“Today, I quit being a Christian.” With those words last week on Facebook, Anne Rice delivered a wake-up call for organized religion. The question is whether it will be recognized as such.
“I remain committed to Christ as always,” she wrote, “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.”
You will recall that the author, famed for her vampire novels, made a much publicized return to the Catholicism of her youth after years of calling herself an atheist. Now, years later, she says she hasn’t lost her faith, but she’s had it up to here with organized religion.
“In the name of Christ,” she wrote, “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.”
If that was not nearly enough for atheist observers, one of whom berated her online for refusing to completely give up her “superstitious delusions,” it was surely plenty for people of faith. But Rice is hardly the only one who feels as she does.
According to a 2008 study by Trinity College, religiosity is trending down sharply in this country. The American Religious Identification Survey, which polled over 54,000 American adults, found that the percentage who call themselves Christian has fallen by 10 since 1990 (from 86.2 percent to 76 percent) while the percentage of those who claim no religious affiliation has almost doubled (from 8.2 to 15) in the same span.
Small wonder atheist manifestos are doing brisk business at bookstores and Bill Maher’s skeptical “Religulous” finds an appreciative audience in theaters. Organized religion, Christianity in particular, is on the decline, and it has no one to blame but itself: It traded moral authority for political power.
