Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to conversations with Tyler. Today, I am here with Dermid McCulloch. He has a new book out, Lower Than the Angels, a History of Sex and Christianity, which I recommend very highly. In fact, all of his books are excellent. He is one of those historians where each and every book he has done is worth reading. He is Emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford and now a senior research fellow at Oxford. Dermid, welcome. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. In the history of the West and the world more generally, why does it seem that monotheistic religion and monogamy are so closely correlated? A good question. They are not always closely correlated. They certainly weren't in Judaism. Judaism is a form of religion in which let's call it very precisely polygyny rather than polygamy. Polygyny was a feature of Judaism really into the twentieth century. In cultures where there there were Jewish communities in Islam, then polygyny survived within living memory. There are people alive, Jewish people alive who would have known that polygynous context. In the West, it is further back with Judaism. It's a twelfth century when Jews cease to allow polygamy, polygyny in such circumstances. And I suspect that is because the pressures of Western society around the Western Christian society forced them into a monogamous form. And conversely, monogamy was a feature of two great civilizations behind Christianity, which were not at all monotheistic. That is Greek and Roman civilizations, most unusually in the ancient world, were monogamous. And I strongly suspect, we may talk about this more, that this is the reason that Christianity decided to stick with monogamy against, its cultural background in Judaism because it wanted to make an impression on Greek and Roman society. So you you've gotta be monogamous. I otherwise, that society will just not listen to you. There seems to be a feature of Greek and Roman societies emphasizing intellectually a kind of subordination in sexual relationships. Oh, yes. Christianity, at least, pretends to abolish. Why that shift? Well, it didn't abolish it, really. But intellectually, it's trying to. Right? Intellectually, it's trying to. Yes. And its great liturgical action is an affirmation of equality between the sexes. That is baptism. When you compare that with the entry right into Judaism, which is male circumcision, you see the difference. That to be in a sense fully Jewish is to be a man, capable of being circumcised. Now Christianity introduced a new form of initiation to the religion, and that is baptism. Very difficult to see where it came from. It's not a prominent feature of Judaism before or any of the religions around, but it's there …