When Michael Arditti announced he was writing a novel based on the Passion, he was surprised at the alarm he raised. Yet even in modern, secular Britain, he argues, Christianity provides fertile ground for writers

Although, in recent years, polemics against religion have topped the bestseller charts, novels exploring the nature of faith remain rare. Even so, I was taken aback by the consternation which greeted the news that I was writing a contemporary Passion story set in a London parish. When I added that much of the narrative took place in church services, the expressions of alarm grew overwhelming. Nevertheless, I persisted in the belief both that the subject was a valid one and that I stood in a long and honourable literary tradition.

In the past, the prominence of clergymen in fiction reflected the dominance of the Church in society. From Sterne's Parson Yorick, Fielding's Parson Adams and Goldsmith's Dr Primrose through Austen's Mr Elton and George Eliot's Rector Cadwallader to Anthony Trollope's Reverend Harding and Bishop Proudie, the English novel abounded in portraits of clerical life. In recent years, the Anglican flag has been kept flying by writers as diverse as Trollope's relative Joanna, Susan Howatch and Barbara Pym, but it is no coincidence that, in our more fragmented age, the most celebrated fictional clerics have been not members of the Established Church, but the whisky priests of Graham Greene.

A mere 2.1 per cent of the population attends Anglican services each week, and yet the Church enjoys a significance in the nation's life way beyond its numbers, as shown by Gerald Scarfe's sculpture in the ill-fated Millennium Dome in which a cleric joined a judge and a politician among the burdens weighing down the man in the street. Clergy are still regarded as moral arbiters in a country that is nominally Christian. Any writer who wishes to explore the discrepancy between public and private behaviour could do worse than go to church.

The Church suffers from the problems of any institution that is based on faith. Just as "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" was an inspiration to millions who later became disillusioned with the communist state, so "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God [and] Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" appeals to millions who are appalled by the Established Church. A curate in Easter, accused of mocking the foundations of the Church, speaks for many when he answers: "Not the foundations . . . merely some later embellishments which stand like a rood-screen obscuring the Cross." Without the Church, Christ's message would never have survived; with it, it has been dangerously compromised.

There are two churches in my novel: the Church of England and the church in England. Like many people, I reserve my respect for the latter. The former is a historical construct and theological balancing act: the via media which, in reality, seems closer to the via mediocre. As every schoolchild knows, it was founded by Henry VIII to effect his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. What fewer children know - or clergy seem prepared to acknowledge - is that divorce is the one area of personal relationships that Christ himself condemned. Such selective interpretation of biblical teaching is grist to the mill of a novelist concerned with moral conflict.

One of my aims in writing Easter was to paint a comprehensive social portrait of a kind that has largely disappeared from the contemporary novel. Nowhere but the Church could I find an institution where all the classes and racial and sexual groups stood (and sat and knelt) side by side. In my fictional parish of St Mary-the-Vale, Hampstead, I have been able to place a property developer intent on defrauding the Church, an admiral's widow mourning her son, a Holocaust survivor denying her past, the daughter of an African chief escaping persecution, a lesbian artist christening her daughter, a homeless man seeking refuge and scores of others, without any sense of strain. Clergy are fond of claiming that the Church's true wealth lies in its people. If so, then a novelist has been the beneficiary.

The clergy themselves remain as worthy of fictional study as they were in the days of Trollope. As countless "Vicarage rat" and "Reverend Romeo" headlines have shown, in no other profession is the disparity between aspiration and achievement so stark. Clergy are placed in an impossible position, not least by the expectations of the laity. We require them to be better than the rest of us and yet resent them for appearing superior. We demand that they "stand in the person of Christ" and yet that they engage fully with a secular society. We insist that they be people of high intellectual calibre and staunch moral fibre while paying them a stipend at which a waiter would turn up his nose. They are our own spiritual conflicts writ large.

Far from being the remote figures of popular myth, the clergy grapple every day with the problems of social exclusion. Caught up in the crossfire of doctrinal disputes and desperate to stave off their own sense of powerlessness, they throw themselves into parish social work. But, at night, when the official social workers (along with doctors and teachers and other middle-class professionals) go home to the leafy suburbs, the clergy alone remain at the heart of the inner city. It is the vicarage bell that victims of fights and domestic violence, vagrants and drunks, the mentally disturbed and emotionally scarred ring at all hours of the day and night. The surprise should be not that someone has written a novel about the contemporary church, but rather that no one has written a "Holy Joe" equivalent of The Bill.

It is often said that the only two valid subjects for literature are sex and death, and Church life contains lashings of both. It may be hard for a layman to appreciate the aphrodisiac aspect of vicars, but the symbolism makes it clear when, dressed in brightly coloured robes and haloed by a heady cloud of incense, they stand - and, at certain services, prostrate themselves - before their congregation. The combination of authority and humility, along with the lure of forbidden fruit, proves to be irresistible to people of both sexes and all sorts. A gay priest told me that he never attracts as many offers as when he wears his clerical collar on the Tube. One heterosexual vicar reported enduring a campaign of harassment from an admirer who even forged love letters to herself in his name, while another recalled entering his church after harvest festival to find a parishioner naked in the vestry, singing "We plough the fields and scatter" and brandishing a root vegetable.

The social comedy and sexual dysfunction of the Church are potent themes for a novelist, particularly at a period when the conflict between liberalism and reaction is entering a crucial stage. The current Archbishop of Canterbury, a reputed liberal, has shown himself so eager to appease the African bishops on matters of sexual conduct that the Church of England is in danger of turning into the Church of Nigeria. Ultimately, however, what drew me to write about the Church is the figure of its founder, whose image and teaching have been the predominant influence on western culture for 2,000 years. Notwithstanding their glaring contradictions (bringing not peace but a sword while turning the other cheek; extolling the lilies of the field while preaching the parable of the talents), Christ's words exert a more powerful hold on my imagination than those of anyone else. And Easter, the most important festival of the Christian Church, offers the perfect opportunity to examine the relationship between the spiritual and the secular, the sacred and the profane, and between humanity and God.

This is the preface to a new paperback edition of Michael Arditti's "Easter", published by Arcadia Books (£6.99)

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