YouSaid · the spoken record

Diarmaid MacCulloch

lines on the record: 69
first: 2026-01-21
most recent: 2026-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And when you're getting that sort of number, you think, well, this is an important topic. I'm not sure there is anything which I can see which I can do as important. And inquiry, you ask me. Well, one thing I want to love to go on doing is simply travelling around English parish churches, looking at them. I may have seen, I don't know, six thousand. Well, that means there are eight thousand to go. And each of them is like meeting a new person and teasing out a new story. So it may be that that's the way that my final years go.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good questions both well I am seventy four And I think I may be entitled to arrest. I've been writing books for fifty years, and I think my last book on sex and Christianity is the widest topic I've covered, and it may be the most important. It is part of my campaign to make the world sane And what I'm doing at the moment is talking about it as I'm talking to you as I talked in Gloucester Cathedral last night to very large audiences in St. Paul's Cathedral in London when we launched the hardback version of the book. We had an audience of a thousand.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suffolk Church about it. It is to keep the human race sane and to stop it listening to lies. By setting down historical method for judging what is true and what is false. So we are the profession, historians are the profession which keeps the human race sane. We don't give you a cure for cancer. We don't give you a rocket to the moon. Those things can be done by mad people. What we do do is show you what are the sane things in society and what can be a sane future.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who was Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta in the nineteen twenties, and Sir Jarunath, under the British Raj was also the chairman of the Imperial Records Commission for the Indian Empire, and they met one day in 1937 a meeting, committee meeting of the Commission, and he dryly observed that civil servants within the Imperial Record Office in New Delhi were worried that giving access to the general public to all their archives would unsettle many settled facts. Beautiful piece of irony, and that is what historians do. We look at settled facts and we unsettle them, and that is good for human sanity. It's why you do it is not just my curiosity as a boy in the world.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I don't think so at all The whole work of a historian in every generation is to look at what the previous generation say and say, well, I don't think that's quite right, the emphasis is all right. Or perhaps more importantly, you have simply not listened to things which I am now going to listen to. I note that in my younger colleagues we have an extraordinarily flourishing world of church history in the University of Oxford with seminars packed out with enthusiastic young historians how we're going to pay for them in the future is another matter. But there are still extremely able people coming through the system. And that is because of the wonderfully self-renewing nature of the historical profession and its inquiry. I quote in the book, you may have noticed, the remark of an Indian historian of the 20th century, Sir Jadunath Saka.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the population have been baptized and taking are taking their children to be baptized. It is part of a way of being Danish. That may be, you might call that folk culture, but it is a form of Christianity which may have equal validity. It's been called belonging without believing. And that may be a form of Christianity which does not depend on orthodoxy. Like so much Judaism depends on orthopraxy things you do in religion form your religion”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fewer people are going to be involved in it. That is inevitable. We in England used to have a church going as a form of social contract. You went to the Church of England, particularly if you were respectable, or if you wanted to make a statement, you went to non-conformist Protestant churches, or if you wanted to make a statement about your culture and maybe ethnic backgrounds, you went to the Roman Catholic Church. That is no longer the case. So intimately. I mean, you also need to look at cases like Scandinavia, where the number of regular churchgoers is very small, but the church is show no sign at all of fading away and are very high in public esteem and the extraordinary situation in Denmark where church going is not very prevalent. I know 10% the population whatever, but eighty percent.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why a Eucharistic faith is much more likely to be sustainable and a religion of sacred place is more likely to be sustainable than the religion of reformed Protestantism evolved in the 16th century. Once you remove the stick, And maybe the carrot doesn't look so interesting.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you aren't more religious. What you mean is many more of you practice going to church. That's a different matter. The thing about hell is, all right, it's there in the Bible, but it is a profoundly unconvincing doctrine. Human beings are very capable of creating hells, and there is certainly an aspect of human existence which is deeply, deeply inflected with evil. And Christianity is a fight against evil. But that does not imply consignment of people to hell. It is true that when you stop trying to persuade people of the real existence of hell, very many of them will stop going to church. For instance, as they have in Scotland, where the Church of Scotland's church attendance has plummeted over the last fifty years because Calvinism without the belief in hell done amount to all that much.