Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

Back to Christian sexual phobias.

A Fascinating new book shows just how intertwined sex and the church have been for 2,000 years

Perhaps the most enduring controversy in the first 12 centuries of the faith was over the merits of celibacy. For several of those centuries, most Christian priests were married, as was the custom of many officials in the religions of the ancient Mediterranean. Polygyny—or multiple wives living with a single husband—was also common in wealthier families. Despite this background, the conviction spread among Christians that virginity made a person closer to God, inspired in large part by reverence for the Virgin Mary and by Jesus’ own apparent virginity. Particularly devout laypeople chose to live in celibate, ascetic communities, the forebearers of monasteries and convents.

It wasn’t until the Second Lateran Council in 1139 that celibacy became mandatory for Catholic priests.

It was just as important to set the clergy apart from the laity, exalting them as authorities whose well-guarded powers and superior holiness were made manifest in their sexual purity. As one defender of this rule put it, “Who is so stupid as not to be able to consider lucidly that the life of those I call upon to bless my house ought to be different and more elevated than mine?” Some particularly pious laypeople sought to emulate the spiritual state of the priesthood by engaging in chaste marriages or refusing marriage entirely—which was the easiest way for an early Christian woman to attain sainthood, provided she was martyred in some ghastly way for her recalcitrance.

Laypeople were encouraged by church authorities to marry and procreate, but many were still troubled by the notion that even married sex was sinful. St. Jerome, a fourth-century theologian who lived for a few years as a hermit in the Syrian desert before going on to minister to a lot of prominent and affluent Roman women, was “no friend to sexual activity of any sort,” and in particular admonished his widowed patronesses not to remarry. Marriage was like “unwholesome food,” Jerome told them, and “now that you have relieved your heaving stomach of its bile, why should you return to it again … like a dog to its vomit?”

//Then come the Protestants\\

Rejection of the clerical celibacy mandate was one of the cornerstones of the Reformation, along with repudiation of the cult surrounding the Virgin Mary, which in some corners had gone so far as to assert that she, as well as Jesus, was immaculately conceived. (Marian devotees had to deliberately ignore biblical references to Jesus’ siblings, which suggested that even Mary herself didn’t stay a virgin for long.)

Protestantism has a tendency to splinter into sects over bitter doctrinal disputes, and was far from immune to extremism in its biblical fidelity. One fanatical leader of the 16th century, John of Leyden, barricaded himself and his followers in the German city of Munster, where they instituted compulsory polygyny (the compelled were girls as young as 11) after the model of the Old Testament patriarchs, outlawed money, and banned private property. When a Catholic army finally retook the city, John and two other sect leaders were tortured to death and their bodies displayed in iron cages that still hang from the exterior of the church in the town center.

There was also during this period [18th cent.] what MacCulloch describes as a “masturbation panic,” which he regards as “yet another symptom of the age of individual choice, for few pursuits are more shaped by individual decision than masturbation.” Immanuel Kant (who probably died a virgin) went so far as to argue that “self-abuse” was worse than suicide. At the same time, a chain of gentlemen’s clubs in Scotland provided members with the opportunity to gather together for “enthusiastic and onanistic contemplation of females hired for the spectacle,” a recreation MacCulloch describes as “programmatically heterosexual though inescapably homosocial.”

This notion reframes the American evangelical obsession with sexual and gender transgression as a battle for the meaning of self-determination in a country obsessed with individualism. That “choice” became the rallying cry of the American abortion rights movement—although MacCulloch, in an atypical lapse, doesn’t mention it—can be no coincidence. As a Briton, this issue may not feel immediate to him, but even he can see that sex “has become the most salient issue for identity in the Republican Party.”

https://slate.com/culture/2025/04/lower-...anity.html