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Alison Flood  Fri 30 Jul 2010 

Twelve years after she converted to Christianity from atheism, bestselling author Anne Rice has "quit being a Christian" because of the religion's attitude to birth control, homosexuality and science.

In a message posted on her Facebook page, Rice said she was "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," the author wrote.

An atheist for decades, Rice returned to her childhood faith of Catholicism in 1998. The author of a series of bestselling books about the vampire Lestat – brought to the screen by Tom Cruise in the film Interview with the Vampire – her conversion caused consternation among her old fans, while Christians questioned the morality of her vampire books.

In a 2007 essay, Rice answered her critics, saying that she saw her earlier novels as part of a long tradition of "transformative" dark fiction, from Dante's Inferno to Hamlet and Macbeth. "I feel strongly that dark stories demand that the audience earn the transformation; they require a certain suffering on the part of the audience as the price of eventual affirmation," Rice wrote.

"I would like to submit that my vampire novels and other novels I've written ... are attempting to be transformative stories as well. All these novels involve a strong moral compass. Evil is never glorified in these books; on the contrary, the continuing battle against evil is the subject of the work. The search for the good is the subject of the work. [They] are not immoral works. They are not Satanic works. They are not demonic works. These are uninformed and unfair characterisations of these books, and this situation causes me deep personal pain."

In 2002 the author "consecrated her writing entirely to Christ, vowing to write for Him or about Him". She began to write novels about the life of Christ, completing Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt in 2005, and publishing Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana in 2008 when she also released the memoir Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, about her conversion at the age of 57. She is currently writing a series about angels, in which a contract killer is recruited by a seraph.

Rice posted on Tuesday revealing her distress about a news story in which an American "punk rock ministry" said that "executing gays is 'moral'". "The bottom line is this … they [homosexuals] play the victim when they are, in fact, the predator," the Minnesota Independent - linked to by Rice - quoted the frontman of ministry You Can Run But You Cannot Hide as saying. "On average, they molest 117 people before they're found out. How many kids have been destroyed, how many adults have been destroyed because of crimes against nature?"

Rice was horrified. "No wonder people despise us, Christians, and think we are an ignorant and violent lot. I don't blame them. This kind of thing makes me weep. Maybe commitment to Christ means not being a Christian," she said.

Later that day, she linked to a report about the Westboro baptist church in Kansas, which "spreads the message that because the United States condones homosexuality, abortion and divorce, all Americans are going to hell", according to the story.

"This is chilling. I wish I could say this is inexplicable. But it's not. That's the horror. Given the history of Christianity, this is not inexplicable at all," Rice wrote, pointing to Gandhi's statement: "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

"When does a word (Christian) become unusable?" she asked. "When does it become so burdened with history and horror that it cannot be evoked without destructive controversy?"

The next day, Rice announced her decision to "quit being a Christian" – a comment "liked" on Facebook by almost 2,000 people. "I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity," she said. "It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For 10 years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."

Yesterday, the author reiterated that her faith in Christ was "central" to her 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," she said. "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."

Article source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/30/anne-rice-quits-being-christian