Diarmaid MacCulloch Audiobooks

Christianity and Lower Than the Angels, two thousand years of belief told as story

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Who is Diarmaid MacCulloch?

Diarmaid MacCulloch, born in 1951, is an English historian and one of the most authoritative voices anywhere on the history of Christianity. The academic credentials are formidable: a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford since 1995, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford from 1997 to 2019, and since 2020 a senior research fellow and archivist at Campion Hall, with a seat on the editorial board of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

What makes MacCulloch unusual is his position relative to his subject. Ordained a deacon in the Church of England, he declined to proceed to the priesthood because of the church’s attitude to homosexuality, and he has since described himself as a candid friend of Christianity – close enough to understand it from within, detached enough to tell the truth about it. That stance, sympathetic but unsparing, is exactly what his readers prize.

Diarmaid MacCulloch in audiobooks

Serious history at scale is one of the great audiobook pleasures, and MacCulloch is represented in our catalogue by Christianity and Lower Than the Angels – big, ambitious surveys from a historian at the very top of the discipline. His particular gift is making two thousand years of belief, argument and institution-building feel like a story rather than a syllabus.

For UK listeners, the appeal is a guide who is neither preaching nor sneering. The candid-friend approach means the faithful, the lapsed and the merely curious can all listen without feeling got at, and the long hours of a big history suit the sweep of his subject. Start with Christianity if you want the full panorama.