Sitting in the sun in the back garden of his modern terraced house, Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch is explaining to me, with half a smile, his imminent plans to shake the foundations of the Church of England. Appropriately enough, we are in Jericho, just outside the centre of Oxford. MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford, has written a near-700-page book about Christianity and sex, which he intends to be a “well-placed hand grenade” directed at those never-ending “debates” within the church over who God permits to share a bed with whom. MacCulloch is on the side of the angels (who, he points out, are the original gender fluid beings; pronouns uncertain).
MacCulloch is the best kind of scholar: one with a keen sense of mischief. He was among the few people his late, great friend Hilary Mantel might have deferred to in knowledge of Thomas Cromwell and Reformation politics. For the past four years, since his retirement from university teaching, he has applied that lifelong erudition to a comprehensive and richly entertaining history of the ways in which, for 3,000 years, the church has tied itself in knots over sex (and love and marriage).
He intends the book, which goes back to Christianity’s roots in Greek and Judean culture and comes up to the present day (“from Plato to Nato”) as the ultimate riposte to those “self-styled traditionalists who rarely know enough about the tradition they proclaim”. It’s a heartfelt project. Along with all its academic rigour, there is a deeply personal story within it.
Back in the 1980s, MacCulloch made a few headlines in the tabloid press as the first “openly” gay man to apply to be ordained as an Anglican vicar. He was the only son of a parish priest in rural Suffolk and, after reading history at Cambridge, had become a deacon (“a priest with L-plates on”) at a church in Bristol. The idea of ordination first emerged in the late 1970s. “And the complication,” he says, “straight away was my very inconvenient addiction to truth.” In contrast to scores of priests before him, he made no secret of his sexuality. “I had a partner. I hated hypocrisy. And of course the church was really thrown by this. No one knew what to do.”
The tabloids had plenty to say. “Everyone picked up the story and there was a negative spin from all sides,” he recalls, “but the trouble was, there wasn’t much that was negative in the story. It wasn’t one of those exposure of naughty vicar stories at all, quite the reverse.”
He believed he might get a sympathetic hearing from the then bishop of Bristol Barry Rogerson, who had a niche in clerical history as the first man to ordain female vicars. But far from it. “The bishop took fright, really,” he says. Rogerson wondered if he might consider celibacy, the time-honoured church cop-out on such matters.
“I guess that was their tacit policy,” MacCulloch says. “And loads of contemporaries of mine went through the system by not mentioning anything. Some of them had the grace to feel a bit guilty about it. But I think someone has to be the little boy who tells the emperor he has no clothes.”
The fallout, he acknowledges, “was a matter of extraordinary stress, trauma, misery. I had thought of the church as a friend and it just sort of slapped me in the face. I was in a relationship with a lovely guy with whom I’m still very much in touch and who rightly said at the time: ‘I told you so.’”
By the mid-1980s that rejection had hardened into something much more vicious. With the arrival of Aids, characterised as the “gay plague” in the tabloids, and with Margaret Thatcher’s outlawing of the “promotion of homosexuality” in section 28, rightwing evangelical elements within the church were emboldened to bring their homophobic fire and brimstone to the governing body, the General Synod.
A rector from a church in Essex, Tony Higton, forced a debate and a vote in that forum on his call “for a return to biblical standards of sexual morality”, publishing a list of “rampant” homosexual practices among clergy and demanding that those engaged in “abomination and perversion should be challenged on an individual basis” and if they did not repent, be expelled from the church. MacCulloch became an inadvertent “poster boy” in that debate, he says. A watered-down version of Higton’s original motion, which declared, among other things, that “homosexual genital acts… are to be met by a call for repentance and the exercise of compassion” was, to the embarrassment of many bishops, passed almost unanimously.
In the 37 years since that Higton debate, the church has lost touch entirely with the wider mood of the country, in continuing to pander to the archaic homophobia of many of its members in an effort to “maintain unity”. It is hard to keep up with the triangulations it now performs in order to hold that line. I think the formula goes as follows: gay vicars can live together in celibate civil partnerships. Same-sex couples may in certain circumstances be blessed in churches but not in standalone services. And – for the most delicate bigoted souls – gay relationships may be best understood in the context of “covenanted friendship”.
MacCulloch withdrew his application for ordination. The last straw, he says, for him was when some Anglican leaders, including Robert Runcie, then archbishop of Canterbury, lined up alongside the ayatollahs to condemn the “blasphemy” of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
In the present, he suggests, “they don’t seem to realise that the country is no longer listening to them, except perhaps when a sibling or niece or nephew wants to get married in church and they can’t because of the stupidity and ignorance of the clergy. It still makes me very angry. You’ll remember they put an egregious book out a couple of years ago called Living in Love and Faith. The evangelicals hate it, of course, but in fact, it’s still pandering to them in so many ways.”
