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Tag: fornication

  • Sex and the Homilies

    by Revd Canon Neil Patterson, Vice-Dean of Bristol Cathedral and Chair of Together for the Church of England

    It feels like some sort of recognition for this blog, and perhaps even this author, to be quoted in an official Question at General Synod, even if the Question is not particularly friendly. For those unfamiliar with the custom, at each General Synod a large number of written Questions are submitted by members. They cover a wide range of the Church’s work, and although some are ruled ‘out of order’ as not being factual or asking bodies which are not responsible to Synod, they are an impressive aspect of accountability in the Church of England. When I first joined Synod, the initial answers were read out fresh, giving an opportunity for quick thinkers to ask a Supplementary that was occasionally interesting, but too often point-scoring. Now both Questions and written Answers are released a few days in advance, and there are fewer pointless Supplementaries. There is still a performative aspect to the whole business, and Synod always runs out of time before all Questions are covered. In recent years LLF has generated very many Questions at every group of sessions.

    The February 2026 Questions included this:

    The Revd Dr Patrick Richmond (Norwich) to ask the Chair of the Ministry Development Board:

    Q228    Given that the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy now serve as a primary document for discernment and discipline, what consideration has been given to the definition of ‘sexual intercourse’ used therein? Specifically, if the term is understood in the narrow sense of biological coitus, as recently argued by the Revd Canon Neil Patterson [https://viamedia.news/2026/01/24/what-is-anglican-sexanyway/] what assessment has been made regarding how the Guidelines reflect the Church’s wider authoritative teaching—such as that in the Book of Homilies warning against ‘all unlawful use of those parts ordained for generation’—and what steps are being taken to ensure that candidates and clergy understand the wider scope of the conduct to which they are committing?

    The Bishop of Chester to reply as the Chair of the Ministry Development Board:

    The replacement of references to Issues in Human Sexuality (“Issues”) with the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct for the Clergy (“the Guidelines”) in the discernment process does not create new obligations for candidates and clergy and nor does it make the Guidelines a primary document for discernment and discipline. The primary documents for discernment are the Qualities for Discernment used before a candidate comes to a discernment panel and the Qualities for Formation, using during training for ordinands. Reference is made to the Guidelines within these processes.

    The primary documents for discipline are set out in the statutory grounds within the Clergy Discipline Measure and the proposed Clergy Conduct Measure.

    As was emphasised by Synod in July 2025 when they called upon the House to replace Issues with the Guidelines, and emphasised again by the House when they decided to make the requested change, no aspect of the Church of England’s theological or ethical understanding of matters relating to sexuality has been changed by the decision to refer to the Guidelines in the process of vocational discernment and training for ordained ministry. Moreover, the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy do not in themselves establish or extend the law, though they do point to the law. They seek to provide a framework for behaviour that reflects the highest standard to which all clergy should aspire.

    Readers will see that the Answer rather sidesteps the Question, and the session ran out of time so Dr Richmond did not have the opportunity to ask a Supplementary. He did not contact me before referring to my previous blog, but here follows an attempt to respond more directly to his interesting Question than did the Bishop of Chester, building on the comments by Helen King in her blog.

    First, why does the Question refer to the Homilies, and perhaps indeed, what are they? The Homilies are a set of sermons, some published in 1547 and others under Elizabeth I, on a range of subjects, intended to be read by clergy who were not able to compose their own sermons, many setting out distinctly Reformed teaching for the new Church of England. I don’t consult my copy as regularly as Dr Richmond may, but the full texts are easily found. I will come on to their status in a moment, but we might first note that I think the reason for appealing to them is that neither Scripture, the Canons of the Church of England, or the authorised liturgies of the Church of England (whether the Book of Common Prayer or Common Worship) offer any direction about specific sexual acts. Indeed, I don’t think there are any direct references to particular sexual acts in the Canons or the liturgies at all. Even Scripture, whilst including the texts about different sexual relationships explored in depth in the Living in Love & Faith book, does not really offer any detail on what happens with particular body parts. Injury to male genitals may disqualify a man from full participation in worship at the Temple (Leviticus 21.20), and draws particular punishment upon a woman causing it (Deuteronomy 25.11-12), and of course there are many references to circumcision. But what happens sexually is not described, and I assume this is the reason for resort to the Homilies as a source of authority. This is far from a ‘wider authoritative teaching’ of which the quotation is a mere sample.

