Questions I have about sex

I just listened back to 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. 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.