IT IS not an election that would normally attract world attention, but when a few hundred Christians gather to choose a new Episcopal Bishop of California today, millions around the globe will be watching.

The reason is simple. Three of the seven candidates are gay or lesbian, and live openly with their same-sex partners. If one of them wins, the victory could well fracture the Episcopal Church in America and trigger a schism in the worldwide Anglican Communion to which it belongs.

It would be like “a terrorist bomb which is timed to destroy a peace process”, says the Rev Paul Zahl, dean of the conservative Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Pennsylvania.

The “peace process” he refers to was made necessary by the Episcopal Church’s consecration, three years ago, of Gene Robinson as its first gay bishop.

That choice created ferment among the world’s 77 million Anglicans. It outraged conservatives, particularly in Africa, where the Church is growing fast but where homosexuality is taboo.

Today about 300 local clergy and 400 lay electors from 86 churches with 27,000 parishioners will gather in Grace Cathedral, on Nob Hill in San Francisco, to choose the next bishop for one of America’s most left-wing dioceses.

The candidates include the Very Rev Robert Taylor, the Rev Canon Michael Barlowe and the Rev Bonnie Perry — all of whom are gay.

The election of a second gay bishop would create a crisis both inside the American Church — which would have to decide whether to consent to the appointment — and with fellow Anglicans around the world.

It would be seen as a rebuff for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Windsor Report, which recommended a moratorium on such appointments, and to a special commission of the American church that has tried to defuse the issue by counselling “very considerable caution”.

“The atmosphere is electric,” Canon Kendall Harmon, of South Carolina, a leading church conservative who writes a widely read blog, said. “If they were to choose a same-sex partnered candidate it’s so clearly a repudiation.”

Ian Douglas, co-chairman of the 14-member special commission, predicted that electing a gay bishop would make Anglicans reconsider seriously the place of the American Episcopal Church in the 77 million-strong worldwide Communion.

“It could not be let go by. It would provoke a response on the inter-Anglican level,” Mr Douglas said. “I can imagine some would be calling for out-and-out disenfranchisement of the Episcopal Church.” The Rev John Kirkley, rector at predominantly gay St John the Evangelist Church in San Francisco and a leader of the Episcopal gay-rights group Oasis, sees a clash as inevitable. “If it does not happen here, it’ s just going to happen somewhere else down the road,” he said.

Episcopalians in the gay-friendly Bay area of the city find it hard to understand what the all the fuss is about.

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