    Before going on to the authority of the Homilies, though, it is worth checking just how little the quotation says. It comes from one of the 1547 Homilies, given on the title page of my copy as ‘Against Whoredom and Adultery’ although at the start as ‘Against Whoredom and Uncleanness.’ As it turns out, the single sentence quoted in the Synod Question is the only one which specifically refers to body parts, and is probably the only such sentence in the whole Homilies (I confess, I have not searched them all). It occurs near the start when the homilist explains that adultery covers not only marital unfaithfulness, but also ‘all unlawful use of those parts ordained for generation.’ This was of course exactly what the General Synod motion passed in 1987 did not say. Even in the Homilies, which – as I shall explain below – are not generally squeamish in their language, the expression is somewhat euphemistic. But I suggest we can paraphrase ‘those parts ordained for generation’ as ‘the human reproductive organs’ in order to be both modern and clear.

    So, this immediately prompts a reflection. Much intimate activity between couples, of whatever sexes, does not involve the reproductive organs at all, at least not of both parties. In particular, as Helen King and others have explained with great clarity, the clitoris is not a reproductive organ but appears to exist solely to create sexual pleasure. And for that we all, especially those who have one, may thank the good Lord for his generous provision. What about ‘unlawful use’? Well, at the time of the Homily, a number of possible uses were outlawed by the Buggery Act 1533, which prescribed punishments for “the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast,” subsequently interpreted by the courts to mean penetrative sex between men, or bestiality, respectively. Today bestiality is regarded as an animal welfare offence, but unlawful use of the reproductive organs between people is defined by the Sexual Offences Act 2003, based on accepted principles around age and consent. No-one in the current debates in the Church of England is arguing for the right of the clergy, or anyone else, to disobey these laws.

    Of course, many will read the expression ‘unlawful’ in the Homily as referring to the ‘laws of God’ but that produces an immediately circular argument. Where are these to be found, for members of the Church of England? In Scripture, the Canons, the liturgy, and perhaps the 39 Articles. And as we have noted, those do not help us reach clarity. Perhaps if a Homily Against Buggery had been written (plausible enough) that would solve it, but it is no more evident than Jesus’ clear and transparent teaching on same-sex relationships. But the 39 Articles do bring us back to the Homilies, even if, as I have pointed out before, the Court of Arches declared some time ago that the Declaration of Assent has relativised their position as a doctrinal authority. But it is there, in Article 35, that we find the Homilies declared to ‘contain a good and wholesome Doctrine’ and suitable to be read in churches.

    No doubt there are still some clergy who read out a Homily from time to time. Most congregations I know would have quite a shock. They follow a fairly consistent pattern, assembling relevant Scripture texts around the theme, reinforced with robust Tudor rhetoric, and that against Adultery is broken into three parts to be useable as a sermon sequence. Whoredom is ‘filthy, stinking, and abominable’ ‘…neither is there a nearer way to damnation than to be a fornicator and an whoremonger’. It draws people away from ‘virtuous studies and fruitful labours’ to ‘carnal and fleshly imaginations.’ It is more repetitive than anything. And it is asserted, rather than shown, that adultery and fornication produce sorrow and poverty in this life, as well as eternal punishment.

    The most disturbing passage, however, occurs when the Homily, like many others, chooses to draw on the then-commonplace knowledge of the ancient world, commending as ‘godly acts’ the laws of various ancient states against adultery or whoredom (not very precisely distinguished). The argument is ‘even pagans thought it wicked.’ But the Homily glories in the various forms of mutilation or capital punishment inflicted by ancient societies – eyes cut out, a thousand lashes, women having their noses cut off to be visibly shamed for life, hands cut off, or death, by stoning, burning or beheading. The ‘Locrensians, Arabians, Athenians, with such other’ are commended for their barbaric laws. In a world where such punishment is associated with only the most violent forms of Islamic extremism, it is difficult to take the Homilies seriously as a source of moral guidance for today’s Church. They have to be interpreted, and once interpretation begins, outcomes are contested, as we all know well.

    So, to repeat the argument made before, the formal teaching of the Church of England does not give us a clear answer on the questions of sexual ethics that are currently the subject of such controversy. Many wish they did, and will no doubt continue to petition the bishops to offer clear answers to matters better judged in context and in private. But, even if they have not shown outstanding strength in setting a positive direction forward, perhaps the bishops will be able to achieve the easier task of resisting calls for easy answers, and allow us to grow into a wiser and less judgmental Church.

