Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity

Written by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Narrated by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Brought to you by Penguin.

A major new assessment of one of the most controversial topics in history

Few matters produce more public interest and public anxiety than sex and religion. Much of the political contention and division in societies across the world centres on sexual topics, and one-third of the global population is Christian in background or outlook. The issue goes to the heart of present-day religion.
The Bible observes that God made humanity ‘for a little while lower than the angels’. If humans are that close to angels, where lies the difference? Is it human sexuality and what we do with it? In a single lifetime, Christianity or historically Christian societies have witnessed one of the most extraordinary about-turns in attitudes to sex and gender in human history. There have followed revolutions in the place of women in society, a new place for same-sex love amid the spectrum of human emotions, and a public exploration of gender and trans identity. For many the new situation has brought exciting liberation – for others, fury and fear.
This book seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a three-thousand-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. The message of Lower Than The Angels is simple, necessary and timely: to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity. The reader can decide from the story told here whether there is a single Christian theology of sex, or many contending voices in a symphony that is not at all complete. Oxford’s Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church introduces an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes.


©2024 Diarmaid MacCulloch (P)2024 Penguin Audio

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin
• Release date: Sep 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781802066586

Reviews for Lower than the Angels

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anyone sitting down to read a history of sex and Christianity in the twenty-first century is likely to have one reason or another for being in a rage. This book will serve as a receptacle for an impressively contradictory range of furies. It will displease those confident that they can find a consistent view on sex in a seamless and infallible text known as the Bible, or those who with equal confidence believe that a single true Church has preached a timeless message on the subject. Others will bring experiences leading them to hate Christianity as a vehicle of oppression and trauma in sexual matters, and they may be dissatisfied with a story that tries to avoid caricaturing the past.
As the author warns us, this is a subject where the reader inevitably brings along a certain amount of baggage. If you didn‘t have strong views, you wouldn’t be here. MacCulloch goes out of his way to avoid treading on our toes during this three-thousand-year jog through the more prurient sides of ecclesiastical history, with the inevitable result that we start to get frustrated with his calm refusal to mock or condemn anybody’s standpoint, however absurd or closed-minded it seems to us in hindsight.

On the other hand, he does take us smoothly through an awful lot of material, clearing up a lot of misconceptions along the way. It becomes very clear that Christianity as a whole has never had a single, consistent teaching on human sexuality. At one time or another, just about anything we might do with our genitals (or to them — cf. Origen) has been condemned by some theologians and licensed by others. Christians have sought to apply the very fragmentary and contradictory teachings found in the Bible to the times they are living in, and come up with what often feels like a baffling range of different answers. Some of these proved to be impractical or destructive, and were quickly discarded, others met the needs of ordinary Christians or the church authorities in some way and embedded themselves in the fabric of ecclesiastical reality for longer or shorter periods of time. Monogamy, for instance, was an innovation adopted to meet social expectations when the church first expanded from West Asia into the main part of the Roman Empire, but stuck, and has only very occasionally been challenged since then (e.g. by the Mormons or by some 20th century African churches).

Obviously, in a book that takes us all the way from Old Testament Judaism to Putin and Patriarch Kirill, we have to spend a lot of time in the Middle Ages and don’t get to look at events in our own lifetime in as much detail as we might like, but there are plenty of other sources for that, and MacCulloch provides us with a comprehensive bibliography. An interesting, useful and quite lively book, even if it does engender the occasional fit of rage…