When laypeople join in the process of contesting orthodoxy and orthopraxy, their interventions are often focused on specific places – whether church buildings or their own bodies. This essay explores one such liminal site of contention: the early modern English church porch, a no-man’s-land whose multiple uses suggest that orthodoxy could be whatever individuals chose to make it. A church porch was, or could be, both a practical storage site and God’s antechamber. That ambiguity – and the practical control laypeople exercised over it – made this a sliver of orthopraxy in which theologians and hierarchies were never dominant. They were even a site for sexual encounters, which were commoner in churches and church porches than anyone liked to admit in early modern England. Sex in churches and porches often plainly had a certain frisson to it, not least when – as in the cases of homosexuality which the essay documents – it openly defied long-established doctrine.

For a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in which it stands. The door that opens on the interior of the church actually signifies a solution of continuity. The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds – and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.