I’m a bit fatigued with amateur Lambethology. Anyone waiting for the present Archbishop of Canterbury to come out and say something really definitive on the matter of, say, whether there might ever be women bishops in the Church of England will be disappointed for a long while yet. It’s not that he doesn’t have an opinion - I dare say he does, although I wouldn’t dare try to say exactly what it is. It’s that he doesn’t think it’s his place to impose it, whatever it might be, on the whole Anglican communion. There are some quite deep reasons for this (read some Donald MacKinnon, if you doubt me): not liberal wooliness or refusal to take difficult leadership decisions, but leadership of another order altogether.

Many observers seem to regard Williams as weak and vacillating; actually he is admirably precise in his judgements and principled in his positions. The fact is that the answers to the problems currently facing Anglicans cannot come from him. It is frustrating, but there it is: it is simply not the commission of his office to resolve contradictions among the faithful by unilaterally deciding on matters of orthodoxy. If you want someone to do that then what you want is a Pope, not an archbishop.

The contradictions exist, obviously, and need to be worked out, and I’m not convinced that this can or should be a wholly polite and courteous process. At stake is whether the church can recognise in full the gifts of women and gay people, or whether it must continue to insist on a sexually mutilated personhood for certain classes of person. It is a choice between grace and sadism. The irony is that many people find sadism more attractive: they can cloak the immense, arbitrary cruelty of sexism and homophobia with a stance of compassion towards the afflicted, whilst enjoying the privilege of glorying in the righteousness of their own adherence to “family values”. But perhaps that is not the true libidinal position: after all, there are no perfect families. Perhaps what the defenders of sexual orthodoxy are really clinging to is precisely the condemnation of their own “imperfections”. They tend to characterise equality as permissiveness, as an “anything goes” attitude towards sexuality - what would they themselves lose, if such an attitude were to prevail?

To be a sexual being is to be a chimera, an amalgum of parts that do not cohere. I do not mean simply that “everybody is a little bit homosexual”, or that we all sit somewhere on a continuum between two poles of orientation. I mean that sexual identity is factitious, the counting-as-one of a fundamentally inconsistent reality, and that it is haunted by phantasms, infantile desires, perverse inclinations and no small amount of unrepresentable Dreck. That is the real of sex: “something about the body”, to use a phrase of Virginia Woolf’s, that is irreconcilable with its self-image and with the socially sanctioned expressions of its desires and capabilities. If one wants to be tortured by this, one can - it’s the easiest thing in the world to be screwed up about. Alternatively, one can declare oneself “sex positive”, get a whole bunch of piercings and pretend that one is totally cool with the whole situation. But it is not totally cool. It is not totally anything: that’s the point. The real of sex cannot be subjected to any consistent presentation; any possible presentation of it will be a mish-mash, a confusion.

Orthodox religious sexual ethics attempts to subordinate the real of sex to some regime of meaning, be it reproductive futurism (“go forth and multiply”) or romantic love (“at last I have found The One!”). The latter has a depressing hold on the imaginations of outwardly unreligious persons: they may not worship a trademarked deity, but they seem happy enough to imagine that some anonymous force in the cosmos actually cares enough about who they mix their DNA with to have selected that special someone for them in advance, and then arranged their entire existence as a sort of providential narrative leading up to the point where they sign the mortgage agreement together. Agnosticism means letting capitalism do your believing for you (and “atheism”, in its current popular incarnation, seems to mean aggressively refusing to let anything but capitalism do your believing for you. Most serious Christians are closer to real atheism, it seems to me, than most avowed atheists). But I digress.

If “anything goes” (and someone who fears that this is what equality really means will inevitably fear a slide from acceptance of homosexuality to acceptance of bestiality and paedophilia, since for them such acceptance means the removal of all restraint on the “impure” elements of sexual desire) then the site on which these narratives produce their (profoundly satisfying) conflicts and resolutions is dissolved - the very possibility of meaning vanishes, and we are reduced (presumably) to brutish animal coupling, the sort of thing those awful men get up to in public lavatories. Condemnation of sexual impurity acts as a guard against racial/biological degeneration, a sort of horrifying return-to-slime in which the very bodily integrity of human beings is dissolved into undifferentiated filth. At the same time, this fantasy of total release from sexual integrity - of uncontrolled desires running wild in every direction at once - is very powerfully invested; the real sex lives of actual gay people, even the most adventurous, generally pale in comparison to the excesses conjured by the homophobic imagination.

At the heart of the struggles over sexual ethics and orthodoxy in the Church of England is the question: can the church help people to live with themselves as sexual beings? As it stands, it does not help: it hinders, and some people eroticise the obstacle more willingly and self-gratifyingly than others. The imago of “the family” it projects is an idol, and must be shattered: those whom it attracts, it perverts, and those whom it repels are right to be disgusted with the idolatry it commands.