Here at CultBox, we only have one rule when reviewing television. Avoid the first person, if you can. Keep it subjective, but distant. Which is fine, but every now and again, a piece of television poleaxes you and personal response is the only response.

And so to tonight’s episode of Rev – the one in which, in a timely piece of programming, Adam Smallbone grapples with the ministry of gay marriage. As of Saturday morning, gay couples may legally be allowed to marry in the UK, but, as this episode makes clear, there are religious exemptions to where those marriages may take place.

I write as a Christian. Specifically, I write as a Christian who is old enough to remember when the Church of England on television was characterised by Dick Emery, sporting comedy teeth and dandruff, or Derek Nimmo, dripping unction with the very wettest of good intentions. When Larry Grayson told you that he had woken up that morning and felt as limp as a vicar’s handshake, it wasn’t just the sexual innuendo that was part of the joke. If the so-called ‘God Squad’ had a face, on television in the 1970s, it was that of your ‘funny uncle’ – long before the very words, ‘funny uncle’, became a euphemism for something else.

Since its debut in 2010, the triumph of Rev is that it has shown us another side of the Church of England: one where the sincerity of its practitioners is not the butt of the joke, but a force for good that is constantly under assault from pressures external and internal.

To those of us who, for all its faults, still love and value the Church of England, Adam Smallbone is the embodiment of the guilt we all recognise as our own. We’re a group of people united in the knowledge that there is always something to apologise for or to cringe about. It’s this awareness that binds us together as much as any belief in salvation or the restorative powers of a nice cup of tea.

The trouble is: when that need to apologise permeates your bones, you’re always, paradoxically, aware of the fragility of this most robust of organisations – always alert to the possibility of schism within the Church, and of the private griefs of the heart that can accompany its most public doctrinal disputes.

In a television landscape populated by tele-evangelists or paedophile priests, you may not see Christians who think and feel like this very often; but they’re there. They’re the ones weeping anguished, exhausted tears when votes to ordain women bishops fall through at the last. They’re the ones choosing their words carefully when others resort to inflammatory soundbites. They’re the ones who stand with Adam Smallbone in his penitent insecurities.

None of which has very much to say about the dilemma of gay marriage within church, but it may help to explain my position, historically, on the issue, which was – I use the past tense emphatically – that while the law should be unequivocal in its support, in the Church, sincerity should be allowed its voice. That there should be a loving, reconciliatory response to both parties in the debate – including to those fervent men and women of faith for whom marriage, in its traditional sense, is an unalterable sacrament. And that the Church, on this issue, can therefore stand apart.

But I got it wrong. This episode shows me why I got it wrong – because no union born of love ever damaged society. Because compromise solutions only ever breed more heart unease and dissent. And because sincerity alone isn’t justification for taking the wrong path.

Gay marriage, in church, isn’t the gateway to the apocalypse. Nor should it be a triumphalist exercise in flag-waving and point-scoring. It is an opportunity to solemnise, legalise and, yes, sanctify relationships that are as honest, messy and true as any in the straight community – if there were such a thing as gay communities and straight communities. But, of course, there aren’t. There are just people. And people don’t tend to live their lives in boxes, which is why they shouldn’t be put in them.

I write all this for one reason only: because the final scene of this episode of Rev, in which Adam chose to marry his two friends in church, left me in floods of tears. Deep, penitent tears. I find it astonishing that it should be a secular television comedy that should show some corners of the Church what loving acceptance should look like; but it did.

This quality of loving acceptance – this grace – has very little to do with judgement and quite a lot to do with a shared and common humanity. It is what survives when everything else is gone, and that it should be exhibited so profoundly at 10pm on Monday night on BBC Two is a most curious blessing. And a most remarkable one.

Aired at 10pm on Monday 31 March 2014 on BBC Two.

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