Christianity is the world’s biggest religion, yet the BBC has not produced a major documentary series about it for decades. That will be rectified tomorrow, when BBC Four begins A History of Christianity, a six-part series presented by Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford history professor whose books about Cranmer and the Reformation have been acclaimed as masterpieces.
MacCulloch is a vicar’s son who grew up in “one of those great Georgian rectories where Agatha Christie murders took place”. He has mastered the tricks of TV presenting without hamming it up: he has all the donnish passion of David Starkey but comes across as much more self-effacing ”“ not difficult, admittedly. Underneath it all, however, the bespectacled professor is just as opinionated. Judging by the first episode of A History of Christianity, there is some vigorous axe-grinding going on.
Not that it has anything to do with the price of tea in China, but can someone answer the question: Is Diarmaid MacCulloch an homosexual? I’ve read several of his books, including the excellent one on Thomas Cranmer and several friends have said to me that he was a man of the vicious sensuality.
RMBruton,
I would like to field that, but I would also like to be very careful about my answer. First let me say that I’m in MacCulloch’s scholarly field and am a traditional-minded Anglican.
1) Yes, Prof. MacCulloch is openly gay and in a relationship (one that has lasted some years). He dedicated his magisterial biography of Thomas Cranmer to his partner, even making a rather cute joke about being in a manage a trois with a dead archbishop.
2) He was ordained a deacon in the 1980s but declined priestly orders because of the Church of England’s position on non-celibate homosexual clergy. However, I’ve also heard from quite reliable sources that he may have simply been denied.
3) Prof. MacCulloch is a brillant historian. Although I don’t care for his take on Augustine in his very helpful “Reformation: Europe’s House Divided” and his insinuations about Erasmus’ sexuality (which I feel is irrelevant) in the same text, Prof. MacCulloch is nevertheless a real light in the field of reformation history. He totally rejects “via media” silliness – ideas about the reformation which are just not true. He gives us a picture of a truly evangelical movement for reform, one driven by scripture. Also, if you look at the acknowledgments in his biography of Cranmer, you’ll see that he heaps thanks on his former graduate student, the Rev. Dr. Ashley Null. As many of you will know, Ashley Null is a very traditional-minded and orthodox Anglican, and canon-theologian for the Diocese of Western Kansas.
So all of that is to say: yes, Prof. MacCulloch is openly gay and does have some slanted arguments. BUT, he is a great historian whose books should be read and read carefully by anybody who really cares about the English reformation.
#2: All of this correct. He is also, as far as I know, something of an agnostic as far as as Christianity is concerned. He’s an historian, not a theologian.
#2: He was declined by his bishop. He was previously an active leader of the ‘Gay Christian Movement’.
My I add two things to the previous posting?
Professor MacCulloch was ordained to the diaconate in the Church of England ca. 1985 by the late Barry Rogerson, then Bishop of Bristol, who was one of the most “progressive” bishops in the Church of England (who rescheduled his ordinations in ealry 1994 so as to be the first English bishop who ordained women to the priesthood after the anct enabling such ordinations was promulgated in the General synod in late February 1994). Bishop Rogerson was well-aware of MaCculloch’s domestic arrangements (as he told a mutual acquaintance a the time, who subsequently told me), but when MacCulloch appeared on the BBC-TV religious affairs programme in 1986 as one of a number of “same-sex partnered clergy” the bishop refused to ordain him to the priesthood because it would be “a provocation.” Subsequently Maccame to describe himself as “a wistful agnostic.”
Secondly, if one wishes to have a succinct presentation of the “story line” underlying MacCulloch’s many books on the English Refromation, Archbishop Cranmer, Edward VI and others, one can get it by reading the following very lucid and succinct article of his, which appeared in 1991: “The Myth of the English Reformation,” *Journal of British Studies,* Vol. 30, No. 1 (January 1991), pp. 1-19.
