CINO

31 Jul, 2010 by Morgan Freeberg

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Anne Rice, founder of the sparkly-vampire craze of the naughty-aughties, is no longer Christian.

The “Interview With The Vampire” author, who in recent years has spoken publicly about her faith and written a series of novels tracing the life of Jesus, wrote on her Facebook page Wednesday that she was finished with organized Christianity.

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 outside. My conscience will allow nothing else.

She followed that post a few minutes later with more details:

As I said below, I quit being a Christian. 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.

As far as I’m concerned, she can believe what she likes. But there are two things about this that cheese me off…outside of the ugly, false slander against Christianity.

One, she’s a revolving-door-slammer. And I think you know perfectly well what I mean by that. “I’m out” means a cessation of interest, and I would expect so accomplished a writer to string together some words more in keeping with her true sentiment. She’s not out. She seeks to use shame to shape and mold something into her way of thinking.

Our world would be a much more tranquil place if everyone who applied the rhetorical flourish of the Grand Exit, could be somehow required to adhere to it. And stay out.

The other thing I don’t like is that it reminds me of Meghan McCain. Yes, I’m comparing a literary giant to a bubble head. Because it fits. Anne Rice is doing to Christianity precisely what McCain has been doing to the Republican party.

Just think this out: You have an institution. Someone like Anne Rice or Meghan McCain wants to join it…maybe they do and maybe they don’t…and a situation develops because you have already figured out your institution relies on A, and A cannot exist with B. Therefore, your continuing existence relies on an intolerance toward B.

Now, that is almost certainly a matter of opinion. And your tradition of excluding B might even be wrong, if your premise that A and B are mutually exclusive, happens to be incorrect.

But my point is, whether this interloper acts consciously as a destructive agent or not, they are still destructive. It is a destructive thing to say “I love this thing over here and want to be part of it…I think it’s just adorable…and so it disappoints me when it doesn’t tolerate everything like I think it should.” To require an object to tolerate everything, even things that are injurious to it, is destructive to that object. It really doesn’t matter if the destruction is intended or not. Everything cannot tolerate everything. That’s just the way the universe works.

I see my Rice/McCain analogy continues to work when one considers what exactly the point of contention is: Homosexuality. The author and the socialite pipsqueek, both desperately want to be part of something, but their consciences will not permit it because they want more tolerance shown to homosexuals.

Well in Anne Rice’s case, the logical error is the one committed by the blind men feeling up the elephant. She’s ticked at some guy named Bradlee Dean, and has decided his views are representative of all of Christianity.

So working from the same logic, I could say all homosexuals and their sympathizers want to arrest and imprison anyone who will not support their agenda, as they did with Dale McAlpine. That is not the case, of course. The world’s a big place. There are homosexuals, and homosexual-rights advocates, who aren’t going to support the hate speech laws; and even the ones who do, will typically acknowledge something is terribly wrong when you can be arrested for providing your opinion, or your interpretation of scripture, to someone who specifically asked. In short, my extrapolation would be bigoted. It would be ignorant. It would be precisely what Anne Rice did here.

To dictate to an institution what it should tolerate, and deny it the God-given right to figure out for itself what is & is not compatible with it, is to ultimately destroy it. I don’t think Rice’s intention is to destroy Christianity; not on purpose. But she does intend to re-shape it to her liking.

She doesn’t intend to leave it. That’s just a dramatic license, to give more punch to her message. If there was substance to it, she would have done it more quietly.

Cross-posted at House of Eratosthenes and at Washington Rebel.