  • In the Beginning: Sex, AIDS, Judgment and the Church of England, 1986-1991

    by Professor Helen King, an authorised preacher in Oxford Diocese and an elected lay member of General Synod

     

    As soon as I typed this title, I could see what is likely to happen. That allusion to Genesis is going to bring out the usual comments about how it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve; the assumption that Adam and Eve were “married”; and no consideration at all of the questions raised by scholars like Diarmaid MacCulloch about whether there was any sex at all in the mythical Garden of Eden. So be it. I want to look back at an earlier period of our history, well before Living in Love and Faith began in 2017, and to ask how far that history is still influencing our discussions.

    I’m writing in the aftermath of this July’s Synod’s near-unanimous decision to end the use of Issues in Human Sexuality and replace it with Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy in the process of vocational discernment. Issues was published in 1991, as a “Statement by the House of Bishops”. As the paper supporting Synod’s recent debate, GS 2413A, noted, Issues was never intended to be used in the process of discernment and ordination. It used some very strange terminology which seemed to date to the 1950s, with much of that period’s thinking. It included not only the assumption that someone bisexual must by definition be incapable of a faithful relationship, and advocacy of conversion therapy, but even the hope that in time homosexuality could cease to exist, if science could “eliminate that orientation in future generations by genetic engineering” (paragraph 4.4). And now this “Statement” has not only been recognised as misguided and toxic but has also been removed from the role it had come to play in the discipline of Church life.

    But before we celebrate, let’s remember that there’s an influential booklet that’s even older than Issues: Sexuality and the Church, aka The Higton Report, published in 1987. My copy last came to the top of the pile of books on my desk back in 2017, when I wrote this. Where Issues was a “Statement”, Sexuality and the Church looks somehow more formal; its subtitle is A Report to General Synod and, as it bears the embargo stamp which was used in those days when documents were sent out to Synod members (embargoed until 29 October 1987, so two weeks before Synod met) it looks like an official part of the Synod paperwork. Looking back, I find this confusing. It’s not an official Synod document, unlike Issues which carried a GS identifier (GS Misc. 382). The Higton Report was printed not by Church House but by “Action for Biblical Witness to Our Nation”, a charity run by Tony Higton and his wife. I can’t remember, thinking back, whether it came with other Synod mailings or arrived separately; perhaps the latter. But there’s some boundary-blurring going on in the way the booklet is presented.

    I want to reflect on my reading of the document when it was published, when as a Synod member I made some notes in the (very tiny!) margins, but also to look at it from my perspective now. Some of it seems very much of its time, but there is much that is still being repeated or – more dangerously – lies behind what is actually being said out loud.

    Synod and sex in 1986-87

    So let’s backtrack to 1987, when I was on Synod as one of the five youngest members. Who was I, in 1987? I was a sexually inexperienced straight cis-woman who had recently completed a PhD on ancient medicine. Despite my research interests, I initially found Synod’s apparent obsession with sex, with who is doing what with whom, somewhat alarming. I had spoken in a debate in November 1986, when I successfully had “virginity” replaced by “pre-marital chastity” in a motion around Victoria Gillick’s campaign to prevent doctors prescribing contraception to under-16s without parental consent. My rationale here was that “virginity” was a loaded word, rather too technical; my research had made me aware of the complex cultural history of what counts as “virginity”, and of the concept of “technical virginity” when someone has avoided penis-in-vagina sex but has enthusiastically experienced pretty well every other option that exists. It was because of this that I preferred the term “chastity”, focusing on an attitude rather than a (disputed) female body part. Clearly, I wasn’t afraid of standing up in debates of this kind.

    Tony Higton’s Private Member’s Motion became available for signatures at the July 1987 Synod. Did I sign it? I don’t remember. It’s perfectly possible that I did, because I would have been interested in such a debate. As Higton tells us proudly in the Introduction to Sexuality and the Church, “168 members signed it during the four days of the Synod, more than for any other Private Member’s Motion, which means it took priority for debate at the next Synod”. The Report says it is “background material” to the imminent debate, which could be a deliberate misrepresentation, presenting it as an official document which formed part of the PMM. While these days we are urged to write such supporting documents with a maximum of four pages, this ran to 79 pages. I’d add that the label “Report” is misleading, as it wasn’t really a “report”, but a collection of essays by an all-male line-up:  Higton, David Holloway (on Synod’s Standing Committee at the time), Gordon Wenham and David Wright, with a reprinted piece by two psychologists, John Green and David Miller.

