Reflections: Medieval Christianity and Modern Sexual Norms

Our survey of medieval teachings about sex and marriage has shown that the medieval Church continually modified its teachings on these matters and at sev­eral critical junctures revised its doctrines quite radically.

Throughout the Middle Ages Church authorities continued to rely upon the three basic approaches to sexuality outlined in the introduction to this book, although the ratio of the mixture varied from one period to another. From the mid-twelfth century onward Church authorities increasingly relied upon canon law and canonical courts as tools for imposing their sexual views upon society. Not even the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century could loosen Europe’s adherence to those doctrinal approaches or its reliance on the law as a primary instrument for social control of sexual behavior.

The model of sexuality that defines sex primarily as a reproductive mecha­nism, and therefore staunchly opposes contraception has demonstrated great hardiness. This view assumes that procreativity is the principal measure of the moral acceptability of each act of intercourse and, more broadly, of all sexual behavior. Writers who place primary emphasis on sex as reproduction, there­fore, condemn homosexual relations as well as heterosexual oral and anal sex practices and often maintain that even the postures used in marital sex are mor­ally good or bad depending on whether they hinder or promote conception.

Writers who take reproduction as the sole or primary goal of sex have virtu­ally without exception dealt with human sexuality from an exclusively male per­spective. Men are normally fertile from puberty to late old age, and male orgasm accompanies the emission of sperm. Thus the view that sex and repro­duction are inextricably joined together reflects the experience of most men. Women experience sex differently. Females are fertile only for a fraction of their adult life, from puberty to menopause.^[2130] The biological cycle of the human fe­male, unlike that of most other mammals, does not involve a close link between ovulation and the female sex drive. Moreover, orgasm for women is primarily a function of the clitoris, which has no reproductive function at all. Thus the link between sexual satisfaction and reproduction is relatively weak from a woman’s viewpoint. Reproductionist writers about sexual morality have historically re­jected this point of view. Indeed, they have rarely even considered it.^[2131]

The model of sexuality that lays primary emphasis on the impurity of sex also remains vigorous.

Advocates of the pollution model of sex attach only secondary importance to procreation; hence they tend not to emphasize “nature” as a criterion of sexual morality, nor are they greatly concerned about contraception. Unlike procrea­tionists, Pollutionists strongly favor limiting marital sexual relations by restrict­ing the times, seasons, places, and circumstances in which sex is allowed. They are also much concerned with the question of who initiates sexual encounters, for they tend to view the party who takes the initiative as guilty of a more se­rious fault than the one who simply complies with a partner s demand for sexual relations. Those who identify sex with pollution reverence virginity as the highest, purest, and most perfect state of life. They relegate marriage (save per­haps for unconsummated unions) to the inferior status of a lesser form of Chris­tian life, suitable only for those who cannot measure up to the heroic demands of virginity.

The third model of sexuality views marital sex as a source of intimacy and affection, as both a symbol and a source of conjugal love. Subscribers to this school of thought regard sexual pleasure more positively than do adherents of the other two models.

Advocates of this third view maintain that Christians ordinarily have a right to marry, a right that some consider almost a duty. Those who take this stand deny that sexual relations in marriage detract from spiritual virtue; instead they see the marital relationship, including its sexual component, as an exemplar of the spiritual bond between Christ and his Church. Proponents of this model of sexuality are generally indifferent to the use of “nature” as a criterion of sexual morality and either approve or at least do not seriously criticize experimenta­tion and variation in sexual techniques practiced by married couples. Advo­cates of marital-sex-as-bonding commonly see no harm in second marriages and tend to be neutral on the issue of contraception, since in their view the mutual love that sexual intimacy fosters between spouses outranks procreation as the primary goal of conjugal relations.

Writers at different periods during the Middle Ages adopted elements of each of these models of human sexuality, as we have seen, in varying combina­tions and with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In early medieval Europe, Chris­tian writers and Church authorities placed greatest stress on the impurity model, but sometimes adopted ideas characteristic of the reproduction model. From the mid-twelfth century, the age of Gratian and Peter Lombard, many canonists and theologians gave greater prominence to the reproductive model of sex.

