Green: What cultural imperatives are you talking about?

Wright: Well, one would name the LGBT agenda. For 2,000 years, Christian, Jews, and Muslims—Muslims for less than 2,000 years, but you know what I mean—have just said, That’s not what we think a human life is all about. Suddenly, we have a cultural imperative [to embrace LGBT identity] coming in the last 30 years or so. That’s quite an extraordinary thing.

Green: I think the LGBT issue is a major tension point in peoples’ perceptions of Christianity, or at least conservative expressions of it. On this issue, people seem to feel that Christianity’s messages are primarily about judgment and condemnation.

Wright: In the early Church, one of the great attractions of Christianity was actually a sexual ethic. It is a world where more or less anything goes, where women and children are exploited, and where slaves are exploited often in hideous and horrible ways. In the Greco-Roman world, if you’d already had one daughter, and then you had another, the regular thing was either to sell her into slavery or literally to leave her out for the wolves.

So a lot of people, particularly the women, found the Christian ideal of chastity amazingly refreshing.