Richard Holloway: The progressive pilgrim's gospel

I am sitting with the Rev Richard Holloway, formerly Episcopalian Primus and Bishop of Edinburgh, now a Michel Foucault-lookalike public intellectual. We are musing on the theology of the homosexual blow-job. "I remember inviting Rabbi Lionel Blue up to talk to my rather conservative clergy," he says. "He told us the most powerful experience of the sheer gratuitousness of the love of God he'd ever witnessed was in a male sauna in Amsterdam. He watched a young man going down on a raddled old gay man, who just didn't have the ability to pull – and it was an act of pure grace. Now, how can you have that level of promiscuity associated with the grace of God?" The bish leans in with characteristic intensity. "But this was like a biblical insight! It was the kind of thing Jesus would have said!"

I am sitting with the Rev Richard Holloway, formerly Episcopalian Primus and Bishop of Edinburgh, now a Michel Foucault-lookalike public intellectual. We are musing on the theology of the homosexual blow-job. "I remember inviting Rabbi Lionel Blue up to talk to my rather conservative clergy," he says. "He told us the most powerful experience of the sheer gratuitousness of the love of God he'd ever witnessed was in a male sauna in Amsterdam. He watched a young man going down on a raddled old gay man, who just didn't have the ability to pull – and it was an act of pure grace. Now, how can you have that level of promiscuity associated with the grace of God?" The bish leans in with characteristic intensity. "But this was like a biblical insight! It was the kind of thing Jesus would have said!"

It's the Holloway effect, and he deploys it well. He is a sonorously-voiced, mild-mannered elder of his Episcopalian faith, who seems at first like a fully-paid up member of what Hugh McDiarmid used to call "the bread-and-butter faction". Yet when he gets into his stride, Richard Holloway is one of liberal Britain's most persuasive and unrelenting defenders. Watching him balance the tea and cakes with the bath-house ethics, ensconced in his comfy flat in Edinburgh, you can also observe the twinkle in his eye.

Here's the paradox: it's not particularly demanding being a free-thinking radical in the purely secular world. In our bordello of Euro-American excess – Brass Eye and the Hamiltons, the kids from Genoa and that Lady Marmalade video, chemicals a-go-go from school gate to sideplate – how else might we stay sane, other than to be ethically supple and morally flexible? Ask Michael Jackson (either of them). As an intellectual challenge, liberal pluralism is hardly rocket science.

But to try and drag Christianity into the centre of this crazed, postmodern environment, and make it somehow relevant – blood-soaked, power-mad, grudge-laden, hierarchical Christianity, desperately defending its faltering grip... Well, that would be fun for a close-cropped, conceptually-lusty former bishop.

This is the task that Holloway has set himself in his new book, Doubts and Loves: what is left of Christianity (Canongate, £14.99). His last book, Godless Morality – lauded by voices such as Mary Warnock, Fay Weldon and Don Cupitt – almost proves his contrarian tendencies. As an establishment bishop, Holloway wrote that impeccably secular tract, arguing that "it is better to leave God out of the moral debate, and find good human reasons for supporting the system or approach we advocate, without having recourse to divinely clinching arguments". And now he has retired, he's trying to make Jesus meaningful again.

"I go with the American philosopher Richard Rorty, when he says he respects Christ as he respects Marx, both of them social prophets," he argues. "We both think that Christianity is about the end of cruelty: that kind of radical, angry pity that Jesus had for a world which seems to crush most of the people who keep coming into it. To end cruelty! That's almost apocalyptic. I don't mind that definition of Christianity."

The pun in the title – what's "left" of Christianity – is deliberate. And Holloway is only the latest in a line of British bishops – David Jenkins, David Sheppard, Jim Thompson – turned into public intellectuals by the freedoms of office, as they spoke truth to power and cant. "That's what can make priests and preachers into edge figures, even clowns or poets," explains Holloway. "You spend a lot of time thinking, and then you spend a lot of time getting other people to start thinking as well."

In the last few years, particularly in Scotland, Holloway has been a fearless, edge-loving figure. He has admitted to taking a puff on a joint, in the midst of his defence of the decriminalisation of cannabis ("didn't do much for me, but I'm glad I tried it"). He faced up to the late Cardinal Winning over Section 28, defending the right of teachers to talk neutrally about loving gay relationships in the classroom. Holloway was a welcome and authoritative voice of freedom and tolerance in a climate where local tycoons were sponsoring homophobic private ballots, and the new Scottish democracy was almost strangled at birth by some very old Scottish pathologies.

