Diarmaid MacCulloch: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you know, Michel Foucault wrote four volumes on the history of sexuality. What did he get wrong about Christianity? Well, he got a lot of things wrong. He’s not at all reliable in those four volumes, which of course I’ve read from cover to cover. What did he get wrong? He didn’t really talk much about ancient Christianity. It’s all about text. He never looked at the nature of ancient society. He also has particular agendas — some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t — about power in relation to historical process. In general, I would advise people to take Michel Foucault with several pinches of salt. He was a pioneer in looking at same-sex relationships, and he was of a decade in which there were several pioneers. There was the American scholar John Boswell, for instance, writing about such matters. There was an English scholar called Alan Bray. They’re real pioneers, the three of them, on such matters as same-sex relations, but they got a lot wrong. It would not be right to start with them and not realize that they are historical texts. Now, in each case, actually, you can see that their perspective is distorted by their Roman Catholicism very specifically. Foucault, born into a Catholic family, never really left that world. Bray and Boswell, converts to Roman Catholicism from Episcopalianism, or Anglicanism if you like. The concern with Bray and Boswell was always to set up a story which wasn’t really true, which was that Christianity had, over the centuries, actually been fairly hospitable to same-sex relations. You read Boswell now, 40 years later, and you see there’s a lot of special pleading in that; same with Bray. None of these historians are setting standards forever. Foucault made absurd assertions about the invention of homosexuality in the 19th century, simply because the word was coined in 1869. Well, that’s so stupid and so French. You see, actually, things which look precisely like modern, for-life, equal relationships between same-sex people way back. You can see it in the ancient world. It’s not the same as the normal, what you might call “normal” same-sex relationships, these unequal things. The Foucault passion, seeing this as emerging as a sort of medicalization in the 19th century, just doesn’t stand up. It’s extremely misleading, and we should leave it behind. There’s a recent rise of interest in theories that attribute the rise of the West to the church banning cousin marriage, that this broke down clan structures. What’s your view of that hypothesis?…

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