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Interview

Mark Beckwith  (00:48)
Okay, welcome to Reconciliation Roundtable. I’m Mark Beckwith, retired bishop of the Episcopal Church, author of Seeing the Unseen: Beyond Prejudices, Paradigms, and Party Lines. I do podcasts with various religious leaders in the Episcopal Church. I’ve done a podcast with former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, with Bishop Mariann Budde, and today it is my honor and privilege to have Sean Rowe, the Most Reverend Sean Rowe, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Sean and I have been colleagues for nearly 20 years. When he was consecrated as a bishop, he was then the youngest bishop in the Episcopal Church. But immediately he demonstrated his wisdom, and he served as parliamentarian for the House of Bishops, which is not an easy task. He knew the ins and outs of how to run a meeting better than any of the rest of us, and we consulted him regularly for his remarkable knowledge of church history and, more importantly, how systems work.

He was elected by his peers in 2024 on the first ballot to be the next presiding bishop, a recognition that his research—he has a PhD in organizational learning and leadership—and his reflection and experience would be critical to guiding the church into its next chapter. Sean, welcome. It’s great to have you.

Sean  (02:18)
Thanks for having me, Mark. As you know, I’ve long admired your work, particularly working with people across difference and your advocacy for those on the margins. So it’s an honor for me to be here, being interviewed by you today.

Mark Beckwith  (02:35)
Thank you, Sean.

To begin, I’m going to refer to an earlier conversation that you and I had a while ago. We talked about building bridges across political and religious divides, which is some of the work that I do with Braver Angels now, and you’ve commended that, and I appreciate that. In that earlier conversation, you indicated that you were formed in the evangelical Christian tradition and that you know it well. Can you describe what that formation was, and how you have evolved over the course of time to where you are now—what you bring from it and what you bring with it?

Sean  (03:15)
Well, I’ve often said that I regard my early formation in a very conservative theological and political context as a gift. Certainly, I have grown to have a broader understanding, but my particular educational formation at a place called Grove City College—a small college in western Pennsylvania known for its very conservative political and theological views—it was a conclave of a place where we really learned about conservative political philosophy.

So in many ways, what we’re all calling conservative now is almost unrecognizable. This kind of far-right MAGA Christian thing is a bit of a different world. But I also learned in that context about taking the Bible seriously. And I really am a person that can’t, in good conscience, dismiss Christian fundamentalism as something that people who are unlearned simply accept. It is its own way of thinking, its own internal logic. I don’t agree with it. I think it’s not nearly as expansive. I think it closes us to the world around us. And I think understanding how it works and how people think is a really important way to have dialogue now across differences.

So the Bible—we were taught, you know, it’s not just a book of nice phrases and inspirational stories to help us be better people, but really a way of ordering our lives. And we found a person in Jesus to order our lives after. And so, in that way, it was a gift. Many, many things about it, though, I found constraining and did not really comport with my understanding of the world around me. But I think I have a healthy respect for the way that people think. And I think sometimes, as progressive Christians, we can easily feel like we’re more enlightened somehow. And I think that’s a really unhelpful approach to dialogue across difference.

Mark Beckwith  (05:29)
Given that you’re steeped in both traditions, what can or should we be doing to build bridges across the Christian chasm? What do we need to learn from one another?

Sean  (05:43)
Well, first, I think a bit of humility goes a long way. And we truly can’t hear one another if we’re so eagerly defending our own positions and working out how to rhetorically undo another person’s position. I think Episcopalians sort of pride themselves in, you know, making a great argument and doing things with rhetorical flourish. But I think that’s the wrong approach: thinking, well, how can we undo this other position?

I don’t want to sound trite, but I really believe this: we all have to look at what we can agree on, like feeding the hungry, protecting children, supporting our veterans and our communities, starting from those places. And I think, at a minimum, Christians should be able to agree that this operation is about love of neighbor. And if it’s not about that, then we’ve lost our way.

I think what I’ve learned from these traditions is there is common ground on which to stand. If we can find the common ground, we can work on the issues that matter. And we can do it without compromising our own values and the commitments that we’ve made to the marginalized, so they’re not mutually exclusive.

Mark Beckwith  (07:11)
So what is that common ground that you’ve identified that you bring from your more conservative tradition into your leadership in the Episcopal Church?

Sean  (07:21)
I think Jesus at the center. I think love of neighbor. Now, what does that mean? You know, ultimately, what does that love look like? I think that’s where the discussion sometimes starts to diverge.