The subsequent Lambeth conference addressed those issues and was prefaced by the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, writing a “conciliatory” note to bishops to reaffirm a 1998 resolution that insisted “homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture” and concluded there would be no change to the doctrine of “holy matrimony”. That intervention prompted one of the great angry public statements of our time from the broadcaster Sandi Toksvig. In an open letter to the 650 bishops at the once-in-a-decade conference, she wrote: “It was a sin in 1998 and you just wanted to make clear in 2022 that no one in your finely frocked gang has moved on from that? Seriously, with the state the world is in, that is what you wanted to focus on?” During her long and happy civil marriage to her partner, Debbie, Toksvig noted that she’d “had several credible death threats, sometimes requiring the very kind assistance of the police hate crime squad. Each and every one of those threats has come from an evangelical Christian. Inevitably they have wanted to kill me on God’s behalf.”
Among many other things, MacCulloch provides all the documentary proof of Toksvig’s assertion: “Jesus doesn’t mention sexuality at all. It clearly wasn’t a big deal for him.” His book is a tragic history of the centuries of human folly and cruelty that Toksvig railed against; of the ways in which a priestly cast of men (and they were always men) were unable to keep their prejudices out of other adults’ bedrooms. Along the way it explodes many myths – for example, the “traditional church wedding” (a thing that has only existed at all for the most recent third of Christian history). “These people talk about ‘traditional marriage’,” MacCulloch says, or “biblical marriage” when “up until very recently a marriage was always between two men”: the fathers of the bride and groom. Women, given away (or more exactly sold) from one to the other, didn’t get a look-in.
In all that time, the church, he insists, has always been involved in complicated conversations about sex – about polygamy, say, or contraception – and has, often reluctantly, “changed and adapted to the circumstance in which it finds itself”. Why, he asks, should our own age be any different? And why should evangelical Christians, many taking their lead from the American right, concentrate on highly selective fragments of scripture about sexuality while ignoring the great screeds of “God’s word” against, for example, greed, or the accumulation of worldly goods, or hypocrisy?
Has MacCulloch – author of the award-winning histories Thomas Cranmer: A Life and Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 – always been saving this particular book for his retirement, I wonder?
He laughs. “I guess the unsympathetic would call it payback for my career,” he says, “but in fact my career has been extremely pleasant and fulfilling.”
He is primed for attacks from the fundamentalist voices within the church, here and abroad. “I will be interested to see what they can do with it,” he says, “because they can’t say: ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ All the footnotes are there. So how are they going to diss it? Because they’ll certainly want to.”
He lists his opponents as the “usual suspects”, evangelical devotees of the “detestable” Alpha course led by Holy Trinity Brompton in London, or from the “strongholds of all things homophobic” that are often “outposts of the diocese of Sydney, Australia”.
What about the African churches about whose extreme opinions Welby expresses anguish, but tries to accommodate?
“I think,” he says, “they are more ambiguous than we think they are. A lot of the noise that they make is just to please the [Bible belt] Americans who send them money. In South Africa, the Anglican church is not like that at all. Remember Archbishop Tutu with his lesbian daughter, who became a priest. The fact that there were many gay people involved in the liberation struggle means they have come out with a different end result.”
One of MacCulloch’s favourite arguments for the complexity of this theological debate comes from former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and his thoughts on the clitoris. MacCulloch asked the classics professor Helen King to read his book pre-publication. King is just publishing a book on women’s bodies through the ages. “She said lots of complimentary things,” he says, “but felt there was a major omission: I hadn’t mentioned the clitoris much.”
“I was embarrassed,” MacCulloch says, “to realise that was true.” So he added Williams’s thoughts – penned long before he arrived at Lambeth Palace – on a subject rarely aired in Christian discourse: “a question… is also raised for some kinds of moralists by the existence of the clitoris in women”, Williams observed, “something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality… [the clitoris] might cause us to worry whether he was in full rational control. But if God made us for joy…?”
* * *
As well as a lot of his theology, MacCullough has inherited some of his tone from his late father. Himself the son of an Episcopalian minister in Scotland, the Rev Nigel MacCulloch was for decades an army chaplain before settling to the parish in rural Suffolk. “I grew up in one of those classic Agatha Christie rectories, which the church has now sold to rich people,” MacCulloch says. “It was a very happy, very old-fashioned childhood. Me and my parents and the dog in this huge house, on a hill above an idyllic village.” Nigel MacCulloch was among the last of a breed of avuncular parish vicars “with a splendid intolerance of bullshit”.
Though natural conservatives, he and his wife did their best to embrace their son’s sexuality when he eventually came out to them in his late 20s. “It was very difficult at the time for them to grab it and understand it,” he says. “But because they loved me, they decided they would do so, which was lovely of them.”
He also understood from his father what, he says, should be obvious to any half-intelligent reader of the Bible, that the book was a kind of “cacophonous library” of competing voices rather than any strict gospel truth. “How anyone could have mistaken it for the word of God baffles me,” he says. “And there’s obviously an intellectual dishonesty about that.”
