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I only made it half way through the book before being unable to stomach any more. Eventually, his antagonism simply became unbearable and over weighed my interest in his rather detailed church history. He is an apostate, insists on liberalising the church, bleating the usual line about modernisation and the need to change the unchanging message, and openly admits to having the intention of muddying the waters with his historical work. If you must read it, read it with full knowledge that the man who writes it is no friend of Christianity. See below.
From https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4853/the-church-rejected-me-because-im-gay :
>"Though he calls the word “belief” “a bully-pulpit term used by those who want to make sure that you’re in or out of a particular ideological system”
>Aware from a young age that he was gay, MacCulloch – a parson’s son – considered this no barrier to entering the clergy. The Church was unsure how to treat his relationship with his boyfriend but ordained him as a deacon nonetheless. He says he thought of his relationship as more or less identical to that of any other clergy marriage, however disconcerting this was for his more conservative colleagues. It was when he was on the verge of being ordained as a priest that things came to a head: the presiding bishop said that he couldn’t go through with it “until the fuss dies down”, in MacCulloch’s words. Refusing to accept that he should have to compromise his sexual relationships for his career in the Church, MacCulloch walked away from his ordination. “What it represented was the Church rejecting me,” he tells me.
> Even now, though gay clergy can be ordained as part of the Church of England, the Church insists not only that they remain unmarried but also that they be celibate. How do senior clerical figures justify this? I ask MacCulloch. “I think they make sense of it because they think that heterosexual sex is the real sex; gay sex is an indulgence, and therefore to commit yourself to the Church means committing yourself to keeping away from this nasty thing.” Though the bishops realise how nonsensical this is, “there’s nothing they can do about it because they’re terrified of noisy Evangelicals who are committed to a narrow literalist reading of the Bible and whom most bishops still see as the only people with any money in the Church. I can tell you this because I’ve had them to lunch and watched it happen.”
>As MacCulloch notes, if Evangelicals wish to recruit from the under-30s they have no option but to alter their rhetoric, because of how radically the young differ on topics like equal marriage and abortion. How Christianity responds to this kind of disparity in the next few decades will have a great impact on how it is perceived from both inside and outside its congregations.
From: http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/an-interview-with-diarmaid-macculloch/
>The problem is avoiding the simple version of the past, which is the property of fanatics. The religious historian’s job is to complicate the past, in a useful way, and stop those simplified stories being told in order to avoid simplified versions of the future—the awful, chilling simplicities of, at its worst, Al-Qaeda, but any sort of fundamentalism. So that’s a justification. It’s the general historian’s duty to combat insanity in the human race and it does seem to me that that’s professional history’s main objective. Apart from the fact of course it’s huge fun.
>Does the historian have particular moral responsibilities then?
>Yes, I think so. I’m very old fashioned in that way. It does seem to me to be a moral task, because otherwise it becomes pretty stories or antiquarianism; it becomes like stamp-collecting. And the task is to do what other disciplines can’t. Medicine is clearly vital to our physical well-being, physicists do things which I can’t do, but very few other disciplines are about combating corporate insanity. And that’s what historians do. So it is a moral task and it’s a peculiarly destructive and critical task as well because it’s always combating the simplicities, the crudities, the bullying of future generations by a version of the past. I’ve always emphasised that—probably more than most historians. It’s perhaps a hazard of being a parson’s son: you want to go on preaching.
>And what do you think is so compelling about Christianity? How has it managed to reinvent itself so many times?
>Well, it’s infinitely malleable, like all great world religions.