Politics & Power Quote by Anne Rice

A novelist’s lament can land like a plot twist: Anne Rice names the reputational wound American Christianity has earned, then slips in the most pointed word in the sentence - “tragic.” Not “unfair,” not “wrong,” but tragic, as if the faith’s public image is the consequence of a preventable flaw in character. The line works because it’s both confession and defense, an attempt to rescue “Christians” from the version of themselves that has been broadcast in headlines, court battles, and culture-war soundbites.

The dash-wrapped “Christians” is doing quiet but heavy labor. It’s a corrective, narrowing the target: not “religion” in general, not “spirituality,” but a specific group claiming a specific moral inheritance. Rice is implicitly arguing that the label has been kidnapped by a politics of disgust - toward queer people, toward feminists, toward immigrants, toward anyone framed as “threat.” The sentence doesn’t deny that hatred exists; it mourns that the association has become plausible.

Context matters: Rice’s career is steeped in the gothic and the moral uncanny, fascinated by sin, longing, and redemption. Her public relationship to Catholicism and Christianity was famously turbulent; she knew the seduction of certainty and the damage done by institutions that confuse purity with virtue. So the subtext is less “Please like us” than “We have a credibility crisis of our own making.” The tragedy is theological: a movement built around love becoming most legible, to outsiders, as condemnation.