The C of E has only one way to go. "We must accept there is a revolution in the area of sexuality." Only thus can the Church contain some of the pent-up hostility to it.

Let me see if I get this right. The reason people are leaving the Church in droves is that they can't abide by its opposition (rather meek opposition, it has to be said) to an abomination that no Christian can possible countenance while remaining a Christian.

Reverse this unfortunate situation, and our predominantly atheist people will do an about-face and march towards the Church as fast as they have been marching away from it.

Essentially this means that in order to reconvert England to Christianity, the Church of England must stop being Christian. I've got news for the Archbishop: it's not just the Church's opposition to homomarriage that turns people off, and it's not just "in the area of sexuality" that a revolution is under way.

Under attack is the whole ethos of Christianity, based as it is on the centrality of God rather than man. Modern man, his head deep up his own rectum, has been brainwashed to think that he himself is the ultimate authority: his own judge, his own priest, his own God.

Accepting an authority that's infinitely higher than himself has become abhorrent and impossible to him. His vulgar materialist mind can't fathom the sublime subtlety of Christianity; his greedy, acquisitive nature can't accept the Church's moral restrictions on his vile behaviour.

The problem is fundamental, and one can only regret that the highest prelate of the Church doesn't realise this. Nor, and this is deeply worrying, does he seem to have the remotest idea of what the Church is for.

When it comes to its interaction with the secular world, the Church is there to pass moral judgment on the multitudes - not the other way around.

It's the Church's sacred duty to tell the world where it's going wrong, not to get up and salute every time yet another subversive aberration is run up the flagpole. If the people don't like what they hear, then so much the worse for the people.

Any sane person, never mind a Christian, must see that homomarriage is a foul obscenity. Alas, people have been largely deprived of their sanity by centuries' worth of ever-accelerating atheist propaganda. The Church must do all it can to restore this sanity - even if it means becoming unpopular with the atheists of Notting Hill and other fashionable parts of London.

Instead the Archbishop clearly thinks in marketing terms, within which he operated for most of his adult life. Even those he both misunderstands and misapplies.

A successful marketing campaign aims at both breadth (expanding its market) and depth (keeping hold of the core customers). Any marketer worth his salt is loath to achieve the former at the expense of the latter. Yet this is what in effect the Archbishop is trying to do.

His forlorn hope seems to be that homosexuals marrying at the altar will suddenly make the Incarnation and the Resurrection universally attractive. It won't. What is absolutely and totally guaranteed is that true Christians will leave the Church as a result - to Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, or else variously heretical fundamentalist sects. Many will part ways with any church Christianity altogether.

Turning the Church into a fancy-dress extension of The Guardian, which seems to be the Archbishop's intention, shouldn't stop at sanctifying same-sex marriage.

The next step should be for the Church to abandon its sacraments, rituals and dogma, as it has already largely abandoned its formative Scripture. Why stop halfway, Your Grace?

You'd achieve a much broader appeal by declaring ex cathedra that, though Jesus was basically a decent bloke and a bit of a prophet, he was in no way divine. That no one can be conceived without some hanky-panky. That no one can come back from the dead. That one's enemy should be eviscerated, not loved.

This is the direction in which "the cultural and political ground is changing." Rather than fighting this change, surely our Church must trail in its wake to avoid criticism that's "uncomfortably close to the bone".

I don't know how many more speeches like this it will take for any orthodox Christian to realise that the Church of England can no longer remain his home. Not very many, would be my guess.

END