Yesterday I copied out three passages from that article. If I have kept them, I will try to paste them below. The first is the beginning, the second in the middle, and the third the end:
“The myth of the English reformation is that it did not happen, or that it happened by accident rather than design, or that it was half-hearted and sought a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism; the point a tissue is the identity of the Church of England. The myth was created in two stages, first in the middle years of the seventeenth century, and then from the third decade of the nineteenth century; and in either case it was created by one party within the church, largely consisting of clergy, with a particular motive in mind. This was to emphasize the Catholic continuity of the church over the break of the Reformation, in order to claim that the true representative of the Catholic church within the borders of England and Wales was not the minority loyal to the bishop of Rome, but the church as by law established in 1559 and 1662.” (p. 1)
“Misunderstanding or wishful thinking about the nature of the Elizabethan settlement are therefore an important part of the myth of the English Reformation. To these are added acts of amnesia or censorship about the ethos of the Elizabethan and Jacobean church, with the result that we have more or less unconsciously seen that church through a Laudian prism, central characteristics becoming marginalized or ignored in the same manner that Grindal has been marginalized as a “Puritan Archbishop.” … To analyze Edwardian, Elizabethan or Jacobean theology is to find the Church of England ranged firmly alongside churches in the Reformed and Calvinist tradition rather than those in the Lutheran camp: nearer Zurich and Geneva than Wittenberg.” (p. 10)
“From this story of confusion and changing direction emerged a church that has never subsequently dared define its identity decisively as Protestant or Catholic, and has decided in the end that this is a virtue rather than a handicap. Perhaps the Anglican gift to world Christianity is the ability to make a virtue out of necessity, to prefer the pragmatic to the tidy. If destroying the myth of the English Reformation exalts this gift to its proper place, then it is a task worth undertaking.” (p. 19)
Calvin wrote,
Thanks for answering my question.
Goodness, what a judgemental crew we have here! Does a person’s private life make any difference to the quality of his work? Really!
Fr. Mark,
That is a fascinating question, and one addressed by Prof. Randall Balmer in another post. Prof. Balmer, who describes himself as a liberal Episcopal priest, notes that perfect objectivity is simply impossible – this is the very real challenge of post-modernism. Prof. Balmer says nevertheless that he hopes to do justice to his subject matter (in his case, religion in early America).
What you’ve hit on is often discussed in relation to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. A brilliant mind in the middle 20th century, Heidegger was nonetheless a Nazi. The question becomes how to do we wrestle with that reality? His thought was incredibly important in lots of circles, particularly in the area of existentialism.
To restrict ourselves to the case of Prof. MacCulloch, I would like to say again that I think he is a brilliant historian. His work is excellent. However, there are quite a number of instances in which his attitudes about human sexuality come through in his books on the reformation. I noted above his insinuations about Erasmus. So his scholarship is in fact influenced by some of his deeply held convictions.
Unless you feel that we can return to the days where we really believe in perfect objectivity, critical and thoughtful readers do have to know some things about the authors we read. In short, an author’s life does inform her or his perspectives and the works she or he produces. The same is true of the arts. Consider the music and plastic arts crafted in times of social crisis, Picaso’s Guernica for example.
Do you really believe we should totally ignore the lives and experiences of the authors we read? If that is the case perhaps we should give up on historical-critical methods of reading scripture and ignore the context of the biblical authors. Is that what you advocate? Sounds awfully fundamentalist.
No, what I advocate is ditching the very naive (and still widely held amongst the religious in America?) view that personal conduct of which one approves = someone is better at their job.
And I don’t think they are insinuations about Erasmus. Why should stating that someone was gay (he says the same about Laud, too, which has long been widely known) be at all a negative thing anyway?
To your #8
None of the posts above made that equation. In fact, my post went in the opposite direction, praising his work despite my disagreements with his conduct.
To your #9
If you read MacCulloch’s arguments in Europe’s House Divided, he doesn’t actually state that Erasmus was gay in any direct way. He makes a number of allusions and in fact insinuations. More important, however, is the fact that Prof. MacCulloch argues that Erasmus’ sexuality (the nature of which has never been really established as he was celibate) was the primary motivating factor behind much of his thought. To fill you in, Prof. MacCulloch argues that because Erasmus had some deeply unsatisfying sexual experience in his youth (only slight evidence btw is offered for this event), this made him turn to celibacy all his life. Is that a convincing argument? Maybe. Maybe not. In short, Prof. MacCulloch’s circuitous claims (and yes they are insinuations in the sense that they are indirect) are highly debatable. If it were in a less introductory text he might have been taken to task to provide more convincing citations.
Regarding Laud, it’s always what you want to make of the evidence (again only slight), and then what you actually do with it. Charles Carlton in his psychoanalytical biography gave us a man haunted by his sexuality. This is a rather shallow read of a very complex man. In my opinion, his sexuality wasn’t really all that much of a factor.
What I am suggesting is a mature approach in which we appreciate and recognize an author’s prejudices and all the elements and experiences that inform her or his life while not limiting or pigeon-holing her or him to a predetermined course.
Go back to my #2 for an application of this. I have the sense, though, that your goal here isn’t to talk about historical method or the post-modern problem of limited objectivity. Fr. Mark, is it that you just want us to think that homosexual behavior is not problematic in the Christian life? If that is the case, there are more direct ways of having that conversation…. and more interested interlocutors than me for that matter.
oooh, Calvin, that supercilious tone!
#11: nothing supercilious at all; very reasoned and thoughtful.
Worth emulating, Mark!
(pwned by reason – that’s gonna leave a Mark!)