Queer footnotes, punk detours, and the long afterlife of Nicaea—one historian listens for what the Church tried to silence.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of today’s prominent historians of Christianity, known for his deep dives into church history and theology. His scholarship unpacks the messy, complex reality behind the official narratives, especially those concerning sex, power, and belief. His recently released book Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity exemplifies this approach, digging beneath dogma to uncover silenced stories and unsettling truths.
What sound does history make?
If you ask the historian, it is not a solemn chant or the creak of cathedral doors.
“Sceptic laughter,” he says. Not cynicism, but the dry chuckle of someone who knows the story does not quite line up, especially the Church’s version. His work does not shout revisionism; it peels back the layers. You do not get easy arguments. You get silences, distortions, buried truths—the kinds of things footnotes usually try to keep quiet.
Graves and Ghosts in East Anglia
MacCulloch first sensed the past was unfinished, not in a library but in a country church. It was among the tombs of Catholic patrons, generous benefactors who kept giving to the Church long after the Reformation officially shut Church doors to them, that he felt the story was not quite over. His father was a country parson, and he grew up within the slow rhythms of Anglican life. Even there, something felt off.
Cromwell, Elton, and the Myth That Sells
As a young historian, he worked under Geoffrey Elton, the godfather of the “Tudor revolution in government” and author of the Protestant progress narrative still echoed in school syllabi today.
However, cracks started to show. Take Elton’s great hero, Thomas Cromwell.
“He didn’t modernise,” MacCulloch says now. Cromwell was not the future arriving early; he was the past in new clothes. Medieval systems were reactivated, not dismantled.
Still, there is no axe being ground. He speaks of Elton with respect. Disagreement, yes, but deep admiration too.
“I think Elton would have grudgingly agreed with me,” he adds, “if he had been alive to read it”.
The Reformation’s Long Afterburn
He describes the Reformation not as a clean break but as an ongoing rupture that still shapes Europe’s cultural weather system.
“We live inside that split—North and South, Protestant and Catholic.” Moreover, if the EU has done anything, he says, it has brought those worlds back into contact. Not harmonised them, necessarily, but forced the conversation.
What surprises most readers is how recent many “ancient” Christian practices are.
“People didn’t get married in church for the first four hundred years,” he notes.
Most of what we assume to be foundational rituals were added centuries after the supposed golden age of purity. Much of what we call orthodoxy is doctrinal retrofitting of later ideas dressed up as timeless truths.
Margins, Misfits, and Erasmus
MacCulloch is especially drawn to early Christian misfits and the history of the blurred figures, which are often relegated to the footnotes.
Erasmus, for instance, is brilliant, sly, and evasive. Not openly gay, but surrounded by rumours and intimate letters. A queer shimmer in the record, enough to notice, never enough to settle.
Even the Church’s fiercest critics were not always outsiders. Some were on the inside, using the scripture itself to push back.
Take Professor Karl Fezer, the Nazi theologian who visited Cambridge in 1935. He was not shouted down. Theology students, forbidden to protest against his views, chose something quieter and sharper. They challenged him through Romans 13 verse 1, questioning him about Paul’s command to Christians to obey the superior powers because they are of God. It was a reckoning by exegesis. No slogans. Just verse.
From Ramona to Rites
Has his faith changed through this work?
Maybe, not in doctrinal terms, but something has shifted.
“I went from The Ramones to a pastoral music scene,” he says. The Ramones, the punk band: noise, protest, defiance. Now, it is slower. Stranger. “I’m still focused,” he adds, “but less interested in shouting.”
You go from being angry young men and women, full of raw rage and urgency, to settled adults who may still carry that fire, but it’s quieter, more contained, simmering beneath the surface.
Faith, like history, does not always resolve. Sometimes, it just changes tempo.
Council of Nicaea: Still Loading
This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the imperial summit at which bishops, under Constantine’s gold-threaded eye, tried to make Christianity agree with itself. The commemoration is earnest. However, MacCulloch cannot help noticing the irony:
We are still revising the minutes.
Seventeen centuries on, theology has not settled. The arguments continue. The Church still tries to smooth the mess into a single creed, but the fragments remain and sometimes, they hum louder than the hymn.
So, what sound does history make?
Not a triumphal chorus. Not quite lament.
It is that dry, knowing laugh you hear from someone who has read the footnotes and remembers what got quietly left out.