But I think if people understood how seriously we take Jesus, the person of Jesus, how seriously we think about what it means to follow Jesus, I think that is core and central. People will say, you know, we’re not a church of Scripture, or what—you know, quite the contrary. If we could engage in a way that didn’t set ourselves up as kind of the intellectual giant in the conversation and came to the table more as kind of an equal, I think that’s what I mean about a little bit of humility going a long way. We tend to approach it like we’re the ones that actually understand, and if everybody would just understand it the way that we did, it would work. When I really think there’s a commonality there.

Mark Beckwith  (08:26)
To that point, in April a year ago, at your address at Virginia Theological Seminary—the Mollagen Lecture—you offered a critique of the Confessing Church in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich and Nazism. And while you commended the resistance, you cited a failure, and this really stuck with me: their focus was on resisting the injustice of the government, but they did not focus at all, or even mention, neighbor—specifically Jewish neighbors. That was not even part of the conversation: Jewish people who were being arrested and eventually murdered. Can you say more about that and what we need to learn from that?

Sean  (09:18)
Yeah. First, I want to say Dietrich Bonhoeffer and many others who were part of that movement are exemplars of faith and witness and hope, so I don’t mean—it’s not my intent to detract from the sacrifices that people made. I think why I find this an instructive case study, and I’ve spent many years looking at the Confessing Church movement and thinking about it as it relates to our own time, is that while their instincts were somewhat correct—their compass was sort of pointing them true north—they really missed what was right in front of them.

I think it’s a cautionary tale because they did resist the Nazi regime, but their primary complaint, their primary issue, was that the Reich really wanted to run the church. They wanted a Reich church. They wanted influence over how the church operated and what it did. So the primary issue was not the antisemitism. And let’s just pick up on that thread. We know lots of other groups were also targeted: Gypsies, gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavs, Poles. But picking up just on the antisemitism, because it ran immediately adjacent to this movement, the Confessing Church really didn’t balk when the academy and the biblical scholars were basically thrown out of the universities. They didn’t really have much of an objection to that.

There was the matter of whether somebody who was Jewish and converted to Christianity was really a Christian or whether they were Jewish. They were kind of agnostic about that issue, too. In many ways, people went to church and they went about their daily lives while their neighbors were being taken away. And that was not their objection. It was not until later in the movement, much later, until it was almost too late, that the idea that people were being taken away, possibly exterminated, came into the conversation.

And I think it was a tremendous blind spot. Much of the kind of popular history that’s been written about the Confessing Church glosses over the internal conflict that was there and the fact that they missed it. And that’s what I worry about today. What is right in front of us that we miss? Because they were not speaking out about the antisemitism. They were not speaking out about the hate. I mean, there were a few people here and there, but as a rule, that was not what the Confessing Church was about.

And I think for us now, I wonder what’s right in front of me that I don’t see as a church leader, as an establishment person. What don’t I see? And ultimately, Bonhoeffer comes to understand that it was the institution itself that became the barrier, and that the whole way and foundation on which the church was constructed at that time, theologically, had the seeds of its own destruction inside of it. That’s why he was saying, ultimately, ethics are not universal; they’re particular.

And I wonder how and in what ways our own understanding, our own mental models, our own theological constructions now keep us from seeing what we need to see that’s right in front of us. Because even these people who were doing their very best did not see what was right in front of them. And I find that scary, and I find it important and instructive for us now.

Mark Beckwith  (13:24)
So how do we open our eyes? What practices, what rituals, what prophetic voices do we need to listen to and pay attention to in order to have our eyes opened to see what’s in front of us?

Sean  (13:37)
Well, I’m really, really influenced by Kelly Brown Douglas and the way that she talks about the kingdom of God. We often think of—or I’ve often, let me put it, I’ll speak for myself—I’ve often been taught, you know, what we’re doing is continuing to draw that circle wider to include more and more people, so that the circle gets wider, we’re including people on the margins.

And I think what she’s helped me—and other liberation theologians have done the same thing, but there’s something about the way she talks about it that really sticks with me—is that the marginalized are at the center. So they’re really at the center of the story. And I think if that’s the case, and I believe that it is, if those marginalized voices are at the center, we’ve got to find a way to listen to them.

