Believing solo

It’s hardly news that someone counts herself in the “religious but not
part of an organized religion” camp. Or as novelist Anne Rice described herself:
she is a follower of Christ who has decided to quit Christianity.
Perhaps Rice’s statement got so much media play because of her much
publicized conversion to Christianity a decade ago.

Probably
most Christians have days when they want to disassociate themselves
from the other people who are trying to follow Christ. But the New
Testament grounds for doing so are pretty thin.

Rice said it was
the anti-gay, anti-feminist public face of Christianity that she could
not longer identify with, and she was especially upset by the Catholic
bishops’ opposition to gay marriage. Rice’s own Roman Catholic
upbringing—which she renounced at 18, only to return to the church
later—seems to figure in her decision: she assumes that the Catholic
Church stands for the whole of Christianity. Is she unaware of or
uninterested in ways of being Christian other than the Roman way?

Her commitment, though, still seems significant. She told NPR that she couldn’t go back to writing those steamy vampire novels, which she regards as deeply pessimistic about life:

I
live now in a world that I feel God created, and I feel I live in a
world where God witnesses everything that happens. . . .That's a huge
change from the atheist I was when I wrote the vampire novels.