The young want to sleep with the attractive they meet.

The married look interestedly at people they are not married to.

Same or opposite sex attraction, we are just human.

So when I read Andrew Brown recently, being vituperative about Evangelicals at Gafcon practising 'homophobia' and threatening a split in the Anglican Communion no one cares about, I had several reactions.

Accepting that the Christian tradition sets out to moderate the practice of sex between two people who are not married is not of course 'homophobia'.

And of all the things I may be prone to be 'phobic' about, homosexuals never figure.

But why the attempted insult by Brown and the Guardianistas at all?

Is it the usual reason that exchanging arguments dignifies their opponents too much and runs the risk of acknowledging that they might have an argument that stretches beyond the imputed blind prejudice?

Whatever the reason, insult and abuse never dignify a position. Perhaps Brown and people of his ideological orientation are themselves irrationally phobic? Chrisitianophobic? Sanctifiphobic? Who knows. But the abuse and irrationality suggest something like that.

I grew suspicious of the gay cultural argument when Gore Vidal wrote near the end of his life about how deeply he regretted inventing the term 'gay'. The project had intended to defend his homosexual friends and himself from prejudice - but had also created a sub-category of humanity who were different. The trouble was he thought, that there were just human beings, - one sort of people, who expressed themselves sexually in a variety of ways - some of which changed and altered over a lifetime. There was no such thing as 'gay ' people. Just people.

And homosexual men are not the symmetrical opposite of homosexual women. And then there are the bisexuals - the omnivores - and then there are the people who start off one way and become something something else - who change - because sexuality can be fluid. And then there are the transexuals - very different again. There is no such thing as 'gay' - it's both much more simple than that - just people - and more complex - fluidity of attraction and appetite.

But Christianity, or Christ, comes to the human appetite, whatever it is , sex, money, booze, pride, revenge, and offers to tame it; to tame and transform it. Sex is not a different special appetite, exempt from the touch or call of God, it's just one that society has become most fixated about, and screams abuse at any attempt to tame it.

So yes, Christians - at least those who have not been infected by the spirit of the age- continue to say that sexual appetite is not exempt from God's call and touch, and that sex outside heterosexual marriage is unacceptable to God - who is holy - and calls us to be either holy too - or else to succumb to the flood of dehumanising appetites that the Tradition has always called sin.

So of course, this applies to me as much as to anyone else.

The moment Jesus warns that even looking at someone with sexual appetite opens the floodgates of desire in a way that takes us in a direction that is unacceptable to God, I and the majority of people are engaged in a struggle that will carry us to the limits of our self control and beyond. But it is not a 'gay' issue. It is a human issue. And it is not restricted to sex. It touches our difficulties with forgiveness, anger, pride, greed, the whole range of human appetite.

Worse that that comes the moment of falling in love with people we are not married to, and becoming imprisoned by feelings that carry us close to madness.

Our culture, and the whole idolatry of romanticism that is Hollywood, suggests that so long as we feel something intensely enough, it has its own legitimacy.

But Jesus in the Gospels teach otherwise. There is no 'get out of jail ' card in the struggle between heaven adn hell just because you feel something deeply, and it threatens to overcome you.

The problem with what we have done in our society is that we have legitimised longing.

And so we have removed from people the possibility of repentance. For those of us who fall into sin all too easily, repentance and forgiveness are the only way out of the imprisonment of the human condition. But you need to want a way out.

I was proud to be part of the group of Christians who met at Gafcon at Nairobi.

There was something deeply dignified about people who had become Christians as something more than a pose of accessorized spirituality, but who were engaged in a life or death struggle with themselves - with militant Islam - with the scorn of self indulgent secularism - and who were serious about their appetites and surrendering them; and not making a special case to exempt homosexual appetite from the call of God to be freed, transformed and blessed.

At the heart of the liberal revolt against this call to surrender our right to please ourselves lies two things:

1 The first is a determination to claim as a right access to pleasure, and in particular sexual pleasure; and more, to rage against anyone who threatens this right rather like an emotionally incontinent child.

