Queen of the Damned quits Christianity. One asks, why not?

Anne Rice by I Am Second. She was a Christian, now she’s not

The news is a few weeks old, I guess, and maybe I need to get out more. But just this week it has come to my attention that Anne Rice, most famously the author of many dark and popular vampire tales, has publicly dissociated herself from Christianity. On 29 July, the following appeared on her Facebook page.

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. 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 deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else… I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of… Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

This seems a little strained. I am a Christian and I know lots of Christians. And many of us — myself and many friends — refuse to be anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-science, etc. And we’re not exactly a rare breed of animal. Folks like us can be found in any town in America. Is Ms. Rice selectively blind? I’m not sure, but I agree heartily with Rod Dreher over at Big Questions Online when he writes, “Surely a woman of her age and experience cannot possibly believe that the entirety of Christianity, current and past, can be reduced to the cultural politics of the United States of America in the 21st century… How can a woman of her putative sophistication really think that Christianity is nothing more than a section of the Republican Party at prayer?”

Whatever her rationale, Ms. Rice’s decision has gotten me to thinking and reminiscing, and I must admit: There have been times, some not so long ago, when leaving the church has seemed like a very good idea to me. There are plenty of reasons  — some straight from Ms. Rice’s list of complaints — why leaving organized Christianity seems to be the smart way to go. Here is a short off-the-top-of-my-head list. There are certainly lots more.

1. The church moves too slow. By mistaking convention for tradition, the pace at which the average church moves ensures that those outside of the church see it as irrelevant and out-of-touch.

2. The church reflects — and avoids challenging — the conventions of consumer culture. Perhaps the best place to see this is in the prepackaged curricula for vacation Bible schools. The basic idea is that everything comes in a box, and all you have to do is open the box, fit volunteers into preset roles, and follow the instructions. The “teachers” don’t even need to now anything about the Bible, because all their prompts are written out for them already. Plus the kids spend no more than 20 minutes in any one place, ensuring that, even at church, one need not develop an attention span greater than that of a squirrel monkey. Plus at the end of the day they get a crappy plastic toy to snap together and take home with them and forget about. That’s creativity? What a God-forsaken disaster. Happy Meal Bible school, as a friend of mine at church calls it. And the same thread runs through so much of what the church has become. There is no escape from banality and consumerism. There is little genuine use of peoples’ gifts.

Why? Competition between churches for members and money. Another market effect. In an effort to provide the best and newest and flashiest summer programs, all churches end up looking alike, afraid to look old-fashioned or out-of-step.

3. The church does not encourage critical or free thought. Boy, is this ever true. I have been a member of a number of Sunday school classes and have at times felt free to speak my mind. This has gotten me in trouble with other class members. Therefore I have sometimes offered to teach, because when you teach it’s not about you. You don’t have to say what you think; you have to pull out of others what they think. I felt much safer teaching. In general I have a much easier time discussing my faith with skeptics, atheists, and non-Christians than I do with Christians, because most Christians are uncomfortable with points of view that diverge from the company line.

4. The church does not understand the best of science and art and thus fears them. It is one thing to not understand something, but another thing altogether to feed one’s ignorance by consciously avoiding it. Or, worse, to shun the idea because it does not square with what one think one is supposed to believe. From the big bang to evolution to abstract art to great Christian writing, if it’s not “safe for the family” (read: “bland, insipid, and dull as hell”) then let’s just avoid it. The church prefers Thomas Kinkade to even joyful and playful artists like Henri Matisse or Alexander Calder, to say nothing of middle-of-the road folks like Georgia O’Keeffe (too much sex and death) or Mark Rothko (too abstract, too weird) or Edward Hopper (too plain, too depressing). A subset of this issue is the church’s seeming insistence that art, music, literature must be explicitly Christian to be holy or even spiritually significant.

I should mention, however, that there are outposts where Christianity and culture meet happily and fruitfully. But, so far as I can see, they’re not associated with the church.

5. The church encourages bad behavior. This is because it does not, in general, have the courage to face down those who poison it from within, especially when these people are prominent and/or rich.

6. The church domesticates the divine. Too often, God becomes as soft as the seat cushions in your local megachurch. In the interest of gaining members and dough and power, the church often paints a picture of God that, quite frankly, is therapeutic, materialistic, me-centered, and thoroughly uninteresting. God: your own personal cheerleader. Who needs a God like this?

7. The church thinks it can’t afford to be honest because it doesn’t believe in its own message. This is, in my view, the most serious problem of all. I am in seminary now and we ministers-to-be have the pleasure to learn a lot of interesting, even radical, theology. But that gets lost in the weekly realities of the parish. I know because I’ve seen it. Most M.Div. graduates have a fairly clear — and, at least in the case of Candler — even radical theology when they enter the professional ministry, but if they told that truth in the pulpit they would be out of a job fairly quickly. That’s because, on the whole, the truth can’t be prettified or polished without becoming something other than the truth.

So, with all of this being true, why stay? Why associate with such a group? There are at least two answers to this. First, there is much good in the church that’s impossible to see without getting up close and personal with it. That means getting your hands dirty. And even though I have tended to emphasize the negative here on psnt.net, over the years the church has been a place filled with my best friends. They are saints, all of them. I mean this as I say it. Those who say that religion has done more harm than good have no idea about the resurrected lives of people like Darren, whom Christ redeemed from the pit of depression and suicide; or Adam, who has joyfully said yes to his call to take the love of God to the city’s impoverished and imprisoned; or Ginny, who in quiet gratitude to God washes the swollen and cracked feet of the city’s homeless at the nearby shelter; or Alvin, who in the hope of God’s promises wins small daily victories against alcoholism. In general, my church friends have not been academics or scientists. They are people from whom I have much to learn.

