Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Viking, 2025. 660 pages.
If ever there was a book (other than the Bible) that makes a sickening read, this is it. As I said to a friend, slogging through this book is like rolling around in a garbage truck that services an abbatoir and a pig farm. But it’s not the book itself. The book itself is a brilliant work of scholarship. What is sickening to any normal human being is — or ought to be — the subject matter.
If people knew the actual history of the church, as opposed to the rubbish that the church teaches about itself, we’d soon be rid of the church. This was already pretty familiar terrain to me. But my credibility as a person who despises the church requires knowing something about the history of the church and the sources of that history.
First, a disclaimer. Yes, there are some nice people in the church. And yes, some nice thoughts are attributed to Jesus. But that changes nothing. As early as Religion 101 (a required course where I went to school many years ago) one learns that there actually was nothing new in the teachings of Jesus. There were many contemporary cults in that part of the world whose teachings very much overlapped with the teachings of Jesus — the Essenes and the Pharisees, for example.
There are a million places to get mired down in the history of Christianity — for example, the question of whether Jesus existed at all. If you’d like to get mired down in that, a good place to start would be the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Personally I prefer to assume that Jesus actually did exist, and then move on from there to the history of the church.
Paul of Tarsus is a good place to start. He was a professional and zealous persecutor. To quote Galatians 1:13 (King James version): “For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: (14) And profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.”
We don’t know what form this “beyond measure” persecution took. It probably meant throwing people out of the temple, or encouraging stonings and beatings. During the occupation, the Romans actually put some restrictions on the liberal Hebrew use of capital punishment. But under the Torah many things could get you stoned: blasphemy, apostasy, violation of the Sabbath, adultery, or being a disobedient son.
But, if you pay attention to what Paul reveals about himself in his letters, his cruelty never goes away. It’s just that the targets of the cruelty changed. (Galatians 5:12, 1 Corinthians 5:5.) Yes, some of Paul’s cruelty may have been merely rhetorical. But he was still a horrid person.
After Paul and his letters, we get into the mysterious history of how the other books of the New Testament were written (and rewritten). From there we move from the contents of the Bible itself to the beginnings of the church and how its doctrines were decided (and decided again, and decided again, and decided again, and by what sort of ugly souls).
There is a vast amount of history, well recorded, about how Christianity became the imperial religion of Rome. One needs to get mired in this history to get a feel for why Christianity could be made into an imperial religion, just what Rome needed for its cultural genocides. See The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, by Catherine Nixey.
Doctrine
Soon madmen such as Augustine of Hippo (354-430) come into the story. Augustine was largely a free-lancer, but you’ll want to read up on official church doctrine, in particular the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 CE). Then it’s time to get mired in the history of the papacy. This will lead you to a history of the crusades, and the Inquisition. Eventually you will get to the Reformation. What were the Protestant complaints against Rome? Investigate the madness of some of the reformers: John Calvin, Martin Luther, Thomas Müntzer, Andreas Karlstadt, John of Leiden (it was reported that he beheaded one of his wives because she wouldn’t accept his authority). You can safely assume that the history of the Reformation could not have happened without fanatics and authoritarians with many different axes to grind — and very ugly minds.
You’ll notice that, so far, I haven’t even mentioned sex.
One fascinating thing I learned from this book has to do with the history of the Moravian church (well known in Pennsylvania and North Carolina because of their early settlements). It’s called “the time of sifting,” and Moravians almost succeeded in purging it from the historical record because it is so embarrassing to them. I won’t get into it here, but it has much to do with the son of Nicholas Zinzendorf (1700-1760), whose patronage allowed the Moravian church to expand to America. The son was Christian Renatus von Zinzendorf. For some juicy details, all of it about sex, you’d need to see A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century, by Paul Peucker, Penn State University Press, 2015.
Sex
There is just no way to try to summarize the history of the church where sex is involved, whether that history has to do with doctrine, persecution, or the church’s own scandals. But it is a history that is always sick. It has cost many lives and has destroyed many millions more. As Christian “mission” work expanded from the 18th Century onward, this sickness was exported to the rest of the world, where the sickness took root and persisted even after the Christian empires were kicked out. The church has always sought to get its sexual doctrines codified in secular law, whether related to marriage, divorce, contraception, or homosexuality. Human societies are always vulnerable to panics, but sex panics are particularly contagious and malicious.
It’s making a comeback
Under Trump, Republicans are salivating to re-impose Christian authoritarianism and doctrine — using public money for indoctrination of the young, banning books, reversing Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges to recriminalize abortion and homosexuality, and weakening constitutional protections so that Christians can exert Pauline persecution against people they don’t like.
Even the recent popes seem to have some understanding that there is not much future in that. But in the United States there is a Great Renewal of authoritarian zeal. There are reports that the decline in churchgoing has bottomed, and that more young people have started going to church. Mainstream publications such as the New York Times and The Atlantic are publishing more articles than ever that are flattering to the church.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
In the Wikipedia article on Diarmaid MacCulloch, he describes himself as “a candid friend of Christianity.” OK. That’s a suitable posture for an Oxford scholar who studies the history of Christianity. I can’t help but wonder, though, how he maintains his sanity and avoids banging his head against the wall or throwing up a lot.
Every now and then in the past, someone has pressed me on my lack of religion. I now have a stock answer ready if it’s needed. It’s that I know far too much about the church to be religious.
I wish everyone did.
