Inglesham, Wiltshire
For Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch ‘churchcrawling’, defined as “like a pub crawl, only with churches” has been a constant hobby over seven decades of his life. In this essay, the historian explains how there was also a time when visiting churches became therapy for his personal crisis after the Anglican church rejected his ordination as an openly gay man. Paradoxically his long-established pastime of endlessly looking round church buildings helped him to cope with the Church’s rejection. Diarmaid takes us to the Church of St John the Baptist in Inglesham, Wiltshire, which sums up his historical therapy in the 1990s. It’s a perfect example of how parish churches were both transformed and preserved after the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. But it is also frozen in time and the sort of Protestant Anglicanism it represents had no room for gay people, “the past is the past, and I wouldn’t want to live there” he says. Produced by Melissa FitzGerald A Blakeway production for BBC Radio 3