    The Higton Report is clearly out to shock its gentle synodical readers and have them clutching their pearls. In the first essay in the booklet, Higton tells us of a visit to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) office at St Botolph’s Church in London where, among other things, he found leaflets describing various sexual practices and how best to prevent AIDS while doing them; he calls these sexual practices  “homosexual acts” but those he names here have nothing intrinsically homosexual about them. I’d never even heard of some of them before; whoever would have thought Synod debates could be a source of my sex education? Higton’s assumption seems to be that heterosexuals have access to a far more limited sexual menu, as well as having far less sex; he positively luxuriates in detailing how much sex per hour can be had in “the baths”. Today, we still hear claims about “the homosexual lifestyle” which are shorthand for assumptions about inevitable promiscuity, which are somehow supposed to be absent from “the heterosexual lifestyle”. Here and elsewhere, Higton’s statistical claims are, frankly, a mess; when he discusses rising abortion rates in young girls he can only see this as evidence of promiscuity among (heterosexual!) teenagers, rather than considering that some of these pregnancies may have been the result of girls being exploited by much older men. He really doesn’t get the relationship between power and sex.

    In its original wording, Higton’s PMM began by asking Synod to reaffirm “that sexual intercourse should take place only between a man and woman who are married to each other” (interestingly, the other Canon B30 phrase, “for life”, didn’t feature because this was all about sex, not about marriage). The motion condemned “fornication, adultery and homosexual acts” as “sinful in all circumstances”. This assumed that everyone understood the term “fornication” to mean the same thing, which it doesn’t. The motion was passed in an amended version, in which the fornication – still undefined – and adultery occupied one clause, with a separate clause using the more specific phrase “homosexual genital acts [my italics]”, which incidentally would mean that at least one of the “homosexual acts” named by Higton would be entirely blameless, no genitals being involved.

    The original PMM also asked Synod to affirm that “Christian leaders are called to be exemplars in all spheres of morality, including sexual morality as a condition of being appointed to and remaining in office”. That is a precursor of the wording of Issues. And that may have been the main intention; to drive out any ordained men (remember this was pre-ordination of women) who were homosexual. During Higton’s speech in the November 1987 debate, this was certainly his main focus. However, Higton’s PMM was amended to “all [my italics] Christians are called to be exemplary in all spheres of morality, including sexual morality, and that holiness of life is particularly required of Christian leaders.”

    Throughout the Report there’s a not-entirely-convincing attempt to do the “hate the sin, love the sinner” thing. The original wording of the PMM ended with a call for “Christlike compassion to those who have fallen into sexual sin” but also for “the ministry of healing to all who suffer physically or emotionally as a result of such sin”. I assume we are talking “conversion therapy” there; but it didn’t make it to the motion as passed.

    Sex in the time of AIDS

     As Higton notes in his section on visiting the LGCM office, the Terrence Higgins Trust was sending mailings to Synod about AIDS, and it’s AIDS which is clearly one of the main drivers of the PMM. Its first mention is on page 4 of the Report. While accepting that it could be spread by any form of sex, Higton claimed it is spread “primarily by sexual promiscuity”. I noted in the margin of my copy, “So far.” He insists (again) that “homosexuals tend to be more promiscuous than heterosexuals”. David Holloway’s chapter goes further and blames the spread of AIDS on the Church’s failure to speak out on homosexuality.  Demonstrating a dangerous ignorance he writes that, except for “a very small number of cases”, he does not think mother to child transmission, nor “contaminated blood”, are relevant. I wrote in the margin, “these 2 points [church silence/AIDS cases increasing] are not related.” 

    And here we come to another aspect of how my life in 1987 intersected with these debates. As someone with an interest in the history of medicine, I had been following the emergence of HIV/AIDS since 1981 and I clearly remember a friend who had just returned from the USA telling me about the news stories that were emerging there in the earliest days. But in 1987, I was also undergoing tests for a familial blood condition, and at the time of the Higton debate I was seeing some of the panic at first hand. During tests at St Thomas’s Hospital, some of my blood was spilled and the staff went into the sort of official protective drill that leaves the patient terrified. While Higton’s “primarily” may have been accurate at the time, I thought it was still unhelpful to make out that sex was the problem when there were so many other possibilities.

    Memory is a funny thing. I knew that Synod had also debated a report (GS 795) from the Board for Social Responsibility on AIDS; indeed, I remember speaking in that debate, from my experience of my own blood condition, reflecting on the unhelpful emerging terminology of the “innocent” victim. Another speaker, Dr Jim Somervell, talked about being a surgeon with the risk of pricking oneself on equipment during an operation. But until this week, I hadn’t remembered that this was on the day before the Higton debate (yes, November 1987’s Synod was quite the experience). With AIDS and the Higton Report featuring on consecutive days, the spectre of the first of these very clearly hung over the second. How could it not?

