A few years ago Gothic novelist Anne Rice made big news when she quit vampires and took up with Jesus. She wrote Christ the Lord (two installments) and a 
spiritual memoir with a revealing title: Called Out of Darkness.
Rice’s return to Catholicism was intriguing to her fans and to outside observers alike, given her decades-long rejection of the faith of her childhood–a rejection fueled partly by the vigorous atheism of her long-time husband, poet and artist Stan Rice. (Stan died about the same time that Anne returned to the Church).
So it was big news again last week when Rice announced on Facebook that “in the name of Christ” she was quitting Christianity. In a status update she wrote that “it’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.” A few hours later she clarified the announcement, insisting that “my faith in Christ is central to my life . . . but following Christ doesn’t mean following His followers.”
Some media-watchers have seen Rice’s “bravery” as a wake-up call for organized religion. Some Christians are glad that Rice has “followed her conscience and articulated the reasons for doing so.”
To criticize Rice is to appear out of touch with the messed-up Church she has left. It is to risk coming across as defensive of some pretty despicable things: misogyny, homophobia, orchestrated cover-ups of pedophilia, just for starters. Recent publicity about a church in Florida that plans to burn copies of the Q’uran on September 11 just seems to confirm Rice’s decision: Jesus is awesome but most of his followers are nutcases.
But I think there’s something a little precious about Rice’s assessment of Christians and Christianity. She seems honestly surprised and disappointed that the sprawling, unwieldy, global collective known as the Church is full of hypocrisy and corruption. And she takes this state of affairs as a kind of personal affront in ways that only newcomers to a flawed institution can. One feels the urge to pat her on the head and say, Grow up a little, Anne. What did you think it meant to join a body, this body, the Church–a community made up of human beings and all of their insufferable, um, humanness?
There’s nothing new or interesting about Rice’s revelation, or her decision to act on it. Anyone who’s been in the Church for five minutes has felt the compulsion to leave it, to be rid of its wearying, demoralizing, sometimes poisonous effects. As Garret Keizer has noted, Christians have to confront “the difficult truth of how a religion founded by an itinerant healer should make so many of its members ill.”
Does that mean that those of us who stay are just resigned to the fact that we’re a sick bunch? Of course. But for those who stay long enough, there’s also the dawning realization that Christian discipleship is a life lived into and out of the mystery of the cross–the sacrificial love that meets and saves us where we are and to which we have no access apart from Word and Sacrament, mediated by and encompassing of the whole people of God.
Contrary to Anne Rice’s tidy announcement–divorcing herself from all that is unpleasant about the Church–there is no Christ without Christianity; no Jesus without his stumbling, bumbling followers; no faith apart from the Church. This is the bad news. And this is the good news.
August 4, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Brave move, Debra.
I can only disagree with one thing…it took me a lot longer than five minutes to figure out the Church was busted. I was twelve when I was brought into the faith, and it was years before I stopped being an insufferable sectarian know-it-all.
But I’m the opposite of Mrs. Rice…I was excommunicated from the church of my youth, but I just won’t give up on the Church.
August 5, 2010 at 10:12 am
Thanks, Debra Dean Murphy!
No doubt stumbling and bumbling throughout my walk along, there are voices in the firmament, like yours, that miraculously correct my way for balance.
Let me say nothing here:
This one is hard not to come off reactionary one way or another.
Perhaps, some history with those reflecting helps discern whether such as you have to say is rash or wise by one’s wits.
Not knowing Rice, and, for the most part, resonating with you although I barely know you, my own reaction may just be inevitable even if not necessarily so.
One might think of a ‘blood-thirsty’ church seeking to slip up on the one-out-of-one-hundred of the sheep who is lost [like a thief in the night], leaving the ninety-and-nine to fend for themselves, and rejoicing when the “lost is found.”