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you're comparing apples and carrots, really, because what you'd be examining with Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus is a religion based on practice, not on systematic thought or theology. These are religions of ortho praxy, to use a piece of technical jargon, not orthodoxy. And that makes you a very different sort of practitioner of religion. Christianity, Anglicanism, they're religions in which you may know a lot about technical matters. You may not. You may do what the Hindu does and just go into a sacred space. That is a very common attitude within English religion, and it seems to me a perfectly healthy one. Doctrine, theology, yes, Christianity is a religion of such things, but that's not all that there is to it.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasing. They have a mission to educate, to inspire through traditional liturgy, which is absolutely flourishing. It has financial problems, but it is in no way in a state of decay. So I'm rather more sanguine about the Church of England than you might be.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that my dad was proud of being able to talk to anybody in his parish, whether they came to church or not, and the Church of England is that one body within the nation which exists to minister to those beyond its walls and not those who come. That seems to be a rather precious thing to have, and it is also appreciated by the other faiths of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs are pleased that there is an established church at the centre of our country, because it is a symbol of the importance, the seriousness of religion. So it's a happy set of relationships, and I look again to our parish churches all the thousands of them and our cathedrals. Our cathedrals are an enormous success story at the present day. Attendance at cathedrals is rising. Numbers through the door, visitors beyond congregations”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In England, it's numbers have gone down because you no longer need to have it as a means of becoming respectable. We're a much more varied culture than we were, even when I was a boy. Our very white and rather boring culture then, it is now exhilaratingly multicultural, and yes, Islam is part of that, and so is Hinduism. There are more Hindus in the UK than there are Muslims. They're not so prominent, I think. And there are plenty of Sikhs. So we have become a multi-faith country. At the center of it is still the Church of England, and the Church of Rome has done reasonably well in recent years because it's constantly being replenished from outside the country by immigration. The great thing about the Church of England is that it has this now rather unusual mission to the entire nation.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you least expect them geniuses emerge like John Bunyan ordinary man in seventeenth century Bedfordshire creating this extraordinary work of Christian meditation, though it's at the centre of it are themes of which I am a little suspicious, Calvinist predestination. They keep coming and I don't think we should be worried about the never coming again.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I doubt it's impossible I don't quite share your universal admiration of Lewis. I think the children's fiction is really quite manipulative. In which case, talking of children's fiction, I would look to Philip Pullman, who of course isn't a former Christian believer, but seems to me to talk about profound issues in a way which can engage children very much. I guess one could look to Rowan Williams and I would look to the poetry of our former Archbishop of Canterbury as perhaps his most lasting work. I would, of course, also look to TS Elliot, who I guess one says, I guess predates Lewis and Elliot says some very profound things connecting him to that tradition which I know so well that of Anglicanism. These things happen.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's true with Bach. He is a symbol of the transcendency beyond our human idiocy and frequent evil towards something which connects us to the divine.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plays with the melody over a tune which he has invented for himself and they interact. So Bach, of course, Bark, of course, and the fugues and the preludes with which they are prefaced are extraordinary, and it's a wonderful way of losing yourself amid the miseries of the present world. You may remember that in the days of the communist regime in Eastern Europe, organ recitals were crowded out because it was a way that the general public could connect with the transcendent in a regime which denied the transcendent. And as a lovely phrase from an English bishop of the 20th century, Bishop Charles Gore, great theologian, and he went to hear Abrandenburg concerto in the concert hall, and he was a gruff man, and he, as he walked out, he was heard to mutter If that's true everything must be all right.