Published: 15 December, 2011
by JOHN GULLIVER

YOU would never take him for having been a high figure in the church.

He is tall, much younger looking than his 78 years, an easy talker, bursting with ideas – many of them wildly heretical.

To me, he was a bit of an unknown quantity as I sat among an audience of nearly 150 people at a debate at the Bishopsgate Institute in the City.

He shouldn’t have been. Any bit of googling reveals Richard Holloway for what he is – perhaps, the most controversial ecclesiast in Britain.

He gave up his office as Bishop of Edinburgh 11 years ago in search of God!

He is not an atheist, though he is often described as one, more a heretic who looks behind the rituals and historic teachings of the church, treating religious narratives as potent myths.

Even so, his sudden use of the four-letter F word – only once, mind – almost made me gasp.  

But then it made sense to him as he was debating morality, crime and the riots with that knock-about contrarian Dr Theodore Dalrymple and Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working-Class, that has risen high in the political documentary charts this year.

His definition of morality was boiled down and spot-on: Do not do to others what you would not have done to yourself.

Neither of the other panellists disagreed.

On crime, his opinion was predictable – understand why men and women commit crime and treat them with compassion.

Dalrymple was bemused at this. He didn’t think it was a bad thing that the prison population had almost doubled in the past two or three decades.

The more who are put away, the fewer there are to commit crimes, he argued.

Nor – unlike Holloway and Jones – was he sympathetic to the rioters in August.
As for education, more was spent on education than ever before, yet our illiteracy rates were at the highest, he  emphasised more than once.

Holloway referred once to the Lambeth Conference in 1998 which he had walked out after a “poisonous” debate on homosexuality.  

“It was worse than a Nuremberg rally,” he said.

Perhaps a bit over the top, but then Holloway should be forgiven as he has written 20 books so far, all on aspects of religion and human behaviour, all of them with a persuasive style.

As for being bad, we shouldn’t condemn extreme behaviour with a Yes or a No verdict but with a more balanced view of how bad a person is.

Most important of all, he said, was that we learn to forgive.

When I spoke to him afterwards, he denied that his views had fundamentally changed from the age of 14 when he turned to religion.

“I am still an attendant at church,” he stressed.

He was brought up in a poor working class family in a small town called Alexandria near Loch Lomond in Scotland, and I assume the full flavour of his exotic life will be caught in his autobiography, Leaving Alexandria, due to appear early next year.