The occasion of this article, though not its only motive, is the current controversy raging in the Anglican Communion over the ordination and consecration of homosexuals to the sacred ministry. The Rector and Vestry of my own Church, St Paul's-within-the-Walls in Rome, have taken a bold and courageous initiative to bring discussion of the issue forward, and I support and applaud their initiative. But I wished also to add more extended comment on the issue, as I am concerned at present that our Church and Communion is being driven forcefully and relentlessly in an unhappy direction by a section of its adherents who claim, in my view not at all legitimately, to represent some sort of 'true' and 'faithful' vision of the church as against the false, faithless and even perfidious vision of it held by others, who may indeed in terms of inclination and preference be a majority, but who have relatively little voice and lack the raucous and often vituperative rhetorical capacities of their adversaries. I see this as an effective 'take-over bid' for the mind and heart of the church, and I think and hope that it should be increasingly resisted if we are to be a church for the future, with a genuine and open disposition to the world in which we are to be a leaven, and with a creed based on the universal love and transcendent acceptance of mortal frailty which shines through the New Testament.

An initial word on credentials; I am a cradle Anglican, brought up and nurtured in a Cathedral which was also a parish church, fed on the sacraments and the incomparable liturgy of traditional Anglican worship; taught by wise and sometimes holy and venerated priests (not a few of them homosexuals, in fact) that fine and measured version of tempered historic Catholicism informed by intellectual enquiry and combining the qualities of deep-rooted reverence for the past with flexibility and readiness to understand and take on board new visions, insights and suggestions coming from the best of reflection and scholarship. I was, for all my late adolescence and university career, also an ordinand, and after taking a degree in modern history which was the foundation of my world view and outlook, I went on in the late 1950s to study theology both at my own University (Oxford) and abroad (in an Orthodox seminary). My decision, very late on, not to go ahead to ordination made me, as my then Bishop put it, "a very peculiar kind of layman".

This article is not meant to be an ego-trip; I provide these details to set the background from which I came because it is one which seems to me to have conditioned and inspired many of the clergy and the laity who have laboured faithfully to help the Anglican Church find a new and less stereotyped and classical identity for itself from the one that it had in the earlier years of the 20th century. It has, in my view, been the making of much that is best in Anglicanism.

It isn't all that easy to sum up this identity, but if I were to pick out a few salient points, they would be these:

a) a continuing respect and reverence for the great tradition of Christianity coupled with a readiness to make way in it for the insights and changes of outlook that have brought such immense intellectual and social good to the world since the years of the Enlightenment, most particularly in the fields of the understanding of the human psyche and the life of society;

b) an awareness that it is not possible to set aside and exclude from the scrutiny of history, criticism and intelligent analysis any aspect of faith and behaviour which forms part of our religious heritage. In other words, fundamentalisms of all sorts were and are simply unacceptable, and this applied in particular to the various forms of biblical literalism which attempted to ignore context, mind-set and limitation on the part of those whose religious experience produced the texts as we have them;

c) an attitude and outlook which was not indiscriminating and resistant to recognising evil and shortcoming, but which followed closely in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth himself in showing a generous and open spirit to those who failed, or differed, or suffered mental anguish - while rejecting with the same force those who considered themselves religiously privileged, possessors of exclusive truth, or demanded the exclusion of those who in one way or another, would not 'conform' to an over-rigid standard of orthodoxy or interpretation of truth.

Even at the time, these attitudes, though I hold that they were the creative force which gave us many of our outstanding Anglicans, most notably William Temple and Michael Ramsey, but also many, many others, not least our present Archbishop of Canterbury, and conditioned the religious lives of uncounted numbers of members of our church, were fiercely contested and rejected by a vociferous, unashamedly self-righteous, and often less than charitable minority in the Church, which went under various titles, but tended to be associated, not entirely fairly, with the tradition of Anglicanism which was called "evangelical". At the time they seemed more an entrenched and increasingly unpopular element, rejecting a great deal of modern thought or departmentalising it into areas where it could not be allowed to touch the simply-defined verities and dogmas which they attributed (with a singular lack of knowledge of recent biblical studies) to the 'Faith of the Bible'. For those of us who found their agenda unacceptable, their claim to represent 'true Christianity' unfounded, and their antics often deplorable, they seemed to be a passing rearguard action force in the church, grounded in fear or suspicion of the road which modern scholarship was taking, and quite out of touch with the realities of challenges to faith in a changing world. Most of the Anglicans I knew then, ordinands and laypeople, shared the values I have listed above and felt either distaste for or discomfort with the fundamentalist wing of the church.