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find them intimidating, frankly, because I find them very difficult to play. I look rather to the chorale prelude tradition, which can be extraordinarily intimidatingly difficult, but has staggeringly beautiful and devotionally heart-rending music, because of course it is the Lutheran chorale. So Bach was working from a musical tradition he knew very well, which was very specifically Lutheran, though he of course did other things too. He did the great B minor Mass, which has nothing really to do with Lutheranism at all. But the Quran prelude is a wonderful vehicle of Christian sentiment. I think of chorale preludes, one I played a week ago at Evensong, in my near, in my hour of need I cry to thee, O God. It's a Lutheran chorale, but he most gently...”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Composer to become the moralism the English composer of his period. You think of the great coronation music that he wrote for that deeply undistinguished king George II and that produced the wonderful anthem Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet, the most triumphant Protestant choral music you can think of. But you're right, there's a paradox. 16th century, England was right at the center of beautiful music, just as much as Palestrina's Italy. And in the 17th century, it all tailed off a bit. And it wasn't until really the late 19th century that England became once more internationally respected as a place of church music and music generally.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right, what happened? A run of quite exceptional composers in late medieval England there is an extraordinarily lavish and beautiful style of music which the Reformation more or less dismantled, but some of the practitioners jump chip and serve the Protestant Church Thomas Tallis is the obvious example, a composer of international standard. William Byrd is the next generation. Byrd did serve the Church of England, of course, to start with, and went on serving it in the Queen's Chapel Royal. But then you're right, there is this curious paradox that in the 17th century the tradition became, well, you could call it international in that Germans in particular came to this country to work for the new Protestant Hanovian monarchs, and were extraordinarily good at it. We were extraordinarily lucky to get Georg Friedrich and turn him into George Frederick Handel, an English”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go on doing this really rather elaborate form of music. It's more elaborate than any other form of Protestantism, even the Lutherans whose music can be very elaborate. Now, if you want to look at the most important person in the whole English Reformation, the person who set the patterns for the Church of England and the England as a whole, in the 16th century, it's Queen Elizabeth I. It's not Henry VIII. It's Elizabeth I.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, it is by being a composer of genius and having a patroness, the queen, who appreciated very good music. Elizabeth was a Protestant, but she was a slightly odd sort of Protestant. She disapproved very intensely of religious fanaticism of any sort. She had an eye for beauty in music and architecture. And music is actually rather cheaper for a monarch to patronise than lavish buildings. Doesn't cost so much. And she also genuinely loved it. She was the person who saved the English cathedral in the wonderful form that I experienced at Gloucester last night. She approved of cathedrals because she approved their music, and she gave patronage to the choirs and had her own choir, the chapel royal, which encouraged”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So served him with a good conscience. Trouble about that is that a man like Henry VIII is a narcissist. I think we may have seen some in modern politics. And the thing about narcissists is that they make good people do bad things. And Henry VIII was talented at making good people such as Cranmer, and I would say Thomas Cromwell do bad things.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that impulse began to weaken under Henry VIII rather than Henry VIII. And you see in Henry VIII's quite long reign an alternating pattern between the capable man of affairs who has made his way up with royal encouragement and the nobleman who feels entitled to have his position in government. And Henry is always slapping down one and then slapping down the other. So poor Wolsey didn't deliver the goods, so he was slapped down. Cromwell, famously, also lost the plot, failed to deliver a marriage which Henry liked, in fact created a humiliating marriage, and he lost his head. Grandma survived, remember he survived by loyalty to King Henry VIII, and I think genuinely loved Henry VIII.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Climb by being clever and they climb by the fact that the first two Tudor monarchs did encourage them to do so because Henry VII, who I of the Tudor monarchs, was the most unlikely person in English history to become a monarch. His claim to the throne was laughably weak, and there were very many people among the English nobility held far more royal blood than he did, and so he frankly didn't trust many of these people, virtually none of whom he'd ever met before he came to the throne, the English throne he'd been in exile for a very long time. So he's going to look around for those people to lead his government who are not necessarily aristocratic at all. They are thereby merit. And his son, Henry VIII, did inherit that thought. Henry did like doing aristocratic things with aristocrats like jousting, for instance.