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Anne Rice discusses her decision to quit Christianity

The novelist says she still believes in God, but she couldn't find a basis in Scripture for some positions taken by churches. And she rejects the persecution of gays and women.

August 07, 2010|By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times

The author Anne Rice, best known for her vampire novels, made waves last week when she declared on her Facebook page that she had "quit being a Christian." Twelve years after her return to Catholicism, Rice said she still believed in God, but that, "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."


Q) You were raised Catholic, became an atheist, then returned to Catholicism in 1998. Why are you quitting now? It's not as if the church has suddenly changed.






Q) I wanted to ask you about that, because you have said that you quit Christianity "in the name of Christ." From a practical standpoint, what does that mean, how do you follow Christ without a church? Are there rituals that you intend to maintain?


Q) You've said that there are rituals of the Catholic Church that you'll miss.



A) Oh yeah, I would certainly go to a church to pray in private as long as nobody there is offended by my presence. You know, when you're brought up the way I was brought up in the Catholic Church, you really remain culturally a Catholic all your life. Your whole approach to art, your whole approach to music, to architecture, to literature, all of this has been shaped by Catholic thinking and the Catholic tradition. So that's not something that you can put aside. I mean, my novels were Catholic novels when I was calling myself an atheist.

Q) Your characters in fiction, you've said, have reflected your own spiritual journey throughout your writing career. What can readers expect now?

A) Well, I want to keep writing about my new hero, Toby O'Dare, and I want to write about the fears and the questions that Toby has even though he's been visited by angels, and even though he's converted. What will he face as he tries to walk the walk? I think now that I've made this, what I consider, morally necessary declaration, there will be a greater freedom to explore those things. And I have another series I'm planning, about immortals. It's a metaphysical thriller idea, but it concerns creatures who have been alive on this Earth for thousands of years, and how they view Christianity. But I haven't even started to write that one yet. There are a lot of wonderful ideas to play with out there when you want to make a series about immortals. Vampires was my first attempt at that, and I'm not going back to that.

Q) That will disappoint some people.

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