His book offers a fabulous catalogue of that babel of voices and the ways that they have been interpreted, invariably for political purposes, down the centuries. He details, for example, how a celibate priesthood was a convenient means of keeping church property intact and free from inheritance squabbles, rather than any sacrosanct edict. Some of the historical fakery is brutally shocking – for instance, the story of the unknown 12th-century “scholar” who invented a malicious legend of the “sodomite massacre” that he dated to the night before Christ’s birth – to explain why the gospels never once mentioned homosexuality. The myth featured in sermons throughout the middle ages.
On other occasions, MacCulloch notes, the repressive weirdness was a result of terrible misunderstandings. In the late 18th century a Russian Orthodox peasant prophet, Kondratii Selivanov, fatally mistranslated a command of God to the Israelites as plotites (“castrate yourselves”) rather than plodites (“be fruitful”). Generations of his male followers, the Skoptsy, duly chopped off their genitals and women mutilated their breasts, in a practice that continued beyond the second world war.
As MacCulloch traces such horrors and examines in our present time the scandalous way different churches have covered up paedophilia and abuse and pursued the unforgivable persecution of single mothers, he develops his thesis that we should always be wary of those priesthoods that believe they have a monopoly on truth and virtue. Has he, over the years, I wonder, ever had the opportunity to address the synod with those thoughts?
“No, no, I’ve been slightly at one remove, which has been very good for my mental health,” he says. “It can be the most poisonous world, that sort of church politics. I’m glad to be able to stand just outside as a candid friend.”
It is interesting to discover that despite all this history, he still maintains a close involvement with his local parish church in Jericho, where he plays the organ most Sundays and takes morning prayer one day each week.
He explains that fact in a few ways. “I like to do things that have been done over centuries by other people – and the practice of the liturgy is a very good example of that,” he says. “Because at morning and evening prayer, you have chunks of the Bible – some of which of course are utterly mad and disgraceful.”
And in the spirit of Philip Larkin, he has an abiding love of visiting ancient churches: “Once I am sure there’s nothing going on / I step inside, letting the door thud shut. / Another church: matting, seats, and stone, / And little books…”
Does he see the church as being in terminal decline? “Not terminal,” he says, “but I think we are seeing the end of the great phase of Christendom, starting with Constantine – and the Church of England’s problem is that it’s sort of a carapace of that.”
He sees his book as part of an effort to better understand that history in order to spark the conversations that make the institution more relevant to the present. In this sense, it feels like a kindred act to the movement to “decolonise” our stately home and museums.
“I’m very pleased by all that the National Trust has done in that regard,” he says. “They have done a wonderful job in presenting the facts and they’ve weathered the criticism – all the ‘anti-wokery’ that certain knowledge shouldn’t be heard.”
That latter belief feels more urgent than ever at a time when strident voices once again seek to weaponise sexual and gender difference as “deviance” to further their own political ends. The concluding chapters of MacCulloch’s books trace the emergence of a “moral majority” in countries as different as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s US and in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
“I think a lot of it is about the threat to traditional male roles,” he says. “Those who expected to walk into their father’s positions in the world have seen women in these positions and gay people – a double sense of betrayal. I think this has prompted this almost universal moment of anger.” The church – a third of the world’s population still identifies as Christian – often exacerbates those divisions. “We must go on trying to say [to these regimes]: ‘Look, there is a much better way of living than the repressive negatives that you’re presenting…’”
One expression of those negatives remains the institutional homophobia that continues to insist on “othering” a loving part of society in its arrogant language of “compassion” – let alone in the shameful continuing hesitation in criticising “conversion therapy” for what it is. “All of that still enrages me,” MacCulloch says, “all the disgraceful harm it has done to impressionable [young people]. And still does.” (“Same-sex couples,” he suggests with characteristic quiet irony in his book – with much supportive evidence – “are now in much the same position as heterosexual couples were in the 2nd-century AD church.”)
There are of course, alongside this, plenty of examples of the ways that the church has moved with the times (and the sky hasn’t fallen in). Women priests and bishops, for 2,000 years considered beyond the pale, have become a fixture in a few short years. Meanwhile, secular same-sex marriage has proved an argument MacCulloch long ago made in the pages of the Guardian: “If we give [LBGTQ+ couples] the social acceptance which heterosexual marriage has long enjoyed, you will find that their partnerships are no different, no better or worse, than heterosexual marriages. They laugh, argue, sulk and make up and go to the supermarket just like everyone else…” And who could argue with that?
• Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity is published Allen Lane (£35). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• This article was amended on 10 September 2024 because an earlier version, referring to MacCulloch’s father (Rev Nigel MacCulloch), said that he was the son of “the first Episcopalian minister in Scotland”. That should have said that Rev Nigel MacCulloch was the son of “an Episcopalian minister in Scotland”.
