Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, has retired. He'll start working with the Center for American Progress, a progressive research and policy organization, on issues of faith and gay rights.

Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, has retired. He'll start working with the Center for American Progress, a progressive research and policy organization, on issues of faith and gay rights.

For many years, it didn't occur to Bishop Gene Robinson the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church that he might retire before age 72, the mandatory retirement age for Episcopal bishops. But then, in 2010, Mary Glasspool, who is also openly gay, was elected bishop suffragan in the Diocese of Los Angeles and, for the first time, Robinson reconsidered his retirement plans.

"I thought, you know, I don't have to keep doing this," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There is an openly gay voice in the House of Bishops, and is there something else that I would really like to do and perhaps that God is calling me to do? And that answer came back 'yes.' And so ... I announced that I would retire at the end of 2012."

Robinson, 65, retired from his position as bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire on Jan. 5. He and his husband, Mark, will be leaving the state where Robinson has lived and worked since 1975 for Washington, D.C. There, Robinson will be working with the Center for American Progress, a progressive research and policy organization, on issues of faith and gay rights.

"I've long been really intrigued with what is the ... proper role of faith and religion in public life," he says. "How do we address the issues that face us as a nation, and what might the church, the synagogue, the mosque have to say to those issues, and what's the proper way of making that input into this larger discussion?"

Robinson, whose most recent book, God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage, was published in September, is an outspoken advocate of LGBT rights, the fight he likens to the civil rights movement.

"Gay is not something we do," he says. "It's something we are. I'm not just gay when I'm making love to my husband. I'm gay all the time. I'm gay right this minute talking to you, and it ... affects how I relate to the world, how I relate to people."

On whether the death threats he and his husband have received contributed to his decision to retire early

"That's really not the reason, although I would be lying if I said that wasn't an extra burden that my husband, Mark, and I have endured during this time. The death threats were plentiful, almost daily for a couple of years. And then more recently ... I prayed the invocation at the opening inaugural event at President Obama's inauguration in 2009, and it was about two weeks later I got a call from the Vermont State Police who had almost accidentally arrested a guy who had been driving through this small Vermont town and was in such a rage that he shot the windows out of an empty parked police cruiser. And when they caught up to him, he had in his passenger's seat, right next to him, he had MapQuest maps right to our house. He had pictures of me and Mark, and he had scrawled across them, 'Save the church. Kill the bishop.' And he had a sawed-off shotgun and tons of ammunition."

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Retired Bishop Gene Robinson On Being Gay And Loving God

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