Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
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Summary
Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sweeping histories of Christianity and the Reformation, and his latest on sex and the church, which demonstrates what MacCulloch calls the historian's true vocation: unsettling settled facts to keep humanity sane.
Tyler and Diarmaid explore whether monotheism correlates with monogamy, Christianity's early instinct towards egalitarianism, what the Eucharistic revolution reveals about the cathedral building boom, the role of Mary in Christianity and Islam, where Michel Foucault went wrong on sexuality, the significance of the clerical family replacing the celibate monk, why Elizabeth I—not Henry VIII—mattered most for the English Reformation, why English Renaissance music began so brilliantly but then needed to start importing Germans, whether Christianity needs hell to survive, what MacCulloch plans to do next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded October 29th, 2025.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:13.5 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:15.7 | For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.4 | visit Conversationswithtyler.com. |
| 0:26.5 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:30.6 | Today I am here with Dermid McCulloch. He has a new book out, |
| 0:35.1 | Lower Than the Angels, a history of sex and Christianity, which I recommend very highly. |
| 0:40.8 | In fact, all of his books are excellent. |
| 0:43.1 | He is one of those historians where each and every book he has done is worth reading. |
| 0:48.0 | He is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, and now a senior research fellow at Oxford. |
| 0:56.1 | Dermid, welcome. |
| 0:57.6 | Thank you very much. |
| 0:58.8 | Nice to be here. |
| 0:59.9 | In the history of the West and the world more generally, why does it seem that monotheistic |
| 1:05.5 | religion and monogamy are so closely correlated? |
| 1:09.3 | A good question. |
| 1:11.0 | They are not always closely correlated. |
| 1:14.0 | They certainly weren't in Judaism. |
| 1:16.0 | Judaism is a form of religion in which, let's call it very precisely, polygyny, rather than polygamy. |
| 1:25.1 | Polygony was a feature of Judaism really into the 20th century. In cultures |
| 1:30.0 | where there were Jewish communities in Islam, then polygyny survived within living memory. There are |
... |
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