Some corners of the Christian net have been buzzing with the news that Anne Rice, author of the best-selling “Interview with the Vampire”, has renounced Christianity. Rice was a “pessimistic atheist” when she wrote her early novels, but the rediscovery of her childhood Catholicism in 1998 turned her into an “optimistic believer”, and she left off writing about vampires to write about angels and Christ instead.
In her memoir, she describes her conversion -
In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from [God] for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul. He wasn't going to let anything happen by accident! Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake.
Faith gave Rice optimism and hope, and an answer to the meaningless universe she’d been grappling with in her books. But the “social paradox”, the “record of injustice”, the fate of the “atheist or gay friend” - these concerns never really left her. She was caught in a terrible dilemma - faith had rescued her from crushing hopelessness, yet the same faith contained values she found abhorrent.
Her solution was a common one - she made a distinction between Christ and the Christian church. All that was good in her faith, she traced back to Christ. All that she wish to reject, she laid at the feet of the church. And so it was hardly surprising when she recently announced -
For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today, I quit being a Christian. I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to belong to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deserved infamous group. For 10 years, I've tried. I've failed. My conscience will allow nothing else.
She went on to identify Christianity with being anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-secular humanism (well duh), anti-science, and anti-life. But she affirmed her commitment to Christ himself -
My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.
Of course, Rice’s position has a glaring problem. The Bible is clear - Christ dearly loves the church and sacrificed himself for her (Ephesians 5). The church is His bride, and he is intimately concerned for her well-being. Rice claims to follow Christ, but is it possible to follow Christ while despising what He loves?
This is not just an issue for disaffected Catholics. I’m increasingly concerned about those evangelicals who are rejecting traditional church structures in the name of “Christian Community”. With their constant criticisms of regular church gatherings, such people don’t sound all that different to Anne Rice. It may be that some who say, “I don’t like the institutional church” need to ask themselves if perhaps they just don’t like the church.
