Keeping faith, losing religion

With those words recently on Facebook, Anne Rice delivered a wake-up call for organized religion. The question is whether it will be recognized as such.

"I remain committed to Christ as always," she wrote, "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."

The author, famed for her vampire novels, made a much-publicized return to the Catholicism of her youth after years of calling herself an atheist. Now, she says she hasn't lost her faith, but is done with organized religion.

"In the name of Christ," she wrote, "I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life."

Rice is not alone.

According to a 2008 study by Trinity College, religiosity is trending down sharply in this country. The American Religious Identification Survey, which polled more than 54,000 American adults, found that the percentage who call themselves Christian has fallen from 86.2 percent to 76 percent since 1990, while the percentage of those who claim no religious affiliation has almost doubled (from 8.2 to 15) in the same span.

Organized religion, Christianity in particular, is on the decline, and it has no one to blame but itself: It traded moral authority for political power.

To put that another way: The Christian Bible contains numerous exhortations to serve those who are wretched and poor, to anger slowly and forgive promptly, to walk through this life in humility and faith. The word Republican does not appear in the book. Not once.

Yet somehow in the last 30 years, people of faith were hoodwinked into regarding the GOP platform as a lost gospel. Somehow, low taxes for the wealthy and deregulation of industry became the very message of Christ. Somehow, hostility to science, gays, Muslims, and immigrants became the very meaning of faith. And somehow Christianity came to seem a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

Consider that, after the 2004 election, a church in North Carolina made news for kicking out nine congregants because they voted for Democrat John Kerry. Has atheism ever had better salesmen than Jerry Falwell, who blamed the Sept. 11 attacks on the ACLU, or Pat Robertson, who ascribed Haiti's earthquake to an ancient curse?

But what of those who feel the blessed assurance that there is more to this existence than what we can see or empirically prove? What of those who seek a magnificent faith that commits and compels but who find churches offering only a shriveled faith that marginalizes and demeans?

Its response to those "seekers" will determine the future of organized religion. And it might behoove keepers of the faith to note the distinction Rice drew in her farewell:

Christ didn't fail her, she said. Christianity did.