And I think it’s what the Confessing Church missed because they were the privileged. They were the people who were at the head of the academy. They were at the top in society. They were able to see from their own point of view and weren’t able to listen. There was no mechanism for them to hear any other voices. So they weren’t listening to Jewish voices, they weren’t listening to others. I mean, finally, Karl Barth and others really stepped into the gap and had them hear, but they weren’t listening to marginalized voices.

And I think that’s what we have to figure out how to do: bring those voices to the center and deconstruct the ways in which we have created systems that exclude people. The whole system is built to favor a particular profile. And it’s our work now to continue to deconstruct that.

Mark Beckwith  (15:22)
Kelly Brown Douglas is a colleague of ours, an Episcopal priest and public theologian at the National Cathedral, and has been featured on a wide array of platforms because of the wisdom that you just cited.

I want to focus on another public voice, who we both know: Jonathan Rauch, who writes for The Atlantic and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and with whom I’ve also done a podcast. Jonathan is really a champion of Christianity, even though he self-identifies as a gay Jewish atheist. Nevertheless, he says that religion, and particularly Christianity, is the load-bearing wall for democracy. It needs to be separate, yes, but it needs to be connected.

So how do we, in your role as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, claim that load-bearing wall? What witness do we in the Christian tradition, particularly in the Episcopal Church, need to make?

Sean  (16:26)
Yeah, well, first I love talking to Jonathan as well. And I’m thrilled you had him on your podcast. He’s a really interesting thinker, and I just love—and I keep saying I’m hoping someday he identifies himself as a gay, atheist, Jewish sort of Episcopalian as well. Someday I’m going to get him to identify as an Episcopalian, I hope.

But in any case, I think I enjoy going back and forth with him and particularly pushing back a little on the idea that our faith itself is a support structure for a political system. I understand what he’s saying. I think what I would do is nuance that a bit and say we can function as a bulwark against systems of oppression, and I believe we’re called to do so.

The issue with the idea of it being a load-bearing wall for democracy is it sometimes puts us on, I think, a different field. And I wonder about us sometimes getting pulled onto the wrong field. That’s like rushing into partisan policy debates, issue statements, accepting—essentially accepting—the definitions and scenarios that the secular world hands us.

I would like to see us—and Jonathan, I’ve talked about this—offering a kind of moral leadership that transcends partisan divides, and that I think offers a winsome and compelling vision of the kingdom. In that way, we’re a load-bearing wall for democracy, but we’re also holding up the world around us. And I think, in that winsome and compelling vision of the kingdom, we can hold up the world around us. I think that is a very powerful vision for us.

That also, I think, keeps us away from the temptation to get too close to the flame of power and authority and privilege. And we have a lot of experience with that in the Episcopal Church as well.

Mark Beckwith  (18:33)
And following up on that, in an earlier conversation that you and I had, you mentioned that Jonathan was impressed that the Episcopal Church doesn’t seem to be beholden to the secular power structure—that the Episcopal Church has not been bought. And your response was that we’ve already done that. We’ve already been through all of that.

Can you say more about that and how you see the Episcopal Church and religious communities in general? How can we comport ourselves so we’re not overly influenced by money, politics, or ideology?

Sean  (19:12)
Yeah, well, when he and I had our conversation, he was really complimentary of the Episcopal Church, saying, you know, you’re really kind of standing up and individuating yourselves from the people that are sort of close to power, and your Christian witness is so different. He was saying, well, how have you managed not to get sucked into that?

And I would love to just take that and run with it. I’d love to take that compliment and go, really, the reason that we’re doing that now, quite honestly, is that we have—I don’t know if I would go so far as to say we completely sold out, but we certainly have taken our turn at the table of power. We’ve been close to the flame.

I think what I would say mostly looked like, say, the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century, when we had in the Episcopal Church what some would call the national church ideal. We really believed we were going to be the church for the nation. Certainly, we weren’t going to have an established church, but we were going to have the National Cathedral. We were hoping to be the moral voice for the nation, certainly the Christian voice for the nation.

Henry Knox Sherrill, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, is on the cover of Time magazine in 1950. It’s his face on the front, a cross behind him, and then hordes of people, which are meant to be, you know, American Christians, all behind this symbol. Now, this was him as chair of the National Council of Churches, but the Episcopal Church was really wanting to be that voice, and it was. It has been influential since the very beginning. Thirty-five of the 54 signers of the Declaration of Independence, or some number approximating those two numbers, are the case. So we’ve always tried to position ourselves in that. You’ve heard the story: we’ve had more presidents and members of the Supreme Court and all these things we’ve talked about over the years.

