Ian Bell on the Anglican crisis

The little I truly know about America - the contents of a small postcard, perhaps - derives almost entirely from New Hampshire. In terms of the continental republic, it is a tiny place, but very beautiful. Its people also have an independence of mind that verges on the obdurate. "Don't tread on me," says their old slogan. That's not a joke.

They are conservative folks, but unflinchingly fair. Natives of the state tend to think of themselves as original, authentic Americans. If their Anglican bishop elects to declare himself as fully homosexual in the 21st century, they may well decline either state of life - Episcopalianism is tricky - but the right to be an individual is defended without hesitation. New Hampshire people are cussed.

Those within the broader Anglican Communion are less easy to understand. Protestant Scots, in particular, tend to balk at antique Christian hierarchies. There is no longer a Scottish Daily Express ready to rail against bishops within the Kirk, but even those of us who lack the gift of faith take the point.

The differences between the CofE and St Peter's church seem too trivial to warrant heartbreak, pain and hatred. Those who might choose Rome should just do so, we outsiders think. Sadly, both for the sky-god and for his followers, that's not how it works. Whether "it" works at all is, in fact, another matter.

Gene Robinson was raised to the bishopric of New Hampshire in 2003. He labours under the hideous all-purpose media label "openly gay". Not a few of his fellow Anglican princes believe, with love and respect (they say), that his identity transgresses against that part of Scripture dictating the reasons why a man shalt - or more importantly, shalt not - lie with another. This is the 21st century, remember.

Simultaneously, a number of these church folk are appalled by the idea women should be allowed to don the revered apostolic purple. So much for the girlies, then, and the queers. So much, for that matter, for anyone's idea of equality, or even - this has yet to be mentioned - the law of the land. The 2008 Lambeth Conference, that once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglicans, is riven.

Bishop Robinson, for one, has not even been invited. To a paid-up heathen, this hardly seems fair. Gene has turned up anyhow, and has been having his say, somewhat to the discomfiture of Cantab, Dr Rowan Williams, but to the evident delight of his loving enemies. They know their victim, I think.

You could dramatise the issues. Are gay people less than human? Are women less than equal? In some respects, the Bible is explicit: homosexuality is forbidden. African clerics, sometimes representing places where a queer can still be persecuted to death, have recited the line about "loving the sinner, deploring the crime" and stuck fast to Leviticus.

In other regards, Scripture is a little fuzzy. History fills the gaps. In the early Christian church there was no argument over the role of women. They were equal participants in mass superstition. The idea there should still be a row in 2008 causes some, even Scottish Prods, to wonder if the adherents of a creed can spot the difference between the Bible and their elbows.

My intellectual dissonance has a slightly different quality, however. I know, first, that the Africans, the English conservatives, and the fundamentalist southern Americans are absolutely correct over Bishop Robinson and biblical teaching. The book says no. "Actively gay" is not allowed.

This causes me to wonder why a cleric from New Hampshire, or any woman of mystical inclinations, would suffer so much effort and pain for a version of a faith embracing so many people who - here come words - feel contempt towards them. Worship your god anywhere. Embrace your faith in any manner you can. Why bother with the homophobes, and with the rest?

On this, Bishop Gene has been ingenious. He has argued the Bible is not a fixed or settled text. He seems to view it almost as something organic, a body of belief adapting and altering to the world in which it exists. True enough: are we still refusing to suffer a witch to live, and torching her otherwise?

There is, though, for my dispassionate money, a problem far larger than Bishop Gene's sexuality, or the enrobing of half the species. If the texts are not fixed - if they are not the rules - who chooses, who decides? If we all get to pick and change, the words do not qualify as rules, I suspect. The Protestant belief in an individual interpretation, clarified by faith, does not answer the question. Simple obedience to a pontiff doesn't help either.

The simple answer - mine, that is - won't help a believing Christian of any stripe. Institutional prejudice towards women and gay people is wrong: correct. Ideas that a priest must always be male, or only discreetly homosexual, or celibate for life, or merely well-behaved in public, will not assist any of these Christian factions. Do you believe you are governed by the actual Word of God, or just operating a kind of flexible concordance to elemental reality?

Neither amounts to anything that could be passed off as sense. Literalism, as Bishop Robinson has insisted, is inconsistent when it is not actually unspeakable. But the autodidact, the one picking and mixing the Bible's bits to suit, is a hitchhiker on the road to lunacy. David Koresh knew his Scriptures inside out and back to front. Yet such, apparently, are the choices for all faiths.

Why should I care? That's a question so good I thought I should ask it myself. After many years of puzzlement, I have only ever fretted over the term "organised religion". What's organised about the idea of a universal love that embeds discrimination towards sweet, affable, intelligent people? And what is "systematic" about any of these theologies?

I care, first and obviously, because those of you who believe this realm is not the end are as stubborn as a bunch of New Hampshire farmers. Bishop Robinson impresses me by dint of sheer determination. He almost - but never quite - convinces me that anyone who can care so much, through such circumstances, might be on to something.

Then I wake up. Then I say to myself: the delusive insistence on salvation is itself a species of oppression. To put it crudely: if God exists, I want a word, and not that Word. I do my own jokes.

It hardly matters that gay men, such as the bishop, are complicit in their own oppression. It hardly matters that women are wedded to an institution containing hundreds of bishops with a peculiar (this is meant to be gentle) attitude towards womanhood. You can, indeed must, object to the behaviour of a cult even if you are spared the possibility of ever becoming a member.

Remember, the Church of England remains the established church within these islands. Many of its bishops have seats, by rights, within the upper house of the London parliament. And they cannot even sort themselves out over gay rights and the dignity of women?

The problems of Roman Catholicism are as numerous. The problems of Islam are multifarious. The Kirk can still give me the creeps. Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism: always there is a problem of authority that matters more, in these dangerous times, than the issue of belief's foundations. That last part is easy: it's untrue.

But the good Christians who cannot in all conscience countenance the simple fact of Bishop Robinson are no different from those who could not suffer a witch to live, or those who strap on a suicide belt, or assault an abortion clinic, or disguise a paedophile beneath a cassock.

I had hopes of a more pleasant ending, but truths are strange things. It strikes me, nevertheless, that Gene Robinson should make a Christian life among actual Christians. I'm no expert, though, on myth and its comforts.