Joan Bakewell: Why should we care if the Anglican Church splits?

It matters because any endorsement of traditional values is a move against women and gays

So the Archbishop of Canterbury moves the Church of England one step closer to schism. Those of secular conviction might not be aware that the Church of England is currently being rocked to its foundations. It has been a querulous place for decades, of course, but in recent months its affairs have had all the plot complexities of a soap opera. Its crisis is deepening, and an institution that was once the very origin of the phrase "a broad church" is breaking up into ever-narrower sects. Its days as an established church of the realm are surely numbered. Disestablishment might be the one thing that helps it to survive.

And I haven't yet mentioned homosexuality or women priests. That's where the problem lies: the deeply entrenched resistance to both within the hierarchy. Back in the 1990s, I was reporting for television about the church's problems with women and gays as though this would prove a transitional period of difficulty while theologians caught up with the thinking of the rest of us. There seemed to be a real effort at that time to re-examine biblical texts and canon law in the light of tolerant, secular values that were acknowledging women as the equals of men and gays as deserving of equal respect to anyone else. But the effort failed, and the church remains locked in outdated attitudes that are finally splitting it apart.

What Rowan Williams is now proposing is a two-tier way of being an Anglican. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he presides over a worldwide network of national and regional churches which all subscribe to the Anglican Communion. As with post-colonial empires, these component parts are getting more and more assertive of their own beliefs and behaviours.

At one extreme, the American Episcopal Church has just defiantly elected a woman as its presiding bishop, and is continuing to bless same-sex couples. At the other extreme, the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, has recently sponsored a law there that increases the legal penalties for homosexuality.

Both sets of views are held with passion and conviction. Each side sees any concession as betraying its principles. How can such divergent views possibly sit side by side within an institution that professes a Christian faith of love and charity? The whole thing brings discredit on what Christ stood for.

Rowan Williams proposes a new structure: a hard core of constituent provinces, Anglican churches that agree to a shared "covenant", and others with merely "associated" status. This would mean in effect that the traditionalists would claim the citadel and expel the radicals to the fringes. The radicals might even decide to go before they're pushed, the Americans leading the way. In the US, of course, all religions have equal freedom and none can prevail over others. The Episcopal Church might do very well on its own.

This would all sound neat and tidy, apart from the fact that each of the constituent churches contains both traditionalists and radicals. The lesbian and gay Christian movement has campaigned for years in Britain and will continue to do so, spurred on by the débâcle over Jeffrey John, the gay cleric appointed Bishop of Reading by Rowan Williams and then required to resign, supposedly in the interests of church unity. In fact, it was simply Radicals: 0; Traditionalists 1.

Why does this matter in what is largely a secular, non-churchgoing society? It matters because the issue goes far beyond Anglicanism. Other religions also penalise gays and have old-fashioned views about women. Islam enshrines in law the superiority of men - as legal witnesses, in divorce, and through the female code of behaviour and dress. In the growing number of countries that adopt sharia as the law of the state, we see that strengthened.

In Birmingham, meanwhile, male Sikh elders forced the city's repertory theatre to cancel a play by a woman writer from their own community, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, because they objected to the view of their faith that it presented. Any move in a country's law that endorses the core values of a traditional faith is a move against women and gays.

Once there was Christendom, a vast swathe of Europe loosely but coherently accepting the teachings of Christ through the mediation of the Pope and his priesthood. The Reformation broke that up and, in a very English way, King Henry VIII saw the Church of England as a halfway house between the two factions. But religious change doesn't answer the same impulses as political change. God doesn't yield to a democracy: we can't deselect him and vote for our favourite 10 commandments. Religions always invoke His Will as the ultimate arbiter. Faced with that, schisms will always flourish. Disestablishment? Bring it on, I say.

joan.bakewell@virgin.net