Anne Rice renounces and reaffirms her faith

Anne Rice, the writer of Interview With A Vampire and the 1,000s of pages that surround that book, has quit Christianity. Oddly enough, she also has reaffirmed her faith and love in Jesus as her Christ figure. One would conclude that this makes her a Christian but one would be... right.

Anne Rice 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.

Anne Rice 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.

I get what she's trying to say. She's fed up with the church that she was a member of, which was the Catholic church. That's fine. Makes sense. Hating the Catholic church is a logical response to being exposed to it. What she doesn't seem to understand is that the Catholic church isn't Christianity. To be a Christian one does not need be Catholic. One simply needs to believe that Jesus is a Christ messiah. So while she might be sick of her church she hasn't rejected Christ. She explicitly still needs the concept of a messiah to comfort her (she went back to Catholicism after a number of severe medical incidents) and has settled on Jesus as her personal #1.

I don't know. Call me strange but if I had came to the conclusion that I actively knew how the universe operated and loudly proclaimed such I would at least be familiar with the word that I'm using to label myself. But that's just me. Choosing a world view based on fear, passing your own personal take on centuries old version (Catholic) of a multi-thousand year old tradition (Christianity) as the "true" version and then getting the name of your faith wrong; that all just seems sloppy and careless to me.

But following Christ does not mean following His followers.

That kind of makes you a Christian, Anne.

But following Christ does not mean following His followers.

Yeah, that's true but it's also not the definition of Christian. Crack open a dictionary before you pick up your bible again.