I was once lamenting the problems at a church I was a member of, and a dear non-Christian friend of mine overheard me. So she asked, Why are things so ugly in the church? I don’t see how that could be. I asked her, Do you have a family? Yes, she said. Does your family have problems? I asked. Yes, she said. The church is a big family, I said. Oh, she said. I could tell that a light had gone on. Like a family, the church can be dysfunctional; like a family, it can be the community that saves you from yourself.

The following is a story I told in a sermon once, about a moment of absolute clarity I experienced in the context of a small church community.

There was once a small church situated in the woods just north of Chapel Hill, NC. The building was small but beautiful, especially its sanctuary, which had a smooth hardwood floor and large windows opening to the trees and wildlife outside. Its openness and light made it seem larger than it was. In this place an unlikely group of people met every Sunday. There were elderly people, college students from UNC and Duke, a couple of families, single adults of various ages, academic sorts, hippie sorts, conservative sorts, liberal sorts, all sorts. It had about as many sorts as it had people, which was no more than about 40 on any given Sunday. A number of these folks met during the week for lunch and for Wednesday night studies. For reasons that are not important here, the church did not last. But while it lasted, there was community.

A few comments are due about that word.  What do we know about community? We who live in a country awash in individualism, what does it mean to us? I don’t pretend to know too much about it, being as much a product of America as anyone else, but I suspect it may have something to do with what Jesus called the kingdom of God. This phrase may not be much more helpful, because Jesus did not tell anyone exactly what it is. But he thought God’s kingdom was really important and he talked about it a lot. And community seems central to the kingdom. After all, it is like a great banquet, a great feast. That’s what Jesus said.

The kingdom showed itself, if only a little, in the community of that tiny North Carolina church. I was there and I think I saw it. After every service of worship we would push the pews to the edge of the sanctuary and we would set up dinner. For three years we did this, every Sunday. It seems remarkable to me now. One day, I was seated at the end of one of the long tables.  In the midst of the meal, in the midst of conversation, I looked down the table at those present. And for a tiny moment a darkness seemed to lift. I saw the kingdom. I saw reality. And I realized how much I loved everyone there. For a few minutes, everything was different. In the words of Thomas Merton, they were shining like the sun and didn’t even know it.

Moments like this make the Christian life unaccountably livable.

What I did not say in that sermon is that this particular event occurred after several trying weeks of real internal struggle, weeks in which me and some others in the church had disagreed sharply about the direction we thought the church should go. Things had been tense and difficult. Miraculously, there had been mutual surrender but it had been hard to come by. I can point to other times in my church life when I have come to see the world anew, times when my internal eyes miraculously opened up, times like this one. And without exception they had been preceded by — and often followed by — difficulty and struggle within the church body, either large-scale and public or small-scale and private. Loss, struggle, and pain, when faced honestly and corporately, leads to redemption and freedom. The place where this has been done most graciously and consistently in my life is the church.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to be a Christian apart from the church. This is because Christianity is intrinsically so counter-intuitive and peculiar that one simply cannot maintain a Christian outlook without being reminded regularly of its substance, without being part of a community of remembrance. Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens the wits of another (Prov. 27.17), and we can never stay sharp so long as we insist on being Christian only in ways that we approve of. I am theologically liberal; I need my conservative friends. I tend to focus on the humanity of Jesus; I need those who connect with his divinity. I tend to focus on the values of solitude and silence that have been nurtured within the Christian tradition; I need those who insist that Jesus was about social justice. You get the idea. I’m like an academic who needs the university environment to keep her mental faculties piqued, but for me it’s far more urgent; I need a community of faith to keep myself from dropping off the edge of life altogether.

Which brings me to my second point. So often I hear of people who have left the church because of its judgmentalism or its hypocrisy. I won’t insist that these are not found in churches; I’ve been around long enough to know better. But one must be very careful to not become what one despises, or, more to the point, to not despise what one is. Because it may be that what you think you see in the church is really a reflection of your own troubles. The truth is, we are all a mess, and the church is a mess. But — and this gives me great hope for all of us — Jesus did not wait around until he had perfect people to spend his time with. Instead, he chose a bunch of selfish, quarrelsome, disputatious creatures who constantly argued among themselves, who missed the point over and over, who were afraid and timid and petty, who betrayed him and turned their back on him at the crucial moment. It is precisely these creatures we are called to love, who we are called to throw in our lot with, because it is precisely these creatures that we ourselves are. And if you think you’re above all this human muck and folly and need, you’re fooling yourself.

You will never hear me say that God does not act outside of the church, or within and among people and groups that do not describe themselves as Christian. God can work, and probably does, through the most hard-boiled of atheists. And the church is not a golden circle within which all good people reside. The church is a mess, but, in the words of my brother-in-law Keith, who is showing up in these pages more and more often, it is a beautiful mess. It is what we have, and we must learn to love it and nurture it. For it is in that very learning to love that we put ourselves aside and become more like Jesus, who we profess to love and to follow.

I for one am sorry that Ms. Rice is quitting the church. She was, for me personally, a first-rate public example that not all Christians are sunny feel-good types who are miraculously shielded from the darker side of human life. And I wish the very best for her as she leaves us quarrelsome and obnoxious Christians behind.

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