Hundreds of Anglicans met in London yesterday to signal dissent from liberalising trends within the Church. The vehicle for their protest was a new organisation called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. The venture claims support from five bishops of the Church of England, among whom the most prominent is Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester.

Bishop Nazir-Ali is a longstanding critic of modern mores and church accommodation with them. He has become increasingly outspoken as his early retirement from Rochester approaches. But his willingness to provoke splits and risk schism within the Anglican Communion serves neither Church nor nation. He commented before yesterday’s gathering that homosexuals should “repent and be changed”. He thereby inflamed an issue on which social attitudes have changed radically for the better within a generation, and signalled insubordination to the authority of Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. To adapt the words of Clement Attlee to an obstreperous Labour critic: a period of silence on his part would be welcome.

That is a shame. Bishop Nazir-Ali is a man of learning and personal courage. He is a powerful advocate of the gospel and a supporter of persecuted Christians. His public interventions are not always wrong; but they are marred by a talent for overstatement.

Dr Nazir-Ali has spoken acutely of the dangers of Islamic extremism and urged integration in British society. Yet he undermined that message when declaring last year that parts of Britain had become “no-go areas” for non-Muslims. The Bishop produced no evidence for his assertion. In the vital aim of separating the influence of Islamist fanaticism from the far larger body of British Muslims on which it is parasitical, his remarks were purely counterproductive.

Similar concerns arise with regard to direct evangelism among non-Christian communities. Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant social thinker, worried about the destructive impact of Christian proselytising of the Jews when “the two faiths, despite differences, are sufficiently alike for the Jew to find God more easily in terms of his own religious heritage”. A half-century later the question naturally arises about Muslim, Hindu and other communities. Knowing much about religious diversity, Bishop Nazir-Ali is less sensitive to religious pluralism. Yet the case for a ministry to non-Christian faiths needs to be argued rather than assumed.

The Church has an important role in modern thinking about social ethics. But when William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s, wrote his seminal work Christianity and Social Order, he felt it necessary to defend at length the right of the Church to “interfere” in the political sphere. Bishop Nazir-Ali’s public statements have been undisturbed by similar agonising about the limits of theological reflection. He has stridently criticised Tony Blair for not relating his religious faith to his policies.

An observer more attuned to the pragmatic traditions of British politics might have shown greater sympathy for the dilemmas of statesmen. The Church of England’s inheritance provides an inspiration for political action but not a manifesto for it. Its civic role is best served as a witness and a leaven to the life of the nation, not a Jeremiah.