“We often think of religion and sexuality as somehow at odds–associating religion with sexual repression and assuming that sexual freedom is somehow the result of a more secular society. In Britain, many of the assumptions underpinning those ideas emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, when new ideas about sexuality–from anthropological accounts of religion as rooted in ancient fertility cults to psychoanalytic theories that explained religious experience in terms of psychosexual development–transformed people’s understandings of religion. In this book, Joy Dixon shows how the relationship between religion and sexuality during this period was increasingly driven by a concern to police “sexual heresies” and to produce a “normal” (healthy, monogamous, and heterosexual) religiosity. The overall result 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 conservative Christians to radical freethinkers, this book emphasizes the dynamic and dialogic relationship between the history of religion and of sexuality, and uncovers the historical contingency of the categories we have used to understand the relationship between the two”
