I know, I know. I’m more than a little late on novelist Anne Rice’s defection from the Church. In a Facebook post last week she wrote she was quitting Christianity “in the name of Christ.” Why?

“I reached a point where I felt that I couldn’t be complicit any longer in the things that organized religion was doing. I really saw it as a fairly simple repudiation, you know? I was exonerating myself. I was saying, ‘Look, when you — when you see the persecution of gay people by the Mormon Church or the Catholic Church, I’m not part of this. I’m out. I don’t support this anymore. When you see the oppression of women. I’m not part of it. I’m stepping aside. This follower of Christ is not part of that Christianity.’ That’s really what I thought to say.”

Anne Rice was raised as a Catholic, left the Church for a while, and then strongly re-embraced her faith in 1998. To see her speak about these issues, among others:

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