2 The second is an insensitivity to any form of spiritual conflict. There is no sense that there is a real agency of evil that sets itself against the patterns that God has laid down. There is no awareness that evil sets out to twist and deform what God has made good.

So the liberal is certain he or she is doing good by giving affirmative permission for people to do what they like, and calling this 'love' - while the conservative or orthodox thinks that he or she is trying to be obedient to a pattern of hierarchical holiness, in which our sacrifice and submission play a part in freeing us from the lure of self indulgent evil.

At the heart of this is a struggle for the Church; a struggle to define Christianity itself.

Who is right?

The liberals use a version, their version of Christianity to give a moral buttress to their self expression. It doesn't attract many people. Few people give up self indulgent secularism in order to become self indulgent Christians. Why would you? There is very little power of the Holy Spirit in this vapid self indulgent spirituality. And perhaps this is partly because the Holy Spirit is an agent of change. The New Testament warns us that the Holy Spirit will come to us to change us - to transform us.

But if we don't want to be changed, the Holy Spirit will not come, for there is nothing for Him to do. And since this liberal form of self indulgent faith which exempts sexual pleasure from the demands of discipleship - or 'losing your life so that you may find it' - since it refuses to change, there is very little for the Holy Spirit to do. So there is very little change. Few conversions; little or no transformation. Just the commitment to 'nice' but without even the power to deliver 'nice' when disturbed or challenged. Hence the abuse that Brown and the Guardinastas spew out. Not 'nice' actually. Not even nice.

But the orthodox? They see miracles, people converted, changed, healed, blessed, transformed. Because that is the agency of the Holy Spirit.

So we have two cultures set against each other. One secular and self indulgent, already experiencing the spasm of its own incontinent death throes; and one transformative and with the experience of being always renewed and capable of capturing whole cultures and civilisations with its empowered sacrificial love.

No wonder Brown and the others gush scorn, shout 'homophobia' at the people they are afraid of. It is born of fear. I suspect it is a fear that this real Christianity might overwhelm their rationalistic self indulgent spirituality, and they have no real defence against it except hate, anger and shouting.

Gafcon does Challenge Anglican Christianity to decide whether or not it is going to allow itself to be defined by a decadent liberalism - a spirituality that celebrates the nice without being able to deliver it; a spirituality that surrenders to secular narcissistic hedonism its the authority to make ethical analyses;

or whether the Church in this country is going to offer people caught up in political and existential impotence and despair, the experience of a loving God will set them free from evil without and evil within; who will set them free to experience the glorious liberty of the children of God. Transformation, forgiveness of their sins, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the demanding and renewing presence of Christ.

The gods of sex do not offer much of an alternative to this experience of Christ.

The promise much, but seldom deliver and when that do, they don't deliver for long.

One of Plato's great moments of celebration was when through old age he began to be free of the slavery of his sex drive. The Good News, is that we don't have to wait as long as Plato did - until we are elderly and decrepit to be free. It can and does start now.

Well done Gafcon. You have held onto the teaching of Jesus and the tradition of the pursuit of holiness.

If the Pilling report does, as so many have warned, legitimise same sex blessing, then it will be contradicting the Gospels and affirming there is no need to repent when Jesus taught there was a need to repent. (Looking with desire at someone you are not married to is not suddenly made wholesome because they are the same rather than the opposite sex.)

It will claim that what is unholy can be blessed.

The Church has often done that, with warfare as well as wantonness. But when it does it, it ceases to be the Church.

In such circumstances then it would be proper to split the Anglican Communion, split the Church of England. Let the parts that want to turn and live, be separated from the dead bits that don't.

The Church that is alive, that teaches and practices 'metanoia', - the change of mind heart add practice that is at the heart of the Gospels and the only hope for us all,will continue to invite people to find freedom in the promises of Christ and the help of the Holy Spirit.

This is not about so called 'gay' people, the 1.5% who experience same sex attraction. It is about the 98.5 % who experience opposite sex attraction as well. It is of course about the 100%. Which is why Gore Vidal was right. We are just humans who express our longings, 'loves' and desires sexually.

It is about the transformation of all of us and all our desires, a transformation that lies at the heart of becoming a Christian.

END