Steamed Rice

Anne Rice is angry;

"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... In the name of ... Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen." - Anne Rice, via Twitter

Sounds a lot like "Non Serviam!!", from here. I don't know anything about Anne Rice, haven't read her books. I know there was a stir a while back when she deigned to re-enter the Church and grace us all with her presence. I'm always very cautious abour celebrity conversions and Mizz Rice illustrates one reason why.

People are flighty. They'll say and do things for all kinds of reasons at the drop of a hat... make vows, join the army, redecorate the living room. Celebrities seem even more than ususally restless and ungrounded, always - very publically - embracing this movement or that guru or endorsing some new miracle health lifestyle.

Oh, Anne, Anne... whence the righteous indignation? You sound for all the world like the naive and disillusioned victim of a bait-and-switch con. Had you no idea at all what Christianity was before you signed on? Were the Ten Commandments something you had just never come across, the way some people - by a kind of miracle of chance - have never had a hamburger?

Being a Christian means turning from your own will and embracing the will of God, especially in the teaching of Christ, which has been around for, well... a while now. It strikes me as more than a little disingenuous for you to walk out of the front door of the Church and cry, "I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that the Pope refuses to endorse gay marriage!"

That would be like me storming out of a PETA rally, protesting, "Why, I had no idea this was such a narrow-minded organization! They refused to hear my presentation on the benefits of eating hamburgers!".

At least she has the decency to leave, which is more than can be said for dissidents like Call to Action, who insist that, of course, they are the real Catholics... because they have the courage to reject everything even remotely associated with Catholicism. Anne Rice is sane enough, still, to see the contradiction.

Perhaps she will go and have herself de-baptized.

Anne Rice's real problem may be simply that she holds - has held her entire life - a narrow and naive picture of God as, well, a Tame Lion;

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness ... by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all". - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Addendum: The Curt Jester apparently has a similar take. Read Committed to My Own Personal Version of Christ.

While The Internet Monk and his readers find in the occasion cause for much introspective hand-wringing. Meh.

P.S. - I've edited the above, slightly. The original was too snarky.

Comments

[pcNielsen]

I thought feminism was dead anyway. Seriously.

Don't know anything about Mizz Rice either myself, other than that she seems to be a bit of a sensationalist celeb. Which is reason enough for me to not pay any attention in my book.

[pcNielsen]

Oh, I was thinking of a different Ann Rice, my wife informs me.

iMonk's take on the situation: http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/anne-rice-through-with-christianity

[Shakespeare's Cobbler the ever loginner forgetter who needs to sync all his blog IDs]

I will second the meh. A generation or two of modern man convinced themselves that Christ dumped morality. The following generation or two has had to put focus on getting morality back. If that's one-sided or obsessed of them, you should ask why they think it's necessary. While there is an extreme that judges persons, to chalk up the entire Christian Church to that is just dumb. I'm sorry, but it is: just dumb.

If you want to actually do something about immoral judgementalism, you have to start with understanding what _is_ moral. I believe it was Chesterton who said you can't talk about reform without reference to form?