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Government proposals for gay marriage would dilute an institution "vastly" important to a healthy society, the Church of England has warned. 

Responding to a consultation on the issue in England and Wales, the Church said the legislation was "shallow".

Government plans to open marriage to gay couples by 2015 could undermine its status as the state church, it said.

The Home Office said religious bodies would not have to conduct gay marriages and that it was considering all views.

The plans do not allow for religious organisations in favour of change to conduct gay marriages.

Gay rights campaigners accused the Church of "scaremongering".

The Church of England said by opening marriage to gay couples, an institution defined for centuries to be exclusively between a man and a woman would have its meaning "hollowed out" and reduced to the level of a "content free", "consumerist", agreement.

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By highlighting the possible loss of its role as a principal provider of marriages, and hinting even at the potential unravelling of its established status, the Church of England hopes to alert the public to the magnitude of what it believes is being proposed in the gay marriage legislation. 

The Church says an institution of "vast" benefit to society as a whole is being undermined to meet a political need, and is being deliberately presented as something far more consequential.

The consultation is a "very shallow piece of work on a very serious subject", according to Church officials. 

For the Church, a marriage - with its focus on procreation and the need to be consummated - is something that is simply not available to gay couples. By creating different understandings of marriage, it insists, the whole institution will be weakened - something the nation should not be allowed to sleep-walk towards. 

Church officials claimed the exemptions from performing gay marriages, which the proposals suggest for religious organisations, would be unlikely to survive legal challenges in domestic and European courts.

Tory MP Crispin Blunt conceded the government's aim "to protect, indeed proscribe, religious organisations from offering gay marriage" may be "problematic legally".

"But the proposal the government are putting forward is that marriage should be equal in the eyes of the state - whether it's between a same-sex couple or a man and a woman," he told BBC One's Breakfast.

But human rights lawyer Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, the vice-president of the Law Society, said the European court was "very tender to religious sensibilities".

BBC