    How far can you go?

     The question of what counts as “sex” is something on which I’ve written before, so I won’t go into graphic details here. But in the margin of my copy of the Higton Report, responding to Holloway’s chapter’s characterisation of “the Biblical tradition” being that “full sexual relationships are exclusively for heterosexual marriage”, I wrote “does this imply ‘partial sexual relationships’ are OK?” I was reminded of this last week when reading an account of the trial for rape and sexual assault of Chris Brain of the now infamous, but once thought to be missionally cutting edge, Nine O’Clock Service, where his “open relationship” with his wife meant that everything other than “full sex” – those words again – was considered fine; at least, by him.

    Looking back on this now, I am again struck by our doomed attempts to divide physical pleasure into neat categories of what is acceptable and what is not, carrying on the proud tradition of the medieval penitentials. Even the heterosexual/bisexual/homosexual division doesn’t work for everyone. From the “How far can we go?” questions which I remember from church youth clubs, to supposedly adult relationships, we seem incapable of getting away from these imagined categories and lists. Full/not full… Acceptable/going too far… Can a kiss be just a kiss? How long should a hug last? As if these things can easily be quantified! Assumptions about these categories also hover behind the convenient fiction that civil partnerships don’t involve “sex” and so are OK where civil marriages are not. Our attempts to construct classifications mean that we miss the big picture of what relationships are about: equality, consent, fidelity, commitment.

    The wrath of God?

     So where does this lead us? Of course, the title of this blog post is misleading because 1986 and the debate stimulated by Victoria Gillick’s campaigning, followed closely by the AIDS and Higton debates, and then Issues, were not ‘the’ beginning; Christian churches had been failing to come to terms with human sexuality for a long time. But something was happening in those five years. In the early days of AIDS, with the level of fear matched with the level of ignorance, the Church of England’s statements of the 1950s and 1960s, when “the Church was in many ways ahead of much of the wider society”[1] in supporting decriminalisation of homosexuality, were forgotten. Led by the evangelical wing of the Church, the general panic about HIV/AIDS was used not only to support the view that homosexual promiscuity was the underlying cause of the pandemic, but that HIV/AIDS was God’s judgement, sent to punish gay men.

    Anthony Petro, author of After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (2015), noted that the conservative right supported the “wrath of God” approach to HIV/AIDS because they were already convinced that the 1960s had led to “an epidemic of sexual immorality”. He observes that it was in the mid-1980s – the era of Gillick/Higton – that mainstream Christian writers in national USA magazines like Christian Century and Christianity Today called for attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis. That’s not to say that all Christians thought the disease was the result of “the wrath of God”: responses differed. But research has shown that, in some quarters, the idea persists that HIV/AIDS is not the result of people’s behaviour but is God’s judgement on homosexuals; as, for example, in a 2011 study of a Christian university in Nigeria.[2]

    I suspect that these ideas of judgement continue to lie beneath some people’s approaches to Living in Love and Faith today. HIV/AIDS continues to feed into the language of homophobia. Staying with Nigeria, in 2021 the Primate of Nigeria, Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, described homosexuality as a “deadly ‘virus’” or as “a Yeast that should be urgently and radically expunged and excised lest it affects the whole dough”. The language of the virus cannot avoid evoking HIV/AIDS. The Nigerian Anglican Church is of course part of GAFCON, but Archbishop Justin Welby wrote to criticise the language used by Ndukuba. And it was the same Archbishop Ndukuba who was predictably quick to condemn the Church in Wales for appointing Cherry Vann as their new Archbishop, calling on church members “to denounce, reject, condemn and expel the rebels in our midst”.

    I believe that we should recognise how the debates of the past, with the language of disease, surgical excision and judgement, continue beneath the surface even today. We can ask for “more theology” as much as we like, but there is far more going on here than simply theology, and it needs to be named.

     

     

    Notes

    [1] Mark Chapman, ‘Living in Love and Faith: The Failure of History’ in Theo Hobson and John Inge (eds), Created for Love (2025), p.85.

    [2] Surveys such as this, carried out in a Christian university in Nigeria in 2011, try to break down these views by the sex, age and educational level of the respondents.

