Early Christians wrestled with how the Virgin Mary could remain a virgin while being impregnated by the Holy Spirit, leading to wild theories about divine entry through her eyes or ears. In his new book, historian Diarmaid MacCulloch explores how Christian attitudes toward sex and gender have evolved, revealing a patchwork of beliefs rather than a single doctrine. As debates over sexual ethics influence global politics, understanding these complexities becomes crucial.
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From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com
© 2024 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
The Economist
Despite their shaky grounding in scripture ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The worry was the Virgin Maryâs vagina. Early Christians were very clear on some things. They knew that the Holy Spirit had made the Virgin Mary pregnant but that she was still a virgin. What they were not quite sure about was how those two things could both be true. How, in short, had God got in?
Theologians set about solving this riddle with great debateâand a healthy disregard for biology. Almost no orifice was off limits. God had entered Mary through her eyes, suggested one text. Another scholar thought He had entered through her ear. A third suggested that He had impregnated Mary through her noseâwhich was inventive, if hard to imagine being incorporated into the annual school nativity play.
God is odd about sex. The Bible and Christian writings are odder yet. If all this weirdness affected only believers, it would be important enough. With more than 2bn adherents, Christianity is the worldâs largest religion andâthough it might not always feel like it in the smugly secularising Westâis still growing in many regions.
But Christianityâs sexual hang-upsâon everything from celibacy to contraception, homosexuality and moreâcarry consequences for many more than the faithful. In America fights over abortion could sway the election. In Russia Vladimir Putin signed legislation against ânon-traditional sexual relationsâ. In Britain a fight over abortion is brewing. This is a good time to try to understand sex and Christianity.
Modern Christians often look to the Bible for clear answers to sexual questions. But clear answers are impossible to find, argues a compendious new book on sex and Christianity. Its author, Diarmaid MacCulloch, is an Oxford academic whose big, fat books on Christianity are almost always a big deal, winning him awards and television series.
The problem is that the Bible, which comprises 60-odd books composed over a period of a millennium and more, is less a book than a libraryâand displays a correspondingly broad range of sexual attitudes. Its pages offer monogamous marriages, polygamous ones, rape, racy sexual poetry, fulminations about homosexuality and tender descriptions of a manâs passion for his male lover. There is, Mr MacCulloch writes, âno such thing as a single Christian theology of sexâ.
Not that that has ever stopped Christians from claiming that there isâor getting cross with those whom they see as deviating from it. From those who burned âsodomitesâ at the stake in the 12th century to those who flame âdeviantsâ on social media today, Christians have a habit of getting angry about this stuff. Where once they argued about transubstantiation, now they are far more likely to argue about trans issues, observes Mr MacCulloch.
He has a point: the entire Anglican Communion, the third-largest club of Christian churches (after Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox), has for years been in danger of a schism. Its members are sparring about whether or not to allow gay marriages in churches. Add in horror over the scale of Catholic priestsâ sexual abuse of children, as well as arguments over contraception, abortion and the ordination of women, and it is possible to see why Mr MacCulloch writes that sex and gender are currently causing more arguments within the church than âat virtually any time over the last two millennia of Christian lifeâ.
Any religion is as much almost random accretion as actual doctrine. Christianityâs sexual obsessions are no different. Much of what people âknowâ about Christianity is, to put it mildly, hard to find in the Bible. There was, for example, no apple in Eden (it reputedly grew out of a translatorâs pun: the words for âappleâ and âevilâ are almost identical in Latin). As a fiery place of torture, hell is similarly almost entirely absent from the pages of the New Testament. While the word âdailyâ in the Lordâs prayerâoften the only Christian prayer that many knowâis pure bunkum. (No one has a clue what the Greek word that appears before the word âbreadâ actually means.)
Christians may have banged on about sex, celibacy and homosexuality for centuriesâbut, in truth, Jesus had precious little to say about any of them. While he was fiery in his condemnation of greedy people he had absolutely nothing to say about gay ones; yet, as one modern theologian pithily pointed out, âNo medieval states burned the greedy at the stake.â There is, similarly, little in the way of Christian âfamily valuesâ to be spotted in the life of this man who was rude to his mother and who himself never married.
Christianityâs oddness about sex and families can be traced, in part, to Christâs odd start in life. The Mary-Joseph-God mĂ©nage Ă trois was unusual enough for Maryâand was not much fun for Joseph either. While all that was going on between his betrothed and God, St Joseph had to sit on the sidelinesâsometimes sanguine, occasionally annoyed, eventually sanctified. Rarely has a man deserved his sainthood more. There were, as Mr MacCulloch puts it, âthree of them in that marriage, so it was a bit theologically crowdedâ.
To understand where the various Christian sexual hang-ups come from, Mr MacCulloch goes on a quick tour of the heroes and villains of two millennia of Christian theology, from St Paul (whose angry epistles inspired centuries of homophobia), via St Jerome (who championed celibacy), and on to St Augustine (who, having screwed around in the fleshpots of Carthage, then helped to screw up the ensuing 16 centuries of Christians with his doctrine of original sin). Things finally brighten up a bit with the humanist scholar Erasmus, who in 1518 published a pamphlet championing the pleasures of marriage, dedicated to a patron with the improbable if unimprovable name of âLord Mountjoyâ.
This book offers other similarly pleasing titbits. It is, for example, interesting to learn that the word âbuggeryâ is a corruption of the word âBulgarianâ, because medieval Christians accused heretics who were thought to come from Bulgaria of it. But far too much of this book is heavy going. Mr MacCullochâs great strength is that he knows a vast amount. His great weakness is that he has written it all down, over 497 pages, in a tiny font. Doubtless there are some who will thrill to discover that in 451AD, at the Council of Chalcedon, the non-Chalcedonian Church âproudly adhered to the âDyophysiteâ theology of the displaced Patriarch of Constantinople Nestoriosâ. Many more will be left scratching their heads.
Does it matter that many will buy Mr MacCullochâs book, but perhaps not finish it? Christian attitudes to sex are so important in world politics at the moment. But it feels like a mistake to take this oddness towards sex too much on its own terms. Why are American conservatives currently crushing womenâs reproductive rights? Why is the Russian Orthodox church inveighing against homosexuality? The writings of St Augustine and St Paul offer one answer. But perhaps a simpler answer is provided by the old saying that everything in the world is about sex, except for sex, which is about power. The Christian church, which has been described as the most powerful persecuting force that the world has ever seen, knows this well.
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