Mentioning Religion

It can be very cliche to harp on religion, particularly Catholicism and therapy, and I'm wondering how many of you are including it (as soon as I decided to ask this on the forum, I saw the thread on viciously murdering a priest...*gulp*)?

The thing is, each and every mention of religion in my NaNoWriMo book was a REAL EVENT! It can't be me butchering religion if I let the actual incidents speak for themselves, can it?

I'd be careful about alienating the sizeable Canaanite readership.

-Shem

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb comes to mind. And The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

I still have 44,000 words to go, surely some redeeming events could be crammed in there ;)

Hey, the more I think on it, the more the pirest had to go. ;)

I'm including religion as a strong focal point in my book given that the overall story is the existence of a religious understone in the varying schools of psychology. However, I'm only alluding to religoin instead of classifying it (i.e. Judaism, Christianity, etc.). Sure, I have priests, bishops, and nuns, but they're not part of a specficially titled sect of belief.

I don't think it's considered butchering as, in my view, religion is a largely metaphorical and personal set of beliefs. How can you butcher something if it's so esoteric? It's all a point of view.

I have no issues including religion; Catholicism is so full of mystery and symbolism, hard for me to ignore it and I'm not Catholic. A friend read one of my books and said, 'Wow, that's a lot of Christianity." Which made me smile as really it was about Catholicism, but religion gets swept under a few big umbrellas. So think of it as you're educating someone who might not know the differences. My novel is about bigotry, working its way into recent anti-immigration fears, but a strong layer of Catholic teachings underpins later issues. Just write and worry about the rest in the next draft... :)))

The theme of Christianity/God/religion comes up a lot in my novel. FMC1's mother was a devout Baptist before she died of cancer, and her death plus the fallout made her essentially turn her back on organized religion. FMC2 was raised very stringently Roman Catholic by an abusive father, so she naturally associates religion with her abuser. Both characters will have to reevaluate their feelings about organized religion, unorganized religion, spirituality, God's presence, etc. throughout the course of the novel. I don't think FMC2 will ever fully reconcile herself to the Catholic church, but she will realize that God was not the justification for her father's beatings - she will finally see the dissonance between his professed beliefs and his actual behavior, and understand that religion does not equal beating women. FMC1 will have to have her own journey to realize that she hasn't stopped believing in God, she's simply very angry with Him, and there is a difference. Neither one will have an easy journey or a perfectly clean ending, because that's just not how life works, even for the most religiously devout, IMO.

See, I personally am a Christian, but I had to make my MC an agnostic because it makes him that much easier to write for.

I'm asking myself the question: How far can politics push religion (in this case Evangelical Christianity) before it snaps and turns into a cult? So far, in fact, that the resulting new religion of nation worship ends up clashing with the Christians. Basically, I'm extrapolating from the raging controversies over church/state issues in the US.

I don't really harp on religion ... I made my own religion(which I actually do believe to some degree...)
I do however say that most religions haven't figured it out ... even the "true" religion is wrong ... since the universe is god ... but even people in my story that believe that are wrong since I am god ....
*tries to not make inception joke*

Anyway it can be a touchy subject, but I don't have anything against any religion which is why I made the vague cluster that is above.

^^

I might occasionally mention it... A lot of my character tend to be Agnostic, and for those that actually are faithful I'll keep it subtle. Like maybe mention something like "After church that Sunday" or something like that. But occasionally a scene will come up that I'll feel should get a mention of religion, or lack there of.

It's rarely a focal point of the story, though.

I butchered a bunch of religions last year. My catholic MC went to a new local worship based church where the bad guy in my story was the preacher. I made sure to bash the catholics along with the pentacostals and I threw in barbs at anglicans and baptists to balnce things.

I don't have to butchering plans this season, but this thread will put the thought in my mind.

I'm including it. But I'm queer and grew up in a Catholic household, and one of my characters will have a similar experience with it, so nothing exaggerated, just my own personal experiences. My novel takes place long after the fact, however, so it's more about the lasting effects of such a childhood rather than the initial drama and rage it initially inspired.

It's a recurring theme in my novel. My MC struggles with the meaninglessness his life, the problem of suffering, the contradictions of moral relativism, etc. In other words, the usual suspects. I imagine he will consider religion, but ultimately reject it as just another system of beliefs. He wants truth. He will find that truth is not found in religion, but that it exists independently from it.

I'm also a Christian, so writing what I know makes it easy.

primary theme in mine too - mc is Jewish/Buddhist, with Sufi tendancies. Uhhhhh, I know from this.....

My character is religious in a rather unique way. He actually believes that he knows God (and he's actually been employed by him!), that he used to live in Hell and knows what it's like there.
I'm personally an atheist, so I find it quite challenging to write not just as a Catholic, but someone who claims it is definitely true and completely real, more so than the world he is in now. It's an interesting experience, though.
I can't imagine writing a book which doesn't deal with the theme of religion, perhaps because I'm kind of obessed with it myself and I think that complex characters definitely have strong views on those things.

Religion can be a dicey topic. I think If I were to bring it into my novel, say for instance my MC is religious, he/she would be realistically be level headed about it. The over the top christian is a bit of a cliche and the down right sinner who doesn't care about morals has also been over done. What about the level headed about it, however recognizing their sinful ways, but trying to cope with the reality of it. Again this character has probably been overused too so as far as a unique approach, maybe this isn't the best but certainly the most realistic and perhaps most the easiest to relate to if you're writing from a 1st person POV. I realized I just rambled a lot. Nothing new there.

My story is set in the very distant future, and most religions as we know it today have vanished. I'm not sure if I really belong on this forum, considering that I believe my story to be halfway between literary fiction and straightforward science fiction, but my entire focus is what exactly makes a one a god. But I've been doing a lot of research into the basis and formation of religion in and of itself, and I get to watch mine grow from a small collection of tribal myths to explain nature and keep order, to a big organized church with doctrines and a priesthood, and a societal punishment for heretics