Book review: Oxford professor challenges Christianity's model of a 'male and female' binary system

THE Christian churches have got themselves into a right tangle over sex, and as they seek to navigate the swiftly changing currents of what
Diarmaid MacCulloch has called “the continuing sexual revolution of our present world”, their unease, floundering and gaucherie become more painfully
evident.

MacCulloch, who is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, has tackled a hotly contentious subject in his latest tome, running to 650 pages, in which he challenges the dominant Christian model of a binary system in which God created humankind “male and female”.

His previous books include A History of Christianity (2010), which was adapted into a six-part BBC TV series, and here he seeks to dispel the widespread belief that there is a single Christian theology of sex.

Back in the 1980s, as he recalled in a recent interview with The Observer, he made tabloid headlines as the first openly gay man to apply to be ordained as an Anglican vicar — a move that was rejected unless he was prepared to embrace celibacy.

Through the 1970s and beyond campaigns for the acceptance of openly gay people and their relationship within church membership gathered momentum. Campaigns for gay rights could not be ignored indefinitely.

“Church institutions everywhere found it difficult to formulate a coherent reaction to these sudden incursions of lesbian and gay activism within Christianity.” For the Catholic Church this is still a huge problem, with its official catechism declaring that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered”.

In an age when what MacCulloch calls the “stopgap descriptive acronym LGBTQ” is in common use, the debate on the distinction between sex and gender presents the Christian churches with a “still more treacherous swamp”.

Here the churches, and the wider society, encounter people “who are passionately convinced that they have been allotted an inappropriate gender early in their earthly lives despite their visible genitals. The physical mismatch assaults a deeply felt sense of personal identity and may lead them to decisions for permanent bodily alteration. Gender and sex are not then easily untangled.” 

And what are the implications of this for the Christian understandings of love and marriage?

But for the overwhelming majorities of Christians, the greatest challenge to traditional Christian teaching on sex, love and marriage came in the area of family planning.

“The most fundamental change in the experience of human sexuality over the last century and a half has been the development of reliable methods of contraception,” notes the author.

The fallout from this, particularly within Catholicism following the publication in 1968 of the anti-contraceptive encyclical Humanae Vitae, posed the biggest challenge to papal authority since the Reformation.

It had the effect of creating among Catholics worldwide a new sense of “moral autonomy”.

And then, particularly in the USA, we have seen the way sex has played “an even more important instrumental role in promoting right-wing secular politics”.

“The influence of conservative Christianity in American politics is baffling to Western Europeans,” MacCulloch says.