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+---
+title: Questions I have about sex
+description: >-
+  Mark Vernon got me thinking about how the Church’s teaching on sex may be
+  evolving.
+pubDate: 2024-12-17
+updatedDate: 2024-12-17
+---
+
+I just listened back to [Mark Vernon][mark-vernon] talking about sexual desire
+and Christian spirituality.
+
+He recounts how his sex ed at an evangelical camp as a boy taught him to think
+hard about holding hands with someone, just in case it led to something
+‘immoral’. He felt he had been taught a sexual naïvety, which has perhaps
+blinded people to the possibility of abuse – and misunderstood the gospel.
+
+He puts forward an alternative to that naïvety, whereby sexual experience is an
+image or a foretaste of love for, or union with, God, exploring thoughts by
+Origen, Julian of Norwich, Dante, William Blake, Iris Murdoch, and various
+parables and episodes from the Gospels themselves.
+
+Part of what’s so interesting about this, is I feel I got my first proper sex
+ed, as an adult, in an evangelical Christian context – and it pretty much lined
+up completely with what he was putting forward.
+
+I’m also currently reading (as is Mark Vernon) Diarmaid MacCulloch’s epic
+history of Christian sexuality, [Lower Than the Angels][lower-than-the-angels].
+But so far (I’m about a third of the way through and up to about the 5th
+century) there have only been odd glimmers of positive Christian understandings
+of sexuality. The overwhelming Christian consensus of the early Church
+(according to MacCulloch) is that sexual desire is a symptom of humanity’s
+fallen state, not our longing for God.
+
+So I want to know: what changed between Mark’s experience and mine? How is
+Christian teaching about sex changing right now? Was my experience typical of
+other Christians growing up today, in evangelical churches, across the
+denominational spectrum, across Britain, across the global Church? What _is_
+the Christian consensus on sex now, and how old is it, and where did it come
+from?
+
+I guess I’ve got two-thirds of a gigantic tome to work through, first of all.
+That’ll be a start. Any answers? Postcards please.
+
+[lower-than-the-angels]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313582/lower-than-the-angels-by-macculloch-diarmaid/9780241400937
+[mark-vernon]: https://www.markvernon.com/the-gospel-sexual-desire-and-the-abuse-scandals-in-the-church-what-has-the-erotic-to-do-with-god