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is absolutely reversed Protestants destroyed most of the monasteries yet a few in Lutheran countries, but very few. Otherwise this absolutely central part of medieval Western Christianity, the monastery, was absolutely eliminated and in what is in place the parish the minister in his parish with his wife, with his children, one of whom is me. So I'm particularly passionate about this thought that Protestantism put the minister on the pedestal as the way that all Christians should live, not just clergy, all Christians could take the model of marriage and family from the clergy.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They would become like lay men in that they had an equal right to have marriage and families and that made them the same as the rest of the world. Martin Luther's concept of the old church, the church he was rejected, was one which had played a huge confidence trick on the laity of Europe by saying that clergy are special and the way we're going to make them special is by making them celibate. So making all clergy married, which is effectively what happened in the Protestant Reformation, absolutely transforms the rules on marriage and sexuality generally. Because from then on, actually the clerical family is the model of the Christian life. Previously, the model of the Christian life had been that of the monk, the celibate clergy, the celibate priest.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say I'm skeptical about that. That's certainly true. The circulation of tax, particularly biblical text, is really very important in late medieval Europe. And it's not that the Catholic Church in general forbade such texts. It just didn't see where they might lead. But I think there's something very significant about the Reformation which is underplayed. Those who know about it and talk about it, look at Martin Luther, for instance, and they use a piece of theological jargon about the Protestant Reformation. They talk of justification by faith alone. Who knows what that means? Well, what it means is that salvation is really in the hands of God, not in the hands of the clergy. Now that's the important thing, that one of the things which Martin Luther did very quickly as he began unfurling his own instincts about the need for change in the church was to make sure that the clergy once more would marry.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personal ties to the great bishops of the pre Reformation Church. Yet the picture is very different in England to that in Scandinavia. But also remember that extraordinary counter case, the case of Ireland, where the government became Protestant, as it did in England. But the great bulk of the population did not go with it. And the story of Ireland is a story of the rejection of the religion of the upper classes right through to the present day when they now rejected so much of Catholicism too. So it fascinating different stories next to each other there.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An interesting question. Lutheranism became much more universal in the Nordic countries. Catholicism did not survive there. The government, the monarchies of these countries were, I think, much more thoroughgoing in suppressing it. The nobility also decided to go over to the Reformation fairly uniformly. In Sweden, in Norway, Denmark. And of course, it does matter when the nobility make decisions. In England, they were divided quite a lot of the nobility and gentry did stick with the old faith. Maybe because they admired many of the bishops of the old church, and I did a little work of research on this in my younger days, in which you could see that those gentry who stayed Catholic after the Reformation were often those who had”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you ask me an impossible question there but probably I would say it is the church which my dad served when I was a little boy when I was four or twenty the Church of St. Mary in Weatherdon in East Anglia in the county of Suffolk, a church in which you had every architectural style from the twelfth century through to the twentieth the furnishings of every age, parts of the building added at various times. So it was a wonderful textbook for a bookish boy like me to grow up with and I sort of I think mentally apply that church to every church that I visit afterwards however huge like Gloucester Cathedral last night.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it may be the way we look at them. I'm a huge enthusiast for them all and spend my time, spare time looking around them all. But could one say that they are actually superlatively wonderful? I think our way of looking at them makes them such. They are hallowed by the fact that they have been there for so long that they are sacred places in which prayer has been valid to an English poet. It's a wonderful thing they're still there. And as you know, in England we still have that rather unusual thing and established church which is there administer all of them, look after all of them and you can walk from church to church and so many of them are still medieval. Yes, it's a wonderful thing. True, of course, in East Orthodox places too, in Greece, in Bulgaria.