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'It is the heretics of religion, however, that we should credit or, at least, recognise for making us who we are and believing what we believe.'

In the first of a new series, Matthew Graham explains why heretics aren't as bad as they used to be in the good old days

I attend a heretical church. Every Sunday I am party to a set of observances that four hundred years ago would have had me and the rest of the congregation praying for rain.

A deluge to sodden the kindling and firewood stacked up around us.

In fact, even today, there are a significant number of otherwise sane people who believe that we are irrevocably damned for the extent of our liberality and inclusiveness.

Of course, I'm portraying us as the victims, the underdogs, the heroes of this piece. In our relativist, pluralist society, we shy away from dogma, associating it all too often with bone-headed fundamentalism.

Orthodoxy is a term loaded with negative connotations, mental images of corporate authoritarianism. We see the heretic as the champion of the sane, rational view - the lone voice crying out in the wilderness.

Choice

Given the choice between the saint and the heretic, we favour the human one, the one fighting the system, raging against the machine, the cool one.

Or we do until we feel threatened. When we become the target then the heretic transforms into a lunatic, an extremist, a terrorist. A cancer to be excised from society at all costs.

Even when we have extinguished it, we fear the spark that could reignite the heretical fire so much that we act out of all proportion to protect ourselves. We jump at every shadow.

Our history is a series of catastrophic jerks as we lurch from one heresy to the next. Chesterton described a heretic as “a man whose philosophy is solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong”.

Its semblance is human but its thinking is not: this is the monster of the collective unconscious, the truly alien, the ultimate fear. But it is no longer religious heresy that most of us get worked up over.

That is now a light filler in the media circus of family tragedies and political disgraces, a comedy act of funny costumes and antiquated practices as the heresy cases against Anthony Freeman and Andrew Furlong have shown.

Bishop

Even the great David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, was a heretic not for dismissing the resurrection of Christ as little more than “a conjuring trick with bones” but for opposing Margaret Thatcher’s government during the Miners’ Strike.

The firebrand heretic of the 21st century lives in politics and economics and science. Deny the existence of God and no-one bats an eyelid: deny the existence of global warming and they’ll be after you with bats.

It is the heretics of religion, however, that we should credit or, at least, recognise for making us who we are and believing what we believe.

Without Arius, there would be no Nicene Creed; without Wycliffe and Luther, no Protestant Reformation; and without Bogomil, no Da Vinci Code. And these are just a handful in a cast of thousands.

We live in a world shaped by the reactions of church and society to the influences of these individuals and their followers.

Over the next nine months I aim to give a few of them a moment in the spotlight and a round of applause. I hope that you will join me with an open mind and having left your matches at home.

• Read our A-Z Saints series