Best-selling author Anne Rice has publicly announced that she is leaving organized Christianity. On her Facebook page, Rice wrote, “I remain committed to Christ as always, but not to being ‘Christian’ or any part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For 10 years I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”
Rice’s objections seem to be mostly concerned with how Christianity – or the wing of Christianity with which she is familiar – has aligned itself with a political agenda that is at odds with her own spiritual convictions.
The difference between spirituality and religion is an important one. Spirituality is like water. You need it to survive, but water isn’t always easy to drink. You cannot drink it up off the ground. If you’re near a stream or river, you can cup it in your hands, but only a little at a time. A few people might live close enough to a gushing waterfall to stand underneath it and get all the water they need without any help, but most people need the assistance of some sort of vessel. Our ancestors invented buckets and cups so we could tote water away from its source and drink it easily.
If water is like spirituality, the vessels that hold it are like religion. Unfortunately, human tradition has often placed more emphasis on the vessel than what it holds. It would be foolish to spend more time concerned with the how ornate and colorful your mug is and never use it to hold any liquid. Unfortunately, religion sometimes obscures spirituality rather than making it more accessible.
All my life, I have heard people say, “I don’t have to go to church to be a good Christian.” I even remember people in my native South say that they didn’t like to call themselves “Christians,” because that only meant they adhered to a human religion. They were “followers of Jesus” or “disciples of Christ.” I suspect that such statements were made less on principal or conviction than out of a desire to avoid the commitments of being in an organized community. A member of my congregation expressed the same idea in a more mature way. He said, “I think I am more spiritual than I am religious, but I also recognize the importance of being gathered together.”
There’s the rub. Spirituality, especially in the monotheistic traditions, is communal. Christianity is simply not possible in isolation. There has to be some sort of gathering. And it’s impossible to gather people in any meaningful way without organization. Organization involves structure. Structure requires some form of decision-making, or governance. How, then, do we prevent the organized forms from becoming excessive and overbearing? How do we make sure that our religion facilitates our spirituality instead of taking its place?
For one thing, I think we simply have to admit that, as imperfect human beings, we cannot guarantee that this won’t happen. You cannot devise any form of “church,” no matter how decentralized or loosely structured, that is not subject to the abuses of human nature. However, we can also develop enough awareness to know when the vessel is getting more attention than the water it is intended to hold. We can develop spiritual practices that continually remind us that we are not simply maintaining a structure. We can covenant with each other that prayer will never be used simply as bookends to church meetings, but as the means of discerning how God is leading us to conduct our business. We can offer multiple opportunities to for people to encounter God – through different forms of worship, prayer, meditation, and Bible study.
Anne Rice is angry, and perhaps appropriately so, at the excesses of some quarters of organized Christianity. But what will she do now? Will she never again seek any sort of organized communal way of celebrating the presence of Christ? That seems highly unlikely. Even if she decides to meet with a few people in her living room once a week to pray and discuss matters of faith, she is constructing a new vessel. And even that one small, unordained vessel is subject to the excesses of human sin. The gathering itself – the intimate connection between those few people at a particular time each week – could become more important than the truth they seek to encounter.
It is simply impossible to shield ourselves from our own sinful tendencies. The risk of excess is no reason to avoid organized religion. Had God used that line of reasoning, he would never have created the world – and certainly not women and men.
The biblical word for church, “ecclesia,” means “called out.” Before early Christians claimed this term, it was used for any sort of assembly within the Roman Empire that was called for by the Emperor. As the church, we are “called out” by God. We are not called as perfect people. “I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners,” Jesus said to his critics. That tells me he knew we would get this wrong. Even so, it was still worth trying to get right. So I’m not giving up.
I hope Anne Rice doesn't give up, either. I hope that, instead, she finds a different vessel to hold the spiritual Truth she has encountered in Christ.
Copyright 2010 by J. Mark Lawson
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