Freud, Christianity, and Desire: Maude Royden’s Modernist Sexual Theology

Maude Royden was one of the best-known woman preachers in early-twentieth-century Britain; from 1917 she preached at the Nonconformist City Temple in London, famous for its liberal theology. Royden’s popular books and articles advocated a distinctively “modern” Christian sexual ethic and in successive editions of her best-selling Sex and Common-Sense (first published in 1921 and revised and reissued in 1947) we can trace the complex dialogue between Royden’s modernist theology and new psychological and psychoanalytic approaches to sex. By 1947, Royden was far from orthodox in her Christianity: she portrayed St. Paul as suffering from a “sex complex” and argued that Freud, like Christ (now dubbed “the greatest psychologist in history”), had played a key role in freeing humanity from the bondage of sin. In Royden’s account, Christianity and psychoanalysis converged to underwrite new justifications for chastity and heterosexual monogamy which would, she argued, work together to renew western civilization.