Sexual Heresies

Thinking about relationships between religion and sexuality usually focuses on what religion has to say about sex. But new ideas about sex could also transform religion itself. In Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the new sexual sciences—from anthropological accounts of religion as rooted in ancient fertility cults to psychoanalytic theories that explained religious experience in terms of psychosexual development—characterized religion as closely connected to the sexual. The outcome, as Joy Dixon traces in this book, was a new sense that religion itself could be sexually suspect. One result of that new suspicion was an increasing concern to police "sexual heresies" and to produce a supposedly normal (healthy, monogamous, and heterosexual) religiosity. The overall effect was a narrowing of the sexual possibilities inside "orthodox" religion and the increasing association of alternative forms of religion with dissident and marginal sexualities that continues to shape both religion and secularism today. Considering a wide range of materials emerging from a diverse array of British society, from modernist theologians and practitioners of sexual magic to conservative Christians and radical freethinkers, this book emphasizes the dynamic relationships between the histories of religion and of sexuality and the historical contingency of the categories we have used to understand the relationship between the two.