Precious? Yes! But, pat on the head — also, perhaps… Just maybe, though, as clear a statement of welcome as the one that comes bring the “truth we don’t want to hear” — that we have already heard — is called for…
{Nothing said, nothing heard?}
August 5, 2010 at 4:10 pm
[...] Things with his tone of derision (testy because it’s his particular Church she’s leaving?), Debra Dean Murphy (whose opinions I enjoy and otherwise usually agree with) in a bit of a parental-tone scold, and [...]
August 6, 2010 at 10:28 am
Two things are often true about this topic:
1. Yep, churches are often a collection of fighting, bickering, fussy, people stuck in the past. Can’t blame folks when they leave sometimes.
2. EVERYTHING involving humans tends to be (you guessed it) fighting, bickering, fussy, etc… Someone the church does great things in Jesus’ name dispite itself!
August 7, 2010 at 7:39 am
is this what mature faith looks like; ridicule, sloganish generalizations so vague to be meaningless and a failure to recognize the Holy Spirit? sounds more like “high” church prejudice…
August 8, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Rice was never a Christian. If you never come how can you leave? By their fruit you will know them. Writing for years about vampires and such is not the work of a true believer. ” They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; But their going showed that none of them belonged to us.” (1 John 2:19)
August 8, 2010 at 6:29 pm
I would rephrase the last statement, that “there is no Christ without Christianity.” The truth is, there is no Christianity without Christ.
August 9, 2010 at 10:35 am
Suzanne said it. There is no Christianity without Christ.
The beauty of Anne Rice so publicly denouncing the NAME of Christianity is that she has said what so many have felt and now there is discussion around the state of the Church. Anne’s statement should be seen as an opportunity to learn. If Christians are thinking that about themselves (I am) then why in the world would a non-Christian want any part of Christianity? From a non-Christian perspective, we don’t want people to see us and think they want no part of that. They need to see us and think I want that!
I also think people have forgotten some things from the Bible. Love God and love your neighbor. By loving our neighbor, our anti- would look a lot differently. We can still disagree in love.
September 6, 2010 at 7:13 pm
To quote a beloved former pastor of my church: “People say ‘I don’t want to go to church–its full of hypocrites’. But I say, ‘Come on in–there’s always room for one more.”
September 7, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Hi Anne, Every Blessing to you in your personal search to live in the Spirit and be filled with the love of God in Christ Jesus. I have a few words to add to this post;
Jacques Ellul, in his publication, The Subversion of Christianity; uses an X to identify what he means when he uses the word Christianity.
He writes; “if we tried to abolish the word Christianity, what would we have to say? First, the revelation and work of God accomplished in Jesus Christ, second, the being of the church as the body of Christ, and third, the faith and life of Christians in truth and love. Since we cannot keep repeating this long triple formula, we shall now use X to denote these three aspects”.
The practice of Authentic Christianity has become so weak and corrupt that writers have to choose between the term Christianity and Followers of Jesus Christ to identify themselves with authentic Christianity.
Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Malcolm X all made the vital distinction between what Christianity is in its racist expression and what Christianity objectively is and ought to be to all who claim to be Followers of Christ.
Even Malcolm X in his Autobiography shows his awareness of the independent reality of true Christianity. ‘I would explain that it was our [the Muslim’s] belief that Christianity did not perform what Christ taught. I never failed to cite that even Billy Graham, challenged in Africa, had himself made the distinction, “I believe in Christ not Christianity”.
In The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave; he concluded that his attack against Christianity, was a charge against the slave-holding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, “between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference – so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked”.
Anne, the movement of “American Civil Religion” has all but replaced Authentic Christianity and the evangelical global movement is the ACR’s greatest promoter. So, you are among many that has taken steps to reclaim our God given right to call the new yet very old Christianity a falsehood. Keep in touch, if you care to.
September 23, 2010 at 8:18 pm
[...] (two installments) and a spiritual memoir with a revealing title: Called Out of Darkness. … Make sure to check out the original source Cancel [...]
October 11, 2010 at 1:33 pm
[...] title: Called Out of Darkness. … Make sure to check out the original source Cancel [...] … Make sure to check out the original source Cancel [...]