Doubts and Loves makes Christianity seem like a particularly appealing form of lifestyle activism; a flexible, friendly, idealistic creed for the Naomi Klein generation. Yet as humane, wise and effortlessly erudite as his new book is, what the Reverend calls "a religious tragedy" lies at the heart of it.

"I haven't held what you could call a conventional faith for quite a while," he says. "I now have to use quite violent words like revulsion. I have come to loathe the routinisation of the church – those ways and rituals that keep the institution alive, but in the process turn it into something ugly and abusive."

The catalytic event that has charred Holloway – and scores his recent writings – was the Lambeth conference of 1998. "It was nasty, twisted – there were closeted gay groups of priests who were the most vigorous conservatives of all... It made me so bloody angry. I became allergic to meeting with other bishops; it felt like an alien environment. I said to Jeanie [his wife], at 5am one morning, 'I've got to leave.' And when I decided to retire, I never missed a beat – no railing at the altar, handing God my resignation. It was a deep-down wise decision, and I haven't missed it for a second."

Compounding this experience of the sclerosis of his Church was Holloway's discovery of Nietzsche, suggested by his daughter in publishing. "One of the things Nietzsche won't allow you to be is bound by a system, he won't let you be his disciple – because all systems define their conclusions by their premises.

"And that's my problem with Christianity. You have to buy original sin as a reality, not as a fertile symbol or metaphor – and only when you do that, can you buy the whole edifice. That really is bad faith, an authoritarianism that no contemporary person can respect. Good faith, in my view, is about throwing things away all the time, not holding on to unjustifiable premises."

In a way, you feel sorry that the bish has taken himself out of the usual religious routines. A man who says that you should forget the Bible on a Sunday service, and maybe enjoy "some poetry from Norman McCaig, a feminist spiritual ritual, whatever", would almost get you back in the pews. Yet it's sometimes difficult to discern what is left of Christianity, in his hands, other than what the Greeks used to call an "art of living". In the spiritual marketplace of the moment, why choose his brand rather than a thousand others: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, New Age fusions and confusions?

Holloway shrugs. "I do think that religion is much more like poetry, or a habit of action, than it is a revelation, a description of the way of the world. As for Christianity, I'm trying to stretch it to allow people like myself, and all the tens of thousands of postmodern, choice-loving, interesting people, to inhabit it.

"It may just be nostalgia. But there's a mystery to existence, a puzzling abundance and creativity in life, that parts of the Christian tradition can help us apprehend."

That's not much for Mother Church to carry forward into the new century. Indeed, Holloway believes that Christianity is about to dissolve into a "pluralism", out of which "something might survive". He mentions a few off-the-record priests and ministers, mostly gay, who are creating spaces within their churches for "a new kind of pilgrimage".

Holloway's furtiveness is at odds with the open confidence of his post-Christian ethics. When he likens the fate of Christianity to that of the Tory party – "they both don't have a clue how to respond to the present complexities" – there is a vaguely depressed tone to his voice. Might the creed that shaped him, from boy to man, be beached by history? Yet if anyone can unite the cannabis joint and the burning candle – or for that matter, the sauna and the surplice – it's Richard Holloway. So don't bash the bishop. Unless, of course, you really must.

Richard Holloway is in discussion with Simon Blackburn, Jostein Gaarder and Alain de Botton at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 25 August at 8pm; he makes a solo appearance on 27 August at 5pm

Richard Holloway: a biography

Richard Holloway is 67. Born to poor working-class parents – his father was a dyemaker – in the West of Scotland, he joined a strict Anglican order when he was 14. His first parish as an Episcopalian priest was in the Gorbals. He met his wife, Jean, while doing postgraduate study in New York. He has two daughters – one a teacher, one in publishing – and a son who is a carpenter. He became Bishop of Edinburgh in 1986, and the Primus of the Scottish Episcopalian Church in 1992; he retired last year. Holloway has served on the Commission for Human Fertility and Embryology and the Broadcasting Commission, and is a regular BBC broadcaster. Doubts and Loves (Canongate) is his 23rd book.