But that has, in many ways, limited our ability to question power when needed, to oppose systems that are unjust. We’ve taken very middle ground. I think it’s how you end up with Martin Luther King Jr. writing letters from a Birmingham jail, and one of the addressees is an Episcopal bishop. We sort of stood in the middle.

I think it’s why during the Civil War, going back to the previous century, we didn’t really allow the church to split over these issues. We were more concerned about the optics and sort of staying close to power than we were making the witness. So I think we’ve learned from that, is what I’m trying to say. I think we’ve been there. We know it’s a dead end. We know it’s not the witness to the kingdom that we would want. And we’ve chosen a different path.

And I think it’s been costly to us, and it’s going to cost us even more. It’s going to cost us the political capital we’ve gained. And it’s going to, I think, cost us some of the things that we’ve held dear. And it’s a cost worth paying. I think we’re going to have to put our collective lives on the line for the marginalized in this time.

Mark Beckwith  (22:42)
Well, I was ordained before you were, and we were really the mainline church in 1979 when I was ordained. And we’ve lost numbers, certainly, and lost influence in the sense that you just described it. But now I think we have an opportunity to be more prophetic and not necessarily lean in on what we had been, but what we are now. And I see that as a key component of your leadership.

Going back to polarization, it’s a toxic reality. Some of it can be traced to the prejudice—yes, the prejudice—that Christians have of one another. How do we address that prejudice, that theological prejudice, which is often unfair, if not reflective of a deeper unawareness and misunderstanding of the other side? What can and should we do?

Sean  (23:44)
Yeah, I think polarization is one piece of it. I think it’s a toxic reality on one hand. On the other hand, it’s also the way in which people are induced to dehumanize one another in service to their positions—that is where the real toxicity is.

I think we can all do our spiritual work and our psychological work, which is a step that many could benefit from, quite honestly. I think we have to examine the forces that have formed us and that have formed me. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how I have been formed, particularly as a white, cisgender, straight man.

Beyond that, I think we could ask ourselves: is there anyone in our lives we deeply disagree with and with whom we count on? I think forging and maintaining connections with people—and this is what I really admire, the work that you do, Mark, and others—is that maintaining those relationships and connections with people who hold different views helps us keep opening and questioning our own beliefs and our own rightness.

And I would love—the dream of many a contemplative and others—is to just get off this field of dualism, get off this field of polarization, and be willing to step onto an entirely different field. And that is what I think we can do as Christians now: help bring people onto a different field.

And I think the trap right now is to get caught up in the kind of political rhetoric, to get drawn into debates on terms that are not our terms as Christians, and to speak in ways that—or be forced to speak in ways that—I think go against the grain of who we are as Christians. And I think that’s going to be our challenge now: how do we redefine the field and talk about it in a compelling way? That’s, I think, our struggle.

Mark Beckwith  (26:00)
Well then, I want to introduce you, or maybe reintroduce you, to a term and an image. It’s called mandorla. It’s an Italian word for almond. It’s the shape that’s created when two circles intersect. Think Venn diagram from sixth-grade math.

My spiritual director from Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, introduced me to this notion and has sort of reframed my life. Initially, mandorla was the intersection between heaven and earth, but today, more and more, it seems to me, it’s the intersection between red and blue, conservative and progressive. It’s a space in between those two circles, a place of risk, a place of transformation. You can’t force people to the mandorla, but you can invite people to the mandorla.

All the work that I do with Braver Angels, which is a national movement to depolarize America, I refer to as the secular version of the Anglican movement because we were created in tension between Catholicism and Protestantism, and we found that space. And sometimes we hold to that space in a creative and life-giving way. Sometimes we ignore that space or avoid it.

But what I hear you saying is this opportunity to create that mandorla space, that space of transformation, risk, of epiphany, of being in a place where we can have common ground, common purpose, common identity as brothers and sisters in the human project.

Sean  (27:38)
Exactly, Mark. And I wonder: what do you think most invites people into that space? What allows people the freedom to step into that space? What compels them into that space versus the polarization? What do you find—people that are kind of willing to do it, finally?

Mark Beckwith  (27:51)
Well, I think you spoke to it earlier: humility, to be able to say, I am humbled, I am vulnerable. Somebody pointed out to me years ago that the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty.