Since the Reformation, Protestant Christians have often emphasized the third model of sexuality, although some Protestant authorities (notably the Pu­ritans) stressed the impurity view. Catholic theologians and canonists after the Reformation, and especially since the nineteenth century, have increasingly ad­vocated the reproductive view, but with a strong subordinate emphasis on de­filement. Until quite recently Catholic theologians have paid little attention to the third model, which they sometimes characterized as a theological error that stemmed from Protestantism or rationalism.^[2132] During the Second Vatican Coun­cil (1962-65), however, many bishops demanded reconsideration of the Church’s teachings about marital sexuality. In the Constitution Gaudium et spes they made it clear that they felt that more attention needed to be paid to emotional bonds in marriage, including the sexual intimacy of spouses, than to procrea­tion and the formal aspects of marital union that Catholic teaching had com­monly emphasized during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁵ Since Vatican II there has also been a significant reorientation of jurisprudence in Catholic matrimonial tribunals. During the past twenty years Church courts have laid far greater emphasis on marriage as an affective relationship than pre­viously.⁶ The judges who sit in these tribunals, both in Rome and elsewhere, have often been more responsive and sympathetic to the relational aspect of marriage than have postconciliar popes.⁷

Catholic tradition has consistently opposed many varieties of sexual expres­sion—it condemns premarital and extramarital relationships, remarriage fol­lowing divorce, and all types of deviant sexual practices, including oral and anal intercourse (either homosexual or heterosexual) and masturbation—and classi­fies them as grievous sins.

⁵ 2 Vatican Council, Constitution on the Church and the Modern World, Gaudium et spes §§ 48-50, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 58 (1966) 1025-1120 (cited hereafter as AAS); English trans, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbot (New York: America Press, 1966), pp. 250-55; see also the comments of Robert McAfee Brown on the mar­riage doctrine of Gaudium et spes in Documents of Vatican II, pp. 314-15.

⁶William LaDue, “Conjugal Love and the Juridical Structure of Christian Marriage,” Jurist 34 (1974) 36-67; Peter Hocken, “The Developing Theology of Marriage,” Law and Justice 46/47 (1975) 29-37; Theodore Mackin, “Conjugal Love and the Mag­isterium,” Jurist 36 (1976) 263-301; Aldo M. Arena, “The Jurisprudence of the Sacred Roman Rota: Its Development and Direction after the Second Vatican Council,” Studia canonica 12 (1978) 165-93. Canonical tribunals in the U.S. have been especially active in this development; texts of selected decisions can be found in The Tribunal Reporter, ed. A. Maida (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1970), and in the continuing series, Matrimonial Jurisprudence, U.S. (Toledo, OH: Canon Law Society of America, 1968- ; 5 vols. to date). Tribunals in the U.K., by contrast, are far more cautious than their U.S. counterparts; see generally Matrimonial Decisions for England and Wales (London: Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1967- ); since 1980 this series has been retitled Matrimonial Decisions of Great Britain and Ireland.

⁷Arena, “Jurisprudence of the Rota,” pp. 265-93. Three landmark Rotal decisions, Coram De Jorio (20 Dec. 1967), Coram Pinto (18 Dec. 1979) and Coram Colagiovanni (15 Dec. 1979) can conveniently be found in Thomas P. Doyle, “Rotal Jurisprudence,” in his Marriage Studies 2:159-99. On the development of matrimonial jurisprudence in U.S. tribunals see also Doyle, “Matrimonial Jurisprudence in the United States,” Mar­riage Studies 2:111-58, and C. J. Hettinger, “Matrimonial Jurisprudence: The Second Postconciliar Decade,” Jurist 37 (1977) 358-75.

“Charles E. Curran, “Divorce—From the Perspective of Moral Theology,” in Canon Law Society of America, Proceedings 36 (1974) 1-24; William E. May, “Marriage, Di­vorce and Remarriage,” Jurist 37 (1977) 266-86; James J. Young, ed., Ministering to the Divorced Catholic (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), Francesco Javier Urrutia, “The �In­ternal Forum Solution’: Some Comments,” Jurist 40 (1980) 128-40; James H. Provost, “Intolerable Marriage Situations Revisited,” in Jurist 40 (1980) 141-96. Victor J. Pos-

Protestant Christians since the sixteenth century have often tolerated some practices—notably divorce and remarriage—that Catholics condemn, and Protestant opposition to most kinds of nonmarital sex has diminished notably since the 1950s. Civil law in the Western industrialized nations has also become increasingly neutral on most of these issues. Divorce and subsequent remar­riage are now permitted by law virtually everywhere in the West, even in tradi­tional strongholds of Catholic intransigence, such as Italy and Spain. Virtually nowhere in Western Europe, save in Ireland, is access to COiitraceptive devices seriously restricted by law.