Over the years we pursued our path of discovering what Christianity, even though lived out in a traditional and sacramental context, could mean in terms of a modern world redeemed - the abandonment of ancient prejudices, the acceptance of those whom a ruthless moral code had for so long branded as outcasts, the new orientation towards the helpless victims of society's injustices. In our own lives we accepted - and it was often condemned as a betrayal by conservatives - a degree of relativism, not in resistance to evil itself and in maintaining the standards of integrity and honesty which allegiance to Christ requires, but in the definition of what those standards imply in the areas of human relationships, sexual behaviour and other aspects of life on which so much light has been thrown by psychology and anthropology over the last hundred or so years. I think that these 'compromises' with some elements of the past, far from being an abandonment of the faith, have been the saving and restoration of many intelligent and searching Christian souls who would otherwise have long since put faith and church behind them and adopted the superficial secularism of the late C20th.

For homosexuals, who like the present writer, grew up against a background always laden with secrecy, fear and potential condemnation, the new climate within and without the church in the 60s and 70s was a blessed breeze of liberation. Anthropology and the deep exploration of human sexuality came to reveal the absurdity of referring to such a high proportion of human experience as 'unnatural'; the positive response to these new insights within the church came initially in the recognition that it was anomalous or worse to brand the nature of those so orientated as "sinful", and eventually many were led to the rational conclusion that the same criteria of "sin" should be applied to all sexual conduct, regardless of orientation: i.e. that the real sin lies in abuse and degeneration of the sexual instinct, not in any particular form of its essence as a means to greater love, understanding, and creativity in human relations.

I was lucky enough to be shown this early on, and thus to avoid the terrible traumas which many young men and women wrestling with their religious growth have inflicted on them by the clergy who, as confessors or counsellors, inculcate a sense of despair and self-hatred into them at the most sensitive time of their lives. I have lived my faith and my sexual nature without fears and contradictions, despite the stalwart efforts of some, both within and without the church, to convince me that I have absolutely no right to do so. I hope that wherever possible I have been able to help such young people to find the same degree of self-acceptance and love and respect for their sexual nature; if I have, then I regard this as a true gift of the Holy Spirit, bringer of enlightenment and comfort in a world which so many seek to make dark and comfortless.

But suddenly, with the arrival of the twenty-first century, I have a sense of a great cloud of darkness descending once again on the Church which we had thought was emerging from its embattled centuries. The assault on the kind of Anglicanism I have very inadequately described above, which I still think is the religion of a vast majority of its members, has been many-sided and vicious. Scholars like Edward Norman poured scorn on what he considered the over-ready identification of the Christian faith with western liberalism, producing a parody of liberal Christianity in order to hurl bricks at it. Conservatives everywhere, reacting hysterically to the great outburst of freedom of the 1960s and early 70s, blamed all the woes of modern society (except poverty and oppression, on which they were significantly silent), on 'relativism', and especially on the alleged relativism responsible for the 'breakdown of sexual morality'. The widespread fears of social disintegration, played upon by authoritarians of all kinds, from the Islamic regimes of the middle east to the neo-conservatives of the west, have led to a great back-tracking which has inevitably found its response in the rise once again of simplistic, reactionary groups within the church who find solutions and inspirations solely in the past, and look to discover the answers to the angst of the 21st century in the tribal rituals and the desert codes of three thousand years ago, which are not and cannot be more than the early signs of an evolving consciousness of eternal truth on the part of long-gone peoples.

Because of the racket that these people make, because of the cheap popularism of their services and the easy solutions they propound to complex problems, they are able to exert an influence in our church out of all proportion to the actual numbers and feelings they really represent. I feel personally alarmed and pained that it looks as if my church, which I love and in which I find my nature and faith fully accepted, is in danger of being taken over by people whose bigotry and rigidity I in no way recognise as 'mine'. I feel deeply affronted at being described by one archbishop as "filthy" and by another as "unnatural" - terms which belong to the age of the Inquisition and the persecution of Galileo rather than to the Church whose mind we have seen evolving and expanding into new and brighter fields over the last fifty years. I feel greatly saddened that one good and honest and evidently holy man has been pressurised into withdrawing from a task for which he was so evidently fitted because of the noise and fury made by the hijackers. And I see with alarm that they intend to do the same with another such, this time in the diocese of New Hampshire.

This article is an appeal, to all those who grew up in the tradition that I did, who still feel the desire to see their church go forward in real faith and not backward in bigotry, to stand up and be counted before it is too late. Let your voices be heard; they are many. Pray and act for Gene Robinson, and may God save us from being plunged back into the dark night of despair by those who are determined to have their way. I believe that this may be near a last chance for Anglicanism to reassert its true nature. Pray God it does not fall back in fear at the challenge.

Brian Williams