Sex and the Church

[PeterRS]

I have read today an article about this new book Lower Than The Angels. I have not read it myself yet and so I will merely quote parts of the article. I see it is available on amazon and there are more comments there. The book is the last in the Guardian article to be reviewed.

Jesus never mentioned homosexuals, masturbation or the role of women in social, let alone sacred, life. Yet that hasn’t stopped millennia of godly scholars and lay Christians acting as if he had. According to these finger-waggers, extrapolating from biblical apocrypha, exegesis and their own personal fantasies, women are either morally superior or corrupt whores. Likewise, same-sex love is at one moment the emotional glue that binds celibate monastic communities and at another a sin that requires participants to be stoned.

In this masterly book, the ecclesiastical historian Diarmaid MacCulloch sets out to show that the source for Christianity’s confused teachings on sex, sexuality and gender is its own untidy DNA . . .

MacCulloch deals candidly with the clumsy and often cruel way in which churches in the post-second world war period dragged their feet on contraception, gay and lesbian rights and the ordination of women. His book is not in any sense a campaigning document, but he concludes with the mild and sensible suggestion that what is desperately needed is a general agreement that the church’s teachings on sexuality have little to do with scripture and everything to do with the muddled fears, fantasies and self-interest of subsequent commentators and the historical societies in which they lived. The best thing to do now would be to look beyond the old and often damaging dogma and take proper notice of how real people, in all their splendid variety, organise their sex lives most comfortably when left to their own devices.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2025/sep/03/this-months-best-paperbacks-haruki-murakami-richard-powers-and-more#lower-than-the-angels