Anne Rice: author of deconstruction?

Best-selling author Anne Rice has died. Her core fan base will remember her principally for her Vampire novels, starting with her 1994 book, Interview with the Vampire, which was adapted into a popular movie. But Christians will remember her as someone who publicly re-embraced a form of Christianity, wrote three books about her pilgrimage, and then just as publicly rejected the Christian faith entirely.

I read all three of her pilgrimage books, her autobiography Called Out of Darkness and her two novelizations of the Gospels. I had the honor of interviewing her about the books and I kept in touch for a few years after that.

It was clear from her writings and interviews that she had a genuine knowledge of the faith. She read widely, including Protestant authors such as N.T. Wright, and in our conversation, she particularly emphasized Wright as a key factor in her conversion. She seemed to love and admire Jesus genuinely and acknowledge him not just as Savior, but as Lord. In fact, the word “Lord” was central to her new religious discourse. She told me that she pledged that for the rest of her life she would only write about “the Lord,” and from that pledge came three books.

But later, cracks began to appear. She changed her pledge, claiming that she meant that she would write “for” the Lord, not “about” the Lord. She began to express more and more anger in her Facebook postings about how wrong she thought the church was about homosexuality and abortion, and how she felt pulled, as the mother of a gay son, away from Christianity. For a time, she spoke positively about admiration for Christ as she continued to ramp up the rhetoric against Catholicism and then Christianity in general, raising familiar anti-Christian tropes about the Spanish Inquisition and witch burnings.

She grew somewhat frustrated by inadequate interest in her books from Christian audiences and clashed with Christian fans about her endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president in 2008. Eventually, she started calling herself a secular humanist. In the end, she failed to complete the third volume in her trilogy about Christ and started talking about writing sexually explicit material (which I assume refers to the trilogy she did complete, which was her erotic twist on the Sleeping Beauty fable). By then, being too saddened by watching this decline, I signed off as a fan.

I could not sign off without engaging in some apologetic debate with the author. As Rice increased her polemics against Christianity, I challenged the accuracy of her historical claims and the validity of her arguments. Was she familiar with accurate historical details about the Inquisition and the witch trials, and how they’d been distorted by anti-Christian propagandists? And what does all of that have to do with modern Christianity, which condones neither the torturing of Jews nor the burning of witches? Rice became irritated by these arguments, questioning why anyone would even raise such objections.

Shortly after her death, Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey tweeted out, “She was deconstructing before we were talking about it.” That seems an apt observation, but what does it say about the current wave of what is being called “deconstruction” among evangelicals? The term is now contested, even among those who use it, given its origin in modern philosophy. In that context, “deconstruction” represents a set of philosophical spectacles that purports to show that language does not convey truth but instead enforces power hierarchies. At its worst, it’s a pretentious-sounding word for a philosophy used to dress up and justify apostasy. Rice’s “deconstruction” actually looked more like “deconversion.” She was just rejecting the truth of historic Christianity.

She didn’t like the Bible’s sexual restrictions? Well, join the club. At some point, the vast majority of human beings probably haven’t liked them either. But that does not mean they are not right and righteous and that the faith is not true. It simply means we must grow to learn that the goodness of sexuality requires following the Creator’s design, not our unbridled desires. Anne Rice did not misunderstand Christianity’s historic sexual ethic—she turned to hate it.

If there is any legitimate role for applying deconstruction to the language we evangelicals use, Anne Rice should not be the role model; she should be the cautionary tale. Only God can judge Anne Rice’s heart. We humans are left only with her words.