Interview by Sarah Pulliam Bailey

Author Anne Rice made waves across the Internet when she posted a short message on her Facebook page:

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 outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.Rice returned to the Roman Catholic Church in 1998, a decision she began openly speaking about in 2005. She spoke with Christianity Today about her recent decision, the enormous response, and how she plans to follow Jesus outside the church.

What did you hope to accomplish by announcing this? Were you hoping people would join you?

Not at all. Because I had written Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, I had become a public Christian. I wanted my readers to know that I was stepping aside from organized religion and the names Christian andChristianity because I wanted to exonerate myself from the things organized religion was doing in the name of Jesus. Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love. They have become associated with hatred, persecution, attempting to abolish the separation of church and state, and trying to pressure people to vote certain ways in elections. I wanted to make it clear that I did not in any way remain complicit with those things. I never expected anyone beyond my Facebook page would be interested. I was doing this for my readers to let them know.

You mentioned D.A. Carson, Craig Keener, and N.T. Wright. They are fairly conservative Protestants.

Sometimes the most conservative people are the most biblically and scholastically sound. They have studied Scripture and have studied skeptical scholarship. They make brilliant arguments for the way something in the Bible reads and how it’s been interpreted. I don’t go to them necessarily to know more about their personal beliefs. It’s the brilliance they bring to bear on the text that appeals to me. Of all the people I’ve read over the years, it’s their work that I keep on my desk. They’re all non-Catholics, but they’re believers, they document their books well, they write well, they’re scrupulously honest as scholars, and they don’t have a bias. Many of the skeptical non-believer biblical scholars have a terrible bias. To them, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, so there’s no point in discussing it. I want someone to approach the text and tell me what it says, how the language worked.