Bishop Curry was elected to be the 27th presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church in 2015, becoming the first African American leader of the denomination. Before his installation, he served as bishop of the diocese of North Carolina for 15 years, and previously he served as a pastor in North Carolina, Ohio, and Maryland. Known for his emphasis on social justice and evangelism, he now leads the 1.9 million members of the Episcopal Church, part of the Anglican Communion of nearly 85 million members around the world.

In April, Washington University in St. Louis welcomed to campus the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Curry delivered a public lecture, entitled “Healing a House Divided.” The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, which publishes this journal, sponsored the event.

Bishop Curry was elected to be the 27th presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church in 2015, becoming the first African American leader of the denomination. Before his installation, he served as bishop of the diocese of North Carolina for 15 years, and previously he served as a pastor in North Carolina, Ohio, and Maryland. Known for his emphasis on social justice and evangelism, he now leads the 1.9 million members of the Episcopal Church, part of the Anglican Communion of nearly 85 million members around the world.

During his visit, Bishop Curry sat down to talk with Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, editor of Religion & Politics, and the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

R&P: We’re obviously living in very divided times, and you’ve titled your lecture “Healing a House Divided.” What do you see as the source or the sources of the divisions that we see today, and how can they be healed?

MC: On some level, the deeper root of the divisions probably does have its origins in—dare I say it—sin. That is, if you think of sin in terms of the kind of hubris and prideful self-will, where I am the center of the universe and everything else is peripheral to me. That self-centered world could be me, my tribe, my religion, my class, my group, my party, my ideology, my family, me me, me, me, me. If I am the center of the universe, then everything else and everybody else, including the creation itself, are on the periphery. Now that’s a starting point. If that becomes the key by which everybody lives, then you have no formula for social cohesion. You have no way of having community.

And so, on one level, that’s probably the deeper root—that human proclivity to make the self the center of the universe and the danger of that is excluding everybody else. But then if you go even further, if you look at American society and American culture, we have and we’ve always struggled with this. This is a human thing, and it’s been part of our history.

I don’t know that I remember a whole lot about what Paul Tillich said, but the one thing I do remember is, in one of his sermons, he said the essence of sin is separation. When you really look at what the fruit of it is, it’s the separation from God and from each other. I think that now, the polarization that we are seeing and experiencing is the result of that separation and fragmentation, where everybody is in their own tribe and their group and so we live in communities of people who think like us, and as a result, we reinforce each other in our own particular biases and prejudices.

When that happens you get balkanization, you get polarization, and you get the undoing of the social contract itself, and the undoing of society in the long run. That is the formula for democracy failing, in the long run. I think we’re seeing the early stages of that. I think that’s the trajectory of what we’ve got going.

Healing requires a balm in Gilead. We have got to find a balm in Gilead that begins to heal that. That doesn’t mean we all agree, but that begins to move us beyond our differences to where we actually have commonality. And when we move there, we actually find a way to work through differences and come up with creative possibilities.

R&P: How can we find that commonality? Where do you see the balm in Gilead? Where can that come from?

MC: I’m not an expert in this. I’m just coming at this as somebody who’s been living through it like everybody else. I come at this as a follower of Jesus, as a Christian. I think our faith traditions point us in a direction, and while the word love is overworked, at least in the New Testament sense, when you look at Jesus of Nazareth, you find a formula for binding up the wounds of the broken. You find a formula for overcoming differences in the way he acts, in his life.

You look at a life that is not self-centered but other-directed. That’s the agapic love that goes through the cross, not for himself, but for the good of others. That I think is a key to actually healing the breaches and finding a way forward.

Now you ask yourself, what does that look like? Practically, what does it look like? Two things. One is real relationships. Real human relationships. And the other is actually searching for and finding where we share common values and principles and ideals.

People have got to know each other as human beings who got a story. When that begins to happen among people, most of the time—not all the time—but most of the time, that relationship becomes the basis for navigating all sorts of stuff. It’s like a marriage. I was a parish priest for years. Every couple I’ve ever counseled, whether they listened to it or not, I have no idea, but if that relationship is reasonably solid, you all can argue and fuss about all sorts of stuff. You’re going to disagree. You know, wherever there are two there, there’s going to be a third opinion. That’s human nature; that’s just a given. But if the relationship is nurtured and cared for, then you can navigate differences. You may not agree all the time, but you can navigate them. Where there is no relationship, it doesn’t take much to make the whole thing fly apart: It’s true in marriage, it’s true in communities, it’s true in nations.

Where are there commonalities? Where do we actually share some values and some convictions? There’s a lot more that we share than where we differ. If we start there and name that and really claim that space and then begin to engage in matters of public policy and public issues coming from that space, I think we will find in our public discourse, we actually will be able to navigate and come up with creative possibilities.

I really believe that the center of any culture, or any group, or even a country, is more sensible than we give it credit for. But you don’t notice it because it’s quiet. It’s not the loud side of the equation, to make all sorts of metaphors there. I was a bishop of an Episcopal diocese for years, and we would engage in congregations where there were issues, and the trick was not to be deceived by the loudest voices in the room. You had to find the center, and that center was bigger than the loud voices, but it wasn’t loud. If you could help that center to rise up, you usually found the health in the community. I think that’s true as a country.

R&P: This gets us into a specific issue. The Episcopal Church now supports LGBT rights, even at the risk of schism, which we have seen within the Anglican Communion. Do you see a way forward for the global church on LGBT issues, and how does that happen?

MC: I’ve said it publicly in a variety of contexts, that as a church, as the Episcopal Church, we really have wrestled with how do we take seriously what Jesus was talking about. He was quoting the prophets, but when he said “my house will be called a house of prayer for all people,” and part of that quote is from Isaiah 56, it’s there in that vision of the temple where there are no outcasts in the temple. Remember that Jesus is pointing back to the eunuch, the foreigner, categories of people who, by part of the law, were excluded from worship in the temple, but are now included. My house should be called a house of prayer for all people.

And so how do we live that? How do we live that house of prayer for all people? Or to take it another step, how do we, as a community, take seriously when St. Paul in Galatians says all who have been baptized into Christ, and put on Christ, and there is no more Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, but all are one in Christ—how do we live into that? And so as I’ve said on other occasions, part of how we’ve lived into that is by recognizing in our community all who have been baptized, whether they’re gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat—you know, just roll out the list.

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