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was about a couple of square miles each way. He could have walked it and often did. So this is an extraordinarily effective way of giving everyone in Europe pastoral care. In fact, not just the nobility. The nobility get the deluxe end of it with the great monastery, the endowments of cathedrals, but everyone has a parish church. It's an extraordinarily wonderfully integrated system. And I think us with a Western tradition often forget how absolutely unusual that is within world religions. To have a single form of a religion absolutely dominating everything within a particular continent. Nothing else like it except perhaps Saudi Arabia in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a day, that he can meet and visit all his parishioners. I speak with feeling about this because I am the son of one of those parish priests in the Church of England, and his first parish which in which”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, the secular inability are paying for it because they're endowing these places with land for the sake of prayer. It is not exactly a decentralized system. It is a system you must remember which actually literally covers the map of Europe. There are virtually no places not contained within the system and within the diocese, that is the institution run by the bishop are what are called parishes which again virtually cover the map of Europe not that they had maps, but they knew the boundaries of every parish. And a parish is a very interesting institution. It's new in the 9th century onwards in the West. And the idea is that you have one priest in each of these parishes and that the area of land that he patrols is more or less”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look around them and you see that the innumerable side chapels there. These are factories of prayer and that is worth spending money on. And hurrah they did because we are left with this amazing legacy of wonderful buildings.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Monks within an abbey, and they benefited from this industry of prayer about which we were speaking earlier, that the elites of Western Europe needed prayer. They needed people to pray for their souls, and the laity generally also wanted prayer because they, the Western Church, was developing a particular view of the afterlife in which it is no longer that simple binary. It is not just heaven and hell. There is a state in the middle purgatory, which is a wonderfully useful way to characterize the afterlife because purgatory is where you can go on being purged of your sins. And you do that with the help of your friends and the clergy in their prayers particularly in the Mass. So purgatory is a big thing here. Cathedrals are full of altars, just like abbey churches.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and scholars from the James Brothers onwards have talked about this, the age of the cathedrals. It's really quite difficult to account for it in any way. And you've got to realize also that such wonderful, magnificent buildings, one of which I was speaking in last night, Gloucester Cathedral in Western England, were there alongside monasteries. In fact, Gloucester Cathedral was a great abbey before it was a cathedral. What are these saying? Well, they're saying one thing, that the church in the West now had a very strong, tight organization by bishops and dioceses. Canons, who were as much a corporation as the corporation of”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be somewhat dismissive of Jesus' family. And the same thing is true of Islam, of course, between who is going to be in charge of the faith in future, so Sunni Islam against Shia Islam have two different answers to that question. So it's not dissimilar to what happened within Islam.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And his family. Now, one needs to ask well, why does the New Testament treat family members like this? I think one way you can account for it is by saying that the New Testament is written by the winners in a very particular conflict, and that is the conflict as to who is going to lead the church after Jesus. Is it going to be the family? Is this going to be a dynastic religion, so James the brother of the Lord, is one of the first people who are powerful within the church? Or is it people who, like Paul of Tarsus, never actually met in his earthly life Jesus? And the balance in that conflict is eventually won by the general number of disciples, not the family. And so you would expect the text created by that side of the battle.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The picture of Jesus' relationship with his family, with his brothers and sisters is not entirely positive. So on one occasion in the Gospels they turned up to say hi, we want to see him. And Jesus looks around and says, well, actually, these people are my brothers and sisters. Implication, you're second class. And one's got to deal with that. The church ignored it as it created an increasingly central place for Mary as queen of heaven, linchpin of salvation. It ignored the fact that the foundations in the New Testament are scanty. It took the protestant reformers of the sixteenth century actually to look at the Bible and look back at that and gleefully in some cases saw that Jesus could be quite off hand with his mother.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say that. She appears more in the Holy Quran than she does in the Bible, of course. But that is clearly the influences on the creation of this book which are probably forms of Christianity. Miaphazite Christianity in what is now the Arabian Peninsula? Yes, she's there, and she is named, unlike, I think, any other woman in the Quran. The relationship is therefore complex and interesting, but so is that of Jesus to the other prophets within Islam. He has given a place of great honor. And naturally also his mother gets it. Mary's position in Christianity is, as you know, complex, and it is a construction of the later church on extremely scanty evidence in the New Testament. The picture of Mary in the Gospels is not entirely positive.