Growing up in England a member of the Exclusive Brethren, an extremist Christian sect, Ian Markham experienced the evils that religion can inspire. But when, as a child, his family broke away, he found a new home in the Anglican Church — where he also found tolerance and generosity of spirit. Markham, 47, was ordained as an Anglican priest in 2007 after years in academia, and is now dean and president of the Virginia Theological Seminary. He spoke with The Washington Examiner about his faith and Christ’s transformational power.
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I am a Christian — I love the Lord Jesus. Christ is the prism through which I interpret everything. I don’t interpret the world in terms of complicated bundles of atoms that are ultimately purposeless, but I see everything as an example of the agency and the love of God, and everything held in God’s eternal loving gaze.
How can you trust that your Christian beliefs are correct?
The way of the world is that all knowledge is provisional — it is human constructs in conversation with experience. Therefore, all of us should hold what we believe about the world with some humility.
Now, why I believe what I believe is because it makes more sense of the complexities of human life than the alternatives. My experience of morality, of beauty, of love — all these things point to the divine, which makes theism more likely than atheism. And then if you ask how can I believe in a God that allows so much suffering? Part of the answer is that I can only believe in God provided I know God knows what it’s like to suffer — and that is the Christian claim, that God knows human suffering. So, for me, it has the ring of truth, more so than the alternatives.
You wrote a sort of encyclopedia of the world’s major religions — “A World Religions Reader.” Did any one faith offer the best competition to your Christian beliefs?
I see religious traditions like vast coalitions — and the truth is, the branch of Christianity I believe in might have less in common with other forms of Christianity, and more in common with certain branches of other faiths. I would never say that all Christians have it right, and all Muslims, for example, have it wrong.
I admire about Islam its commitment to practice — being told to pray five times per day is a wonderful practice. Without that commitment, a lot of Christians end up living like atheists. Or Buddhism — the key idea of Buddhism seems to be that the way we react to something often makes it worse. If we could find some way of not letting things get to us, we’d be better off. I’ve found that idea helpful in understanding what Jesus said in Matthew 6: “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”
What do we risk by opting out of faith and religious community?
The risk is that the ugly forms of religion dominate — forms that judge rather than love, criticize rather than encourage, destroy rather than build up. And also the risk of indifference. Those are the risks of our age.
I do believe that urban life is losing a sense of community — people have stopped organizing, and gathering, and joining. We don’t know our neighbors like we used to. You can live like that for so long, and then you lose your job, or your home is foreclosed upon, or your child dies. And it’s in that vacuum that people are vulnerable to the intense community of the extremists.
That’s why it’s always worth persevering with a boring church service. All those weeks that you’re sitting there thinking of the things you’d rather be doing are made up for in that one moment your life falls apart and there are people you know you can turn to.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that all people are held in the eternal gaze of God’s love, and that I must interact with them recognizing that reality. Every person matters.
– Leah Fabel