In the United States the intervention of the federal courts has caused even strongholds of sexual conservatism to permit the sale of what some statutes used to refer to as “indecent articles.”^[2133] Homosexual practices between consent­ing adults are no longer subject to criminal prosecution in most of the Western world, except again in Ireland and some parts of the United States.¹⁰ Adultery and fornication, although still statutory crimes in some American jurisdictions, are in practice almost never prosecuted when practiced discreetly and in pri­vate. ¹¹ Even so, private sexual relationships between consenting adults remain theoretically subject to legal restrictions in most Western nations.¹²

Why have medieval Christian beliefs and policies concerning sex endured so persistently? Three factors provide at least partial explanations. The first has to do with the large-scale stability of long-term social conditions in Western Eu­rope between about 1100 and the industrial revolution. Medieval sexual doc­trine, as it developed in its classic form during the twelfth and thirteenth cen­turies, responded to problems in a society that was becoming increasingly urban and economically diversified. Those social characteristics persisted into the modern era, as have sexual doctrines adapted to respond to them. Sec­ondly, medieval canonists and theologians, the principal architects of sexual doctrine, were conscious that sex is in some mysterious way connected with the wellsprings of salvation and the bliss of heaven, that it is both wonderful and terrible. They considered those who contravene the limits that religion sets on sexual behavior as trespassers in a sacred realm. This perception (by no means unique either to Western Europeans or the Middle Ages) has also persisted and helps to explain why modern societies continue to find so many medieval Chris­tian sexual doctrines viable. Third, medieval writers who dealt with sexual

“In the U.K. the Sexual Offenses Act 1967 § 1(1) lifted criminal sanctions against homosexual relations between consenting adults, except in Northern Ireland. By a pecu­liar quirk of the statute, however, sodomy between a man and a woman (including hus­band and wife) remains punishable by life imprisonment; S.O. A. 1967 § 12(1); Anthony M. Honore, Sex Law (London: Duckworth, 1978), pp. 24, 91-101. In the U.S. statutes penalizing homosexual acts remain current law in twenty-six states. The U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed in Bowers v. Hardwick (30 June 1986) that States have the power to penalize homosexual sodomy. The Hardwick judgment reversed a series of Federal Appellate decisions that had extended the right of privacy to cover homosexual acts between consenting adults; New York Times, 1 July 1986, pp. 1, 10-11; Baker v. Wade, 553 F. Supp. 1121 (1982); Bowers v. Hardwick (slip opinion).

“Several lower courts in recent years have taken the position that the Supreme Courts decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird brought all private, voluntary, and noncommer­cial sexual relationships under the protection of the right of privacy; see Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 431, 92 S.Ct. 1029, 31 L.Ed.2d 349 (1972); Doe v. Commander, Wheaton Police Dept., 273 Md. 262 at 272, 329 A.2d 35 at 41 (1975); Montgomery County, Md. v. Walsh, 274 Md. 502 at 513, 336 A.2d 97 at 105 (1975); State v. Pilcher, 242 N.W.2d 348 (Ia., 1976); State v. Bateman, 547 P.2d 6 at 9 (Ariz., 1976); Baker v. Wade, 553 F. Supp. 1121 (Texas, 1982). The effects of these decisions extend well beyond the area of criminal law and may affect, among other things, contracts, testamentary issues, and property arrangements of all kinds; Kay and Amyx, “Marvin v. Marvin: Pre­serving the Options,” pp. 937-77; Dwyer, “Immoral Contracts,” pp. 386-88.

¹²Honore, Sex Law, pp. 24-34, 59-76, 94-101, 117-32. Schnucker, “La position puritaine,” pp. 1380-81, 1386; Stone, “Family History in the 1980s,” pp. 78-79. problems assigned to law and legal processes a paramount role in controlling sexual behavior. They counted on lawgivers, lawyers, the courts, and civic offi­cials (in modern times, especially the police) to keep at bay those who profane the holy. Law is by and large a conservative force in society, for law seeks to assure continuity and preservation. The legal profession, moreover, came into being in something resembling its modern form during the thirteenth century, just at the time that a consensus among religious teachers about the basic ele­ments of Christian sexual morality was taking shape. Jurists, in collaboration with moralists, have been instrumental in securing the continued acceptance of the medieval sexual ethos during the past seven centuries.

