‘I thought of the church as a friend and it slapped me in the face’: historian Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Church of England’s hypocrisy

The award-winning author, ecclesiastical historian and church-goer on his incendiary new book about sex and the church, challenging centuries of self-serving homophobia, fakery and abuse. He is primed for the backlash…

Sitting in the sun in the back garden of his modern terraced house, Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch is explaining to me, with half a smile, his imminent plans to shake the foundations of the Church of England. Appropriately enough, we are in Jericho, just outside the centre of Oxford. MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford, has written a near-700-page book about Christianity and sex, which he intends to be a “well-placed hand grenade” directed at those never-ending “debates” within the church over who God permits to share a bed with whom. MacCulloch is on the side of the angels (who, he points out, are the original gender fluid beings; pronouns uncertain).

MacCulloch is the best kind of scholar: one with a keen sense of mischief. He was among the few people his late, great friend Hilary Mantel might have deferred to in knowledge of Thomas Cromwell and Reformation politics. For the past four years, since his retirement from university teaching, he has applied that lifelong erudition to a comprehensive and richly entertaining history of the ways in which, for 3,000 years, the church has tied itself in knots over sex (and love and marriage).

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