Miri'sMERCADO

Anne Rice leaves Christianity

Legendary author Anne Rice has announced that she’s quitting Christianity.

The “Interview with a Vampire” author, who wrote a book about her spirituality titled “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession” in 2008, said Wednesday that she refuses to be “anti-gay,” “anti-feminist,” “anti-science” and “anti-Democrat.”

Rice wrote, “For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian … It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

Here are a few valuable responses from the Evangelicals for Social Action community:

Rice is not disenchanted with Jesus…just with the church.  Welcome to my world, Ms. Rice.  I wish you had stayed in it.  The church needs voices like yours…voices that remind us that Jesus was “for” more than he was “against.”  The church spends too much energy being “anti” when its greatest resource is pro-active love extended to all–to those like us and those unlike us, those who applaud us and those who would silence us.  Your leaving makes a point, but not the one your staying might have made.

It seems to me that Jesus didn’t like the “church” of his day either.  Yet, he plugged away, often from the fringe; but he was far from the fringe on Calvary. Those who thought he was wrong, and who feared that through him others would discover they were wrong, silenced him with nails and beams.  He refused to walk outside the circle of the faithful even though the faithful often were not faithful.  He suffered being connected with them–suffered even the cross.

Michael Duncan, Pastor, Eminence Baptist Church, Kentucky

Although imperfect, because human, the church is the Body of Christ. I can no more reject the church and cling to Jesus than my hand can reject my body and cling to it at the same time.

Dan Whitley, Pastor, Clintondale Friends Christian Church, NY

The question you pose is a very important one, and one I have been contemplating myself as I have been rereading both Bonhoeffer’s “Discipleship” and “Sanctorum Communio.” It is particularly interesting to me that the more I learn about Christ, the more I become a very critical person in relationship to what has alternately been called “Christendom” (Kierkegaard) and “institutional Christianity.” The only reason why I have not given up on church is because God commands me not to. There are far too many organic metaphors in the Bible to allow for a Christianity that looks more like a disciple following a guru in the Buddhist model of things.

But at the same time the church as sociological institution is bankrupt. This is the point that Brian MacLaren was trying to make in his book Everything Must Change, but his open Christianity becomes an epistemological morass of the worst kind. To pretend that God has not revealed his will is dangerous. (Whoever thought the day would come when Kierkegaard would be an ultra-conservative?)

I do not know what the answers are. I hold theological and political positions simultaneously so far to the right and the left that it gives people intellectual whiplash. (Which probably explains why I attend a confessional United Methodist church despite my Calvinist theology.) But they all come as a result of me trying to figure out what it means to “follow after Christ in simple obedience” (to use the Bonhoeffer language). The rest of the world knows that Christian arguments about women’s ordination and gay marriage are both red herrings to cover up our own shortcomings in failing to model appropriate Christian marriage and in eliminating the abuse of power.  

 As I have said to many before, Christians need to shut up–to stop screaming, start listening, and start living. Christianity’s problem is not the threat from the outside of the neo-atheists like Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Zizek. It is the rot in our collective core as we refuse to act like believers, a position that the debate between Zizek and Milbank (The Monstrosity of Christ) points to. One cannot be orthodox without orthopraxis. Or, to quote Bonhoeffer, “Only the believers obey, and only the obedient believe.”

So perhaps being academically trained as both a theologian and a social worker isn’t a paradox after all…

I think one can reject the authenticity of so much of the Christendom subversion of the church, but there is an unmistakable “one another” dimension to Christian faith that requires a community of some sort for which one is responsible and to whom one is accountable. The Christian community is a significant part of the gospel in that it is the recreation of the human community as God has intended it to be, and lives within the embrace of the Trinitarian community.
 
This is a struggle for so many. I have written two books recently seeking to work my way through this as I have been engaged with younger adults as they seek integrity in their own engagement with the church. Enchanted Community: Sojourn Into the Mystery of the Church, was  published by Wipf and Stock a couple of years ago, and the same firm has accepted my more recent Refounding the Church from the Underside for publication in a few months.

But to totally reject the church is immature. It is, after all, the Bride of Christ, as so wonderfully expressed in the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation.”

Bob Henderson