These three factors—the continuity of the socioeconomic environment, the continuing identification of the erotic with the sacred, and the inertia of the law and its institutions—not only help to explain the continuity of medieval sexual teaching, but are useful in understanding the historical development of that teaching itself.

One aspect of socioeconomic continuity requires special mention. Modern historians sometimes claim that one of the principal contrasts between late me­dieval society and modern society is in family structure. The “modern” family, they say, centers on the nuclear unit of father-mother-children, and this type of family first emerged between 1680 and 1850. But as we have seen, the nuclear family had already become the primary social unit in many parts of Europe be­fore A.D. 800. Some other characteristics of the so-called “modern” family— including free choice of marriage partner, the rejection of parental permission as a necessary precondition for the marriage of adults, the ideal of conjugal bonding through mutual affection—were also promoted and championed by medieval lawyers and theologians a half-millennium before 1680.^[2134]

This is not to cast the medieval Church in the role of a disinterested cham­pion of liberty in its marriage law: the development of canonistic theories about marital formation makes that a highly dubious proposition. But at least in this respect the Church successfully anticipated the needs of later European society.

The suggestion has recently been advanced, not for the first time, that the medieval Church tried to keep a tight grip on sexual behavior in order to ad­vance its own economic interests. Medieval marriage law certainly tended in some respects to secure economic advantages for the Church. At least some of the Churchs leaders may have perceived that this was true. The virtual monop­oly that the medieval Church enjoyed over the legal determination of who was married and who was not meant that the Church was in a position to influence patterns of inheritance in the medieval West. That Church leaders sometimes used that position in ways calculated to benefit their institution seems very likely indeed.

It is a great deal less likely, however, that the Church and its leaders were either cunning enough or farsighted enough to have implemented a long-range scheme to shape Christian marriage law so as to maximize the Church’s material benefits. It would have required a better-organized and more efficient system of centralized planning than the medieval Church ever enjoyed to have projected and implemented such a strategy.

While the medieval Church’s marriage and sex policies may have helped to increase ecclesiastical wealth, it does not necessarily follow that the system was designed in order to achieve that goal, although some Protestant reformers sus­pected that it had been.^[2135] We are more likely dealing with an unintended result of the Church’s urge to protect the sanctity of sex, rather than with policy con­sciously created to enrich the ecclesiastical establishment.

The leaders of the medieval Church, although occasionally sensitive to the problems and moral dilemmas of their flocks, were often indifferent to the so­cial implications that their policies created. Nowhere was their indifference more marked than in matters concerning reproduction and family life.^[2136] Twen­tieth-century spokesmen have also maintained that Christians should ignore the pain and suffering that may result from the application of their moral prin­ciples, and have repeatedly disclaimed responsibility for the results of their moral teachings.^[2137]

The third factor in our explanatory scheme—the persistent control of sexual conduct by the legal establishment—holds the key to explaining several anoma­lies in the historical development of sexual beliefs. Virtually all restrictions that now apply to sexual behavior in Western societies stem from moral convictions enshrined in medieval canonical jurisprudence. The attitudes and beliefs of canonists and theologians about marriage, divorce, family structure, womens status, human psychology, gender roles, and a host of other controversial topics are woven into the very fabric of our legal system. In recent decades, legis­lative bodies and courts have begun to eliminate some vestiges of the medieval Christian world view from secular law. Despite this, substantial parts of our medieval religious heritage remain embedded in Western law because they still reflect a broad consensus about the most desirable ways of shaping institutions and controlling human behavior. The committment of Western societies to the principle of monogamy is one vestige of medieval Christendom that remains intact. The institution of marriage itself retains a generous measure of its medi­eval antecedents, even in the most secularized Western societies, and again there is little evidence that significant numbers of people wish to see it altered in any fundamental way.

