Abstract
Sometimes it seems as if Christians can talk about nothing but sex, and they’re against it. And such Christians talk as if two thousand years of unchanging certainties have been drowned in a tide of filth just in the last half-century. Christians who call themselves traditionalists have been having a rough time in the Western World in the 21st century. It’s entered an age of unprecedented sexual tolerance and equality. Women have swept into the workplace and positions of power. Fewer than 50 per cent of British couples who live together get married, least of all in Church; gay people are getting equal rights in country after country. Again and again, most Christian Churches seem out of step. They mostly ban equal marriage; they have been very slow to let women take top leadership roles. Catholics and Evangelical Protestants alike have raged about abortion: Catholic leaders add a ban on contraception and compulsorily celibate clergy to the wish list. Is this a collision course without an exit?
In a topsy-turvy way, Western Christianity created this problem for itself. It has always talked about sex, in a mostly negative way; and its reward over the last two centuries or so is that the deafening chatter about sex has continued in Western society, even though Christianity has become powerless to contain it. Talking about sex has become almost the defining characteristic of ‘the West’, which is no longer a place but a state of mind: you can find ‘the West’ in every shopping mall and on every beach throughout the world. Other cultures hate this. Human beings all think a lot about sex, but in most cultures, it is bad manners to discuss it. Western openness in sexual chatter outrages millions; the resulting anger is one of the forces which fuels attacks on ‘the West’ which now span very different conflicts from Moscow to Lagos, via the Middle East. We need to understand how modern terrorism relates to culture wars which the West itself has provoked.
It was urgent issues like these that spurred me to develop the TV series which went out on BBC2 from 10 April. In it, we reach back into the ancient world to uncover the complex, explosive and divisive history of the Christian Church and the unexpected ways that it has reached today’s battles about sex, marriage and gender. From bible lands and Ancient Greece to our own time, we revisit the individuals and events that have shaped and shaken the Christian Church and the Western World. The fascination of the story is that it’s not just the Word of the Lord or popes and kings we need to consult, but a babble of competing voices: Greek philosophers, forgotten Syrian traders, who imported the idea of monasticism into Christianity (monasteries were invented by Hindus and Buddhists). We meet shaggy hermits crouching in the desert caves of Egypt, and early Irish monks who catalogued sexual sin with the enthusiasm of stamp-collectors. Wandering past the witch hunts of the 16th century, the drag queens of 18th century London and the Free Love of the 1960s, Mormons, Methodists and missionaries, we hoped to show viewers what an illusion it is to think that Christian views on sex and gender have ever been fixed - they have been in flux right from the start. And I hope that that will be a comforting, not a frightening thought.
As we developed our argument and the programmes that you will see, we were always conscious of what an explosive and difficult subject sex is. Sex is a problem, even for sophisticates and ultra-moderns, and it always will be. I’ve done my best to tell the story with an even hand, without strident proclamation or condemnation, and with a light touch which nevertheless seeks to avoid mocking human beings who long ago passionately held convictions which are not ours. The series unashamedly has a purpose; it is aimed at bringing sanity and clarity to debates which often seem deliberately to avoid both.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford. His series ‘Sex and the Church’ aired on BBC2 from 10 April 2015.