And there are many forces and voices, indeed even in the Episcopal Church and in Christian traditions and other religious traditions, that try and present their theology as certainty. And what that does is it locks people in. And to the extent that we can claim humility, that we can invite people into a space, find common ground, where we share our human vulnerability—that we all grieve, that we all laugh, that we have sadnesses, we have victories, all that kind of thing—so it’s a real invitation.

And as you mentioned earlier, Jesus is one who invites us, I think, increasingly into that space. And it’s hard. It’s hard to do. A lot of people don’t want to do it. People tell me all the time, ‘I’m glad you’re doing this. I can’t do it.’ People say, ‘If I engage in conversations with people who radically disagree with me, I will be betraying my values.’

And my response to them is: I am more and more committed to having conversations, to building relationships with people who disagree. At the same time, my convictions, my faith, my positions are stronger than they were, but more open to listen to other sides. Because I think there’s always an opportunity for something to creep in, and we can learn from that.

We did that as the Episcopal Church. We’re neither Catholic nor Protestant. We came up with a third way, and when we’re at our best—I say when we’re at our best, which isn’t always the case—when we’re at our best, we have a role to play.

What’s interesting, going back to conversations with Jonathan Rauch, who we both derive a lot of wisdom from, he identifies the LDS Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as a key witness and a key group in this country because, by and large, they are conservative, but they have a moral sphere. And they are fiercely supportive of people in their own individual rights. They may not agree with what those rights are. They may not accept those rights within the LDS Church, but they are fierce in supporting it in the American project, in the American experiment toward deeper democracy.

Sean, what’s your greatest concern as we struggle with all that we’re struggling with, not so much in the church, but the church in its relationship with the world?

Sean  (30:53)
My biggest concern is that, as it relates to faith, it becomes distorted—that the Christian faith becomes distorted in a way that is accepted as the mainstream. That this kind of Christian nationalist point of view, these pretty exclusionary understandings of Christianity and what it means, really become what people think Christianity is. And I think a lot of the polling is showing that.

But my biggest fear is that we lose our ability to have a witness to a distorted understanding of Christianity. And the other side of that coin for me, Mark, the hope is that we can reclaim a compelling, winsome vision of the gospel of Jesus Christ in a way that helps people see things differently, that helps people see the world differently, that is truly compelling, that we can really get through to people in ways that are meaningful.

And we haven’t quite figured that out, quite honestly. It’s a—I don’t know why we’ll call it a failing of ours, but it’s certainly a shortcoming. We have not quite figured out how to package this message in a way that can be heard more widely. And I hope to do so.

I’m not one of the people that think we’ll never—we’re always going to be fringe, you know, we’re always going to be a small fringe. I don’t buy it. But that’s probably a debate for another day. I really do think we can have wider appeal, and hope that we do.

Mark Beckwith  (32:34)
And as you’re saying that about hope, somebody who we both know and I’ve done a podcast with, Jim Wallis, has said that hope is believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change.

And I’m just so grateful for this time together, for the hope that you radiate in your person, in your writing, in your leadership. Just really grateful for that and the time that we’ve had together and ongoing with one another to see how we can build bridges across difference. And we in the Episcopal Church, we know how to do that. It’s in our DNA. And sometimes we exercise it better than at other times.

So Sean, thank you for this time together. How can people follow you beyond this podcast, which will soon be up and given to your staff? How can people follow you?

Sean  (33:32)
EpiscopalChurch.org is the best place, and I direct people there for all that the Episcopal Church is doing, what I’m doing and saying in the world, but even more importantly, what my siblings and colleagues around the church are doing as well. Thank you.

Mark Beckwith  (33:50)
Great, thank you. And again, I’m Mark Beckwith, retired bishop of the Diocese of Newark and the Episcopal Church, and the host of Reconciliation Roundtable. You can follow me on my website, markbeckwith.net, with these podcasts and my weekly blog.

So thank you for this time together. Let me offer a prayer as we conclude our time.

Gracious God, thank you for the opportunity to hear you in one another. Thank you for Sean’s energy, for his witness, for his wisdom, for his passion. We give thanks for our life together and how we might grow into fullness of faith and purpose and prophetic witness. In your name we pray. Amen.

Sean  (34:41)
Good to be with you, Mark. Thanks for your work.

Mark Beckwith  (34:42)
Sean, thank you.

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