To stress the primacy of law as a means of sexual control is not to maintain that there has been harmonious compliance with its regulations, or universal agreement with its strictures. Indeed, medieval canon laws record in securing obedience to its marriage policies was decidedly mixed. Flandrin is surely right when he asserts that the medieval Church never entirely succeeded in securing acceptance of its views on reproductive policy. Yet the Church often did secure compliance with many aspects of its marriage law. Its consensual marriage the­ory was generally accepted, although sometimes modified in practice; its at­tempts to secure freedom of choice in the selection of marriage partners were often implemented; certainly its efforts to make marriage easy to contract were generally successful, although the price paid for this achievement—the preva­lence of clandestine marriage and the consequent uncertainties that surrounded even solemnized marriages—seems excessively high.^[2138] It is striking that where surviving court records make it possible to compare the practices of judges with the prescriptions of the law and the academic commentators, the agreement between practice and theory is by and large rather close.^[2139] It is much more diffi­cult to tell to what degree ordinary people may have internalized the prescrip­tions of canonists and theologians on marital practices. Thus it is nearly impos­sible to determine what degree of success the Church may have had in forming people s perceptions and shaping their consciences on sexual matters.

Marriage and the family are such central social institutions that rules gov­erning the methods of contracting, terminating, and supporting marital units will continue to be legislated, and governments will try to enforce them in any foreseeable circumstances. But the relationship between restrictive sex laws and the social price we pay for them remains a matter for basic disagreement. Those who subscribe to a functionalist anthropology, as many people do in the late twentieth century, insist that restrictions on sexual behavior can be justi­fied only if they serve identifiable social goals—bolstering the institutions of family and kinship, for example, or avoiding harm to children. Many other people, however, reject this functionalist view and believe that society has a duty to restrain sexual behavior in obedience to enduring moral and religious values. Those who take this view maintain that a moral society must impose stringent limitations upon sexual freedom; they believe that sex should be per­mitted only at certain times, under certain circumstances, or for certain pur­poses—such as within marriage, in the missionary position, and with the goal of reproduction, for example.

Many twentieth century societies, however, lack a broad consensus about either religious beliefs or the proper role of law in enforcing sexual morals. Those who operate on functionalist assumptions find the limitations that medi­eval religious beliefs imposed on sexual conduct indefensible and argue that they should be repealed because they no longer serve a social purpose. Those who continue to subscribe to traditional Christian religious beliefs, however, feel that legal restraints premised on their views of sexual propriety should re­main in place and warn that to relax those restraints will mean abandoning the central values that have historically held Western societies together.

It is certainly true that twentieth-century attitudes toward sex often betray a continuing, frequently unconscious, acceptance of the medieval sexual ethos. This shows up in the expressions that we use to refer to sex, in the concepts and categories employed in analyzing sexual behavior, and in the feelings that most adults in our society share about their sexual experiences. Although many people in late twentieth-century society (especially, but not exclusively, in the United States) are prepared to tolerate public discussions of sexual issues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society would have found objection­able in the extreme, it remains true that, as Gagnon and Simon observed, “learning about sex in our society is learning about guilt; conversely, learning how to manage sexuality constitutes learning how to manage guilt. ”^[2140] The guilt that we attach to all kinds of sexual behavior is beyond serious doubt an artifact of medieval Christian beliefs about personal morality. Technical legal discourse in particular still employs language—“crime against nature,” “unnatural act,” and “sodomy” for example—that implicitly assumes medieval beliefs about the nature of sex and its role in human life (see Appendix 3).

Our sexual assumptions, moreover, still rely heavily on beliefs and rhetoric that stem from late ancient psychology and anthropology. Medieval and modern analyses of sexuality usually assume more or less absolute dichotomies between body and soul, matter and spirit, reason and passion, mind and feelings. None of these ideas is self-evident, and none is supported by indisputable (or even terribly persuasive) proof. Another common assumption, sometimes openly ex­pressed, more often tacitly implied, holds that human instincts and feelings are at best morally suspect, if not downright evil, a notion that stems from the be­lief in original sin. This view identifies sexuality with passion and animality which are tainted with wickedness, impurity, and sin. These themes were highly developed in medieval theology and law, as we have seen, and the senti­ments, even the metaphors and phrases of medieval thinkers, still figure in the pronouncements of religious authorities, notably the modern popes.^[2141]

Like their medieval models, twentieth century Catholic sex theories typi­cally deny that pleasure has spiritual value and treat sex as an unfortunate con­sequence of sin. Some Catholic writers in this century have cautiously moved away from this position, to assert that sexuality may not, after all, have been one of the Creators blunders or, alternatively, a punishment for sin. By and large, however, Catholic thinkers have hesitated to adopt this position. In view of the disapproval visited on its proponents by the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (otherwise known as the Holy Office, the successor of the Roman Inquisition) their hesitation is understandable.^[2142]

