Anne Rice on Quitting Christianity (in Memoriam)

I am sure many of you were saddened by the news of Anne Rice’s passing. She visited the podcast in 2010 after publicly ‘quitting Christianity’ and enough of the long-time listeners asked for the interview we decided to share it. My buddy Mike occasionally did interviews back then and he is the one asking the questions here. Since it was 2010 the technology was not as good, but I reworked the audio as best as I could. Here’s Mike’s reflection on Anne’s passing In the wee hours this morning I heard the heartbreaking news that Anne Rice died, surrounded by loved ones, due to complications from a stroke. Anne revolutionized gothic horror writing with her layered, humanizing, and sensuous approach to storytelling, initiating a trend toward more sympathetic portrayals of (say) vampires, telling the story of their eternal power and anguish from *their* point of view, which became the de facto norm for later shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood. The LGBTQ community in particular embraced her supernatural creatures’ ‘outsider’ status as their own, and she embraced them right back, becoming an early safe haven and trusted voice for queer folk. As a young evangelical growing up in the Bible Belt, her writing was *especially* forbidden, and I recall the rushes and flushes I felt as a kid when sneaking some of her fiction in grocery store aisles while my mom was shopping, a world of history, mysticism and sexuality opening up to me. When Anne publicly announced her conversion from atheism to Christianity in 2005, I was among the first journalists to cover the story, in what became an award-winning profile for RELEVANT Magazine. You can read an archive of that story in the link below. When I met Rice at a progressive Baptist church in Birmingham, she was telling her story of coming to faith with nuance and intelligence, in a conversation proctored by a Roman Catholic priest, a rabbi, and a progressive Baptist minister. In our more private conversation that followed, she explained how her deeply-felt faith came from her inner historian’s keen eye for mystery: “Well, [being Christian] certainly has to be personal experience, but I did read myself back into faith. It was history, reading the story of the Jews in time and realizing that there was no rational explanation for the survival of the Jewish people. It was the biggest mystery history ever offered me—how did these people survive? That was the beginning. And then the second big mystery was this: How in the world did Christianity spread the way it did, to become an international religion by A.D. 110? How did that happen? In trying to answer those two questions, I read myself back into belief. And then belief came.” She temporarily abandoned her vampires and fallen angels, saying “the truth is,