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The professions, the language of the clergy. You can explore mysticism without the new invention of men in the twelfth century theology, which is something associated with the first cathedral schools and then the universities, both of which are male institutions. But mysticism, no. You can just get on with it. It involves many of the same themes in every religion that turns to mysticism, themes like fire and water, air, the vocabulary of the mystic really is quite universal. It is not restricted to Christianity or Islam or anything. It's the way that one aspect of humanity works out when it tries to meet the divine.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question because the Quran allows that to happen and the Quran has been interpreted by men when very often what it's talking about is just people. So that may be one explanation. Islam did remain very much a militarized culture to start with, so it's almost by definition run by men, but there within it a powerful set of images for women in the Quran itself. On top of the Quran there is so much added and it's usually added by male societies. So yes and no, really. There is a constant strain of things one can say about the position of women in Christianity. Women are constantly carving out parts of Christian faith for themselves against the fact that male men are increasingly running the church. It's a fact of life. Think of the mystics of the medieval West and the way in which so many of them are females because to be a mystic you don't need the male language of Latin. The language of”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's as usual with such hypotheses, far too simple. I don't see that so at all. Cousin marriages went on as being a feature of Christianity, particularly if you've got a pope to dispense such marriages in the West. What could one say about such a theory? Clans, families were not broken up by Christianity, by far the reverse. Those structures did not change very significantly. So, no, I don't think that really works at all.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, forty years later. And you see there's a lot of special pleading in that. Same with Bray. So none of these historians are setting standards forever. Foucault made absurd assertions about the invention of homosexuality in the nineteenth century, simply because the word was coined in eighteen sixty nine. Well, that's so stupid and so French. You see actually things which look precisely like modern for life equal relationships between same-sex people way back. You can see it in the ancient world is not the same as the normal, what you might call normal inverted commas, same-sex relationships, these unequal things. So the Foucault pattern, seeing this as emerging as a sort of medicalization in the 19th century, just doesn't stand up. And it's extremely misleading, and we should leave it. Behind.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're real pioneers, the three of them, on such matters as same sex relations, but they got a lot wrong, and it would not be right to start with them and not realize that they are historical texts now. In each case, actually, you can see that their perspective is distorted by their Roman Catholicism very specifically. Foucault, born into a Catholic family, never really left that world Bray and Boswell converts to Roman Catholicism from Episcopalianism or Anglicanism, if you like. And you read Bob.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, got a lot of things wrong. He's not at all reliable in those four volumes, which, of course, I've read from cover to cover. What did he get wrong? Well, he didn't really talk much about ancient Christianity. And it's all about text. He never looked at the nature of ancient society. He also has particular agendas, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't, about power in relation to historical process. But in general, I would advise people to take Michel Foucault with several pinches of salt. He was a pioneer in looking at same-sex relationships, and he was of a decade in which there were several pioneers. There was the American scholar John Boswell, for instance, writing about such matters. There was an English scholar called Alambro.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sexual marriage and notice it's also unequal by structure. It's about educating the younger partner in the ways of the first Greek world. So yes, there is our strategy to there and you look at Christian history there's not much change there at all whereas if you look at Islam there is much more acceptance of same-sex relationships in a rather traditional way in a rather a way rather like that of non-Christian Greek and Roman society”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which was used in the marketplace in the eastern Mediterranean. The other one means simply the soft. Put these together and you may have the two sorts of relationship that you get in the classical version of same-sex relationships, which is an unequal structure between a younger and an older partner that is a passive partner and an active partner. And they may be on one side Arsene Koitai on the other side Malakoi. It is difficult to see why that should be applied to modern homosexuality. It's a different institution, that ancient institution is not a lifestyle for life. It's a phase that people go through in their heterosexual lifestyle or their general lifestyle, so both partners would be expected to go on to be involved in a headline.”
2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source