Protestant writers in this century have often been more willing than their Catholic counterparts to emphasize the positive role of sex as a symbol anseems highly probable.^[2147]

Religion and law have served past societies as means for enunciating social consensus about acceptable outlets for sexual urges and for imposing both for­mal and informal controls on the acting out of sexual fantasies and desires. Me­dieval Church leaders saw that these two modalities of social control could be fused with one another, that religious prohibitions could be enforced by legal sanctions, while legal doctrines could be shaped by religious values. Although it is impossible to divorce law from morality—and it would be undesirable to do so, even if it were possible—it does not follow that law need be so intimately concerned with sexual morals as it commonly is and has been in Western thought. H. L. A. Hart was no doubt correct when he asserted that certain “universal values” (by which he meant generally accepted values) are necessary to the survival of any society, but there is no need to suppose that the sexual beliefs and attitudes of medieval Christendom are among those values or that abandonment of late ancient Stoic and medieval Christian beliefs about anthro­pology and sexual morals would destroy the foundations of Western society.^[2148]

The Christian churches continue to enjoy a legally and politically privileged position, even in what is sometimes called a secular age. Within the churches, however, and particularly among their intellectual elite, ideas about the proper role of sex in Christian life are very much in flux. The three traditional models of sexuality that have dominated Christian discussions of the subject since pa­tristic times continue to attract, in one combination or another, the allegiance both of professed Christians and of many whose ties to organized religion are casual or nonexistent. Some theologians and canonists are anxious to break away from traditional attitudes and doctrines on sexual matters. Discontent with accepted orthodoxies is particularly keen among Catholic intellectuals, many of whom wish to see their Church give real weight in its law and doctrine to the concept of marriage as a relationship bonded by intimacy. Catholic writ­ers who champion change on such issues as contraception and abortion, how­ever, have met stiff resistance both from the Roman curia and from recent popes. Modification of the Roman leadership’s views about sex seems unlikely in the near term.^[2149]

While diversity of thought, teaching, and opinion on sexual matters offends the stereotype of a monolithic Roman Church, many Protestant Christians take positive pride in their traditions capacity to tolerate disagreement on basic issues. Mainline Protestant churches have typically adopted a relatively per­missive stance on sexual morality. Most of them will tolerate divorce and remar­riage among their members without imposing disciplinary sanctions. Although most Protestants disapprove of casual fornication and still more strongly of marital infidelity, premarital intercourse between engaged couples is usually accorded tacit acceptance as a prelude to formal marriage.^[2150] Masturbation no longer ranks as a significant moral offense in the minds of most Protestant writ­ers, a startling shift from Protestant views in the nineteenth century and the first half of this century. Considerable numbers of mainstream Protestants are now prepared to tolerate homosexual relationships. A few congregations accept clergymen who make no secret of their homosexual life styles.^[2151]

Among fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, however, sexual activity and expression remains more rigidly controlled. While only the more intran­sigent fundamentalists flatly condemn remarriage following divorce and even fewer punish divorced persons by banishing them from their fellowship, funda­mentalists and evangelicals consider divorce a moral evil and strongly disap­prove of remarriage of divorced persons. Extramarital sex of all kinds remains nearly as taboo among fundamentalists as it is among traditional Catholics. Much the same is true of attitudes toward homosexuality and other deviant sex­ual practices. In the United Kingdom the Revere S Ian Paisleys campaign to “Save Ulster from sodomy” echoes hostilities and fears that remain strong in the United States among Southern Baptists, evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals. But Dr. Paisley and other militant Orangemen probably share more beliefs and sentiments with conservative elements in Catholicism than members of either group would care to acknowledge, even to themselves.^[2152]

The diverse views of contemporary Christians about sexual behavior reflect familiar mixtures of the three models of sexuality that we found in the writings of medieval canonists and theologians. The themes of reproduction, purity, and affection, together with subsidiary propositions deduced from them, flourish almost as vigorously in the twentieth century as they did in the twelfth. And in the present century, as in earlier eras, Church leaders insist that governments have a moral obligation to enact into law Christian religious prescriptions about sexual conduct.^[2153]