Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

What It Covers

Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch examines how Christianity shaped Western attitudes toward sex, marriage, and gender over two millennia. He traces the evolution from early egalitarian baptism practices through medieval celibacy requirements to Protestant reformation of clerical marriage, explaining how theological shifts drove social transformation and why certain sexual norms emerged when they did.

Key Questions Answered

• •Baptism versus circumcision: Christianity's choice of baptism as initiation rite, available equally to men and women, created structural equality absent in Judaism's male circumcision requirement. This theological foundation enabled women's participation despite two thousand years of subsequent male-dominated institutional drift away from this egalitarian principle toward ancient world patterns of female subordination.
• •Twelfth century transformation: Western clergy became universally celibate when the Eucharist was redefined as requiring maximum priestly purity. This created a binary where celibate clergy performed sacraments while married laity became the only legitimate sexual actors, establishing that valid marriage required openness to procreation and eliminating previously acceptable celibate marriages like Saint Etheldreda's two unconsummated royal unions.
• •Parish system coverage: Medieval Europe developed parishes sized for one priest to visit all parishioners within a day's walk, creating unprecedented universal pastoral care. This integrated system, combined with cathedrals and monasteries functioning as prayer factories funded by nobility needing soul-saving masses, produced the architectural explosion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries still visible today.
• •Protestant marriage revolution: Martin Luther's core insight was not justification by faith alone but eliminating clergy as special intermediaries. Requiring all Protestant clergy to marry made the minister's family, not the celibate monk, the model Christian life. This reversed fifteen hundred years of monasticism as the spiritual ideal and fundamentally restructured Western family patterns and sexual norms.
• •Meritocratic Tudor advancement: Henry VII, having weak royal bloodline claims and no prior English connections, deliberately elevated capable commoners like Wolsey, Cromwell, and Cranmer over aristocrats he distrusted. Henry VIII continued this pattern, alternating between merit-based advisors and entitled nobility, creating space for talented individuals to reach highest government positions regardless of birth status.