarily effective way of giving everyone in Europe pastoral care,’ unmatched in world religious history except perhaps by 20th-century Saudi Arabia.
The cathedral-building boom MacCulloch reads as a direct expression of this system: ‘factories of prayer’ worth funding handsomely, producing the legacy of Romanesque and Gothic buildings still standing. His personal favourite is the tiny medieval church of St Mary in Wetherden, Suffolk, where his father served as parish priest — ‘a wonderful textbook for a bookish boy to grow up with.‘
The Reformation as sexual revolution
The conventional account of the Reformation stresses justification by faith alone and the printing press. MacCulloch does not dispute those factors but locates the deepest change elsewhere: Luther’s mandate that clergy must marry. The celibate priest had been the moral ideal of Western Christianity for four centuries. Protestantism abolished him and installed the minister-in-his-parish-with-his-wife-and-children as the new model for every Christian family, not just the clergy. Monasteries — the institutional expression of the celibate ideal — were destroyed almost everywhere.
MacCulloch speaks from inside this history: he is himself the son of a Church of England parish priest, raised in that tradition where the clerical family embodies a specifically Protestant definition of Christian life.
He also observes that the differential survival of English Catholicism versus its near-total disappearance in Scandinavia came down to noble decision-making. In Sweden, Norway, and Denmark the nobility went Protestant as a bloc; in England they divided, partly because of personal loyalty to pre-Reformation bishops. Ireland presents the inverse case: government went Protestant, population did not — a rejection of the religion of the upper classes sustained across centuries.
Foucault, Boswell, and the errors of the pioneers
Asked about Foucault’s four-volume history of sexuality, MacCulloch is pointed: Foucault’s error on homosexuality was to confuse the coinage of a word with the invention of an institution. Equal, lifelong, same-sex partnerships are visible in ancient sources; what they are not is the same institution as the age-structured, educative, phase-of-life pederasty that was the norm in Greece and Rome. Paul’s references — arsenokoitai and malakoi, the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ partners — most likely describe that unequal classical structure, not what we now call homosexuality.
MacCulloch also notes that Foucault, Boswell, and Alan Bray all shared a specific distortion: their Catholic formation led them to want Christianity to have been more hospitable to same-sex relations than the evidence supports. He credits them as pioneers while warning firmly against treating them as authoritative.
On Christianity’s hostility to same-sex relations, he traces a dual origin: the Jewish emphasis on procreation within marriage, and a strand of ascetic world-denial in Hellenistic Jewish philosophy — particularly visible in the church at Alexandria, that meeting-point of Greek and Jewish thought.
Elizabeth I and the survival of English music
MacCulloch names Elizabeth I, not Henry VIII, as the decisive figure in the English Reformation. Henry was a narcissist who made good people — Cranmer, Cromwell — do bad things; Elizabeth was a Protestant of unusual temperament who disapproved of fanaticism and loved music and architecture. Her patronage of the Chapel Royal and her tolerance of William Byrd despite his Catholicism sustained a tradition of cathedral choral music more elaborate than any other Protestant tradition. The 16th-century English musical peak — Tallis, Byrd, running parallel to Palestrina’s Italy — collapsed in the 17th century and was not restored until the late 19th, with the 18th century borrowed from Handel and the Hanoverian imports.
On organ music, MacCulloch nominates Bach’s chorale preludes as the summit — not the more demanding Trio Sonatas, which he finds technically forbidding — precisely because they carry the specifically Lutheran inheritance directly: a melody Bach knew from a living tradition, transformed and accompanied by a counter-melody of his own invention.
The sustainability of Christianity in England
Against Tyler Cowen’s reading of Anglican decline, MacCulloch is sanguine. He distinguishes between churchgoing as social contract — which has faded — and Christianity as a form of cultural belonging. He cites Denmark, where 80 per cent of the population are baptised and baptise their children though only 10 per cent attend regularly, as a model of ‘belonging without believing’ that may be equally valid. English cathedrals, he notes, are growing in attendance. The Church of England’s unusual mission — to serve the entire nation, including those who never attend — is valued by Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh communities as evidence that religion is taken seriously at the centre of national life.
His reservation is about reformed Protestantism without the doctrine of hell: once you remove the stick, attendance falls, as Scotland demonstrates. A Eucharistic faith and a religion of sacred place are more durable than Calvinist sermon-religion once the threat of damnation is withdrawn.
The historian’s mission
The closing exchange circles back to method. MacCulloch quotes Jadunath Sarkar, the Indian historian who noted in 1937 that civil servants feared archive access would ‘unsettle many settled facts’ — and endorses the unsettling as the historian’s core purpose. Every generation of historians looks at the previous one and says, ‘You have simply not listened to things I am now going to listen to.’ That is not a failure of the profession but its engine. Historians do not cure cancer or build rockets, MacCulloch concludes: ‘What we do do is show you what are the sane things in society and what can be a sane future.‘
Related
- Diarmaid MacCulloch — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host