Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
Popular author Anne Rice recently announced she’d quit Christianity. She wrote on Facebook that she refused to be anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-Democrat, anti-secular humanism, anti-science and anti-life any longer. This, she feels, is what Christianity has become.
She adds she’s left Christianity, not Christ: “My commitment to Christ remains at the heart and centre of my life.” She plans to attend church to pray in private, “as long as nobody there is offended by my presence,” she told the Los Angeles Times.
Rice wrote about vampires (The Vampire Chronicles series of novels) before it became popular to do so. She wrote these books as a “pessimistic atheist.” She says, “Those novels are all about what it’s like to live in a very dark world, a meaningless world. . . . I can’t go back to that, I don’t believe that anymore.” Now she writes about angels.
Still, she’s walked away from organised Christianity, and in doing so she’s identified three issues Christians need to address.
- Without attempting to defend or challenge her “anti” list, it shows a major tragedy with today’s Christianity. What Christians stand for is being drowned out by what they are perceived to stand against. God must weep at this.
- She says it’s impossible for her to belong to this “quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious . . . group.” So many Christian groups act like dysfunctional school children when there needs to be respect and honour for one another—1 Corinthians 13 is a good guide.
- Finally, she asks whether “the decisions of people in organised religion are related to any deep-rooted theology of Jesus Christ.” Is it stating the obvious when we say Jesus Christ must be central for those who are Christ-ians?
I’m sorry Rice feels she has to walk away from Christianity because it’s best experienced in a healthy body of Christ (the church). I hope she discovers one soon.
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