Deborah Orr: A man of God we should all be supporting

Many people who consider themselves to be socially progressive, tend to believe that they are fully alive to the dangers of fundamentalism. It is de rigueur for this group to gaze in frustrated wonder at Muslims who believe that the teachings of the Prophet should be interpreted literally, whatever the context of the age.

But they are not the only ones who are at it. Even Barack Obama, viewed by many as the progressive Messiah, is minded to believe that the desirability of militias in the US a couple of hundred years ago should dictate that controls on the ownership of handguns are unacceptable even now. It is enough to make you wonder whether a written constitution might be more trouble than it's worth.

And it is thought very widely to be almost criminally irresponsible that despite the horrors of the African Aids pandemic, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church continues to warn against the use of condoms. Yet in one important respect, many of those who condemn most vociferously the intellectual and practical dead end that fundamentalism tends always to lead to can be pretty fundamentalist themselves. There is a tendency among secularists – of which I am one – to believe that no belief that is held by a religious group – even a progressive one – is worthy of support.

The danger of that complacent and negative expression of intolerance of religion is that it tends actually to foster the most fundamentalist expressions of religious belief, while allowing moderate and humane religious voices to be stifled. It is odd and rather shameful that secular progressives are so unwilling to make common cause with people who share their own social values, and who fight to defend them, just because they commit what is seen at best as the quaint solecism, and at worst as the sin against reason, of believing in God.

Right now, on a global scale, progressives are under attack by fundamentalists in a battle of contradictory religious beliefs that has without hyperbole been described as unseen since the Reformation. That battle is being played out among 77 million Anglicans, hugely divided over attitudes to homosexuality and to women, and on the brink of schism as a result.

Controversy has been rumbling since the ordination of women was accepted by the Anglican Church in 1992. But major hostilities began in the US in 2003 with the consecration of the out-and-proud Episcopalian Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire. Critical eyes turned next to Canada, when one diocese authorised a gay blessing service. Last month, London was the focus of the wrath of traditionalists, when the flamboyant wedding-style blessing of two gay priests was criticised by the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres, as beyond the narrow remit that the Church of England permits for such ceremonies.

Such is the distaste for the goings-on in the US, Canada, and Britain that 300 bishops decided to boycott the Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade meeting of the Anglican Church worldwide which takes place next week in Canterbury. Styling themselves as the Global Anglican Future Conference, the group of evangelicals held an alternative meeting in Jerusalem last week. They decided to reject links with Britain, the US and Canada, and to form a breakaway Church, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, which would in effect become some kind of global anti-homosexual Protestant sect.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is naturally against such a move. As the leader of the Anglican Church worldwide, he condemns the group as lacking "legitimacy, authority and integrity". He stands, in effect, against the establishment of a church of homophobic Anglicans, although such is the sensitivity of the issue that he is quite unable to express his worries in such strident terms. Even the words he has so far chosen are considered, for him, to be unusually direct and uncompromising.

All social progressives would normally be intensely interested in, and appalled by, the prospect of an international movement being set up specifically to stand against equal rights for gay people and for women, and to proselytise from such a platform. But for secular fundamentalists, who consider their rejection of religion to be an article of faith more sacrosanct than any earthly defence of human rights, any church, in any manifestation, is something to be ignored at best and opposed whenever possible.

There are even arguments which suggest that the Anglican Church is being neo-colonial in its wish to impose its happy-clappy inclusivity on the largely African Anglicans who are so upset by the failure of their church to reject homosexuality. It is quite a spectacle, this one, which sees a perfectly legitimate Christian attempt to protect important human rights as some sort of paternalistic and prescriptive conspiracy.

Anyway, the idea is rather contradicted by the fact that the breakaway bishops have made a beeline for Britain, where they intend to set about recruiting to their new group those parishes that share their regressive views.

Unfortunately, they could not have arrived at a better time. On the home front the Anglican Church is in turmoil, not just over gay rights in the church, but also over its championship of equal rights for women. Again the progressive leadership is pressing for the extension of female involvement in the church, and is backing the ordination of female bishops in the Church of England. And again the fight is hard. More than 1,300 clergy have written to Rowan Williams and to the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, threatening to defect to the Catholic Church, which still does not allow the ordination of women or gays, if two votes at the General Synod this weekend result in the ordination of female bishops.

What makes the anti-women clergy particularly furious is that their demand for a strange kind of parallel administration – which would operate as a church within a church, but without any women – is unlikely to be met. Again, if any other establishment group was blatantly making such rabidly discriminatory demands, progressives would be up in arms. Everyone who believes that it is wrong for a human being to be denied their vocation simply because of their gender, ought to consider this cause to be a brave and important one.

I am an atheist myself, but not one who wishes to impose my beliefs on others. When religion is used as an excuse for the denial of human rights, I abhor it. But when a church is striving to protect and extend such rights, all over the world, I'm right behind it. Religion does not have to be the enemy of social progress. On the contrary, Anglicans have a strong progressive tradition.

Secularists, in refusing to take an intelligent interest in the debates and the challenges of those who resist such unsettling tendencies within religious groups, run the risk of offering tacit support to the bigots and the fundamentalists. The triumph of the latter, as can be seen by the rise of religious fundamentalists in both the Christian and the Muslim worlds, is a far from attractive prospect.

d.orr@independent.co.uk