Democracy can seldom have seemed a more nerve-racking business to progressives in the Church of England. Yesterday, as the General Synod discussed Christmas stamps and the ubiquity of sin, there was plenty that they and the Church’s evangelical conservatives could agree on. But the temporary calm at the Synod’s summer meeting in York masked an uncomfortable reality: In their debate on heresy trials at the weekend, the Church’s leaders came within four votes of exposing themselves to a storm of divisiveness from within and ridicule from outside.

The Synod’s rejection of a proposal to establish “disciplinary tribunals” that would have tackled errant clergy on doctrinal as well as worldlier matters is, first of all, to be welcomed. There was never a need to begin a theological witch-hunt and there is always a need for theological debate.

A degree of consistency in its interpretation of Scripture is clearly important for the worldwide Anglican Communion. This is why church law was modernised to help to resolve doctrinal disputes in the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure of 1963. But the closeness of the vote on tribunals, and the support for them from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, are ominous. The former suggests that too many senior clergy are willing to risk derisive headlines — headlines that would doubtless have recalled Monty Python’s satires on the Spanish Inquisition if not the Inquisition itself — for the sake of orthodoxy. The latter gives the impression of an Archbishop under pressure to keep theological extremists content.

The narrowness of the liberals’ margin of victory is not entirely surprising. The debate on discipline was in large part a proxy for the larger and more emotive one on homosexual clergy that has already come close to tearing Anglicanism apart. This being so, Dr Williams’s fears are understandable. He is trying to reconcile conservatives from Nigeria to Australia, who have issued thinly-veiled threats of schism should he relax his policy on homosexual clergy, with an Anglican Church in Canada that has already done just that.

Dr Williams devoutly wishes to hold the Anglican Communion together. But that will involve ongoing and vigorous debate about spirituality, not an uneasy silence in which vexed topics dare not speak their name. The long-term prospect of a thriving Church will be viable only if traditionalists sense that they have not been betrayed and potential members believe that there is a pew that suits them.

The idea of disciplinary tribunals sitting in judgment on the finer points of New Testament theology as it applies to modern sexuality may seem reasonable to some. To them, the alternative would be a form of proselytising that involved simply telling unbelievers whatever they wanted to hear in order to convert them, thereby diluting the creed they hold so dear.

There has long been a traditional view that would seem to limit debate, but even those traditionalists, or some of them, accept that exegetic conclusions were not handed down with the tablets. A healthy argument is not a sign of moral laxity.