  • Love Came Down at Christmas – For Some

    by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford; his book Sex and the Church: a History, is scheduled for publication in Autumn 2024

    Picture credit: Barry Jones

    Western society’s acceptance of homosexuality as one accepted variant in social relationships has been a breathtakingly fast process in comparison with most societal changes: it has been contained within my still not excessively venerable lifetime. Not surprisingly, the transformation has left some folk behind, for a variety of reasons, particularly those Christians for whom it disturbs particular views of biblical or ecclesiastical authority. It is easy for those who have got beyond such preoccupations to mock or belittle them, without realising the unexpressed depths of such negative feelings. Often that is because we (and they) do not know enough about the Christian past and what it contains. Here is one little story about the history of the Christian West and its homophobia.

    ‘Homosexuality’ is a very recently-coined word, the invention of a mid-nineteenth German/Hungarian journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny to describe what he regarded as a medically-defined behavioural disorder (another such disorder he named ‘heterosexuality’). While Kertbeny’s science now looks, well, mid-nineteenth century, his coinages have persisted to our own time when other nineteenth-century attempted word-inventions have fallen by the wayside; they have become central to some of the most bitterly-fought disputes in Christian Churches.

    Previously, the main Western Latin word for a variety of unusual sexual activities, some of which were between people of the same sex, was ‘sodomy’, a medieval coinage with an Old Testament reference. The word sodomia was popularised in the eleventh century by the reforming monk Peter Damian in his polemic ‘Book of Gomorrah’ (Liber Gomorrhianus). It was an inescapably negative theological term, on the analogy of the older Latin word blasphemia; thus Peter paired ‘sodomy’ with the sin of denying God, in the process ‘thinning and condensing’ the wrongdoing of the ill-fated biblical city of Sodom from malpractices that were originally much more various.

    Ivo Bishop of Chartres, Damian’s contemporary and the major influence on Western Christian canon law in his time, evolved the concept of ‘sins against nature’, in which same-sex acts were ‘always unlawful and beyond doubt more shameful than to sin by a natural use in fornication and adultery’; at least fornication and adultery were not active obstacles to the continuation of the species. All this marched in step with the developing Western Christian doctrine that marriage must necessarily involve the potential for reproductive sex. Any obstacle to reproduction was ‘against nature’, so the same acts committed between men and women, or solo masturbation, fell into the same category of sodomy.

    Most bizarre and extra-biblical of Western Christian claims about ‘sodomy’ was that the baby Jesus killed all sodomites, simply by being born in Bethlehem; he would not come into a world where there were people doing things ‘against nature’. This story is to be found in a couple of standard texts read or heard by the devout throughout the medieval West, and medieval England in particular. First was the thirteenth-century Latin anthology of saints’ lives by Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine known as The Golden Legend. Second was the Festial, a fourteenth-century compilation of vernacular sermons for English parish priests to use throughout the liturgical year, by an Augustinian Canon John Mirk, who drew much of his material from de Voragine. They cited authorities from the Early Church for their malevolent fable – Jerome and Augustine of Hippo – which is good evidence that it started life in learned and clerical circles before moving out to instruct the wider public.

    Distorting a remark in a sermon attributed to Augustine of Hippo, de Voragine and those echoing him claimed that at the birth of Christ all the ‘sodomites’ in the world had suddenly died, as committing ‘sins against kind’ [nature]. Christ delayed entering the world till they had all gone. Yet evidently this mass Christmas extinction proved not to be permanent, needing continuing vigilance from all right-thinking people. As I have explored the history of sex, gender and the family over two millennia of Christian history, I have noticed how casually medieval Westerners would allude to the Christmas sodomite massacre in writing about other spiritual matters. Moreover, the story has not been forgotten. The more unpleasant corners of the Internet persist in gleefully reminding the right-thinking of medieval Christ’s view of sodomy by repeating the tale, though anachronistically relating it to that nineteenth-century word ‘homosexuals’. I will not dignify such Internet sites by naming them, but if you want to try it for yourself, have a go at Googling ‘Christmas all sodomites died’.

    This is what modern Christians are up against as we struggle to come to a balanced view of how to deal with developments in sexuality over the last three hundred years: a background of fear and hatred based on clerical paranoia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. We can do better than that, surely? Or we may have to order a new set of Christmas card designs.

     

    Further reading: M.D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997), from whom comes that useful phrase ‘thinning and condensing’. For the original texts: R.W. Granger (ed. and tr.), Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: readings on the saints (Princeton NJ, 2012), legend no. 6. The Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ), citing Jerome as well as Augustine; S. Powell (ed.), John Mirk’s Festial (Early English Text Society 334-35, 2009, 2011), sermon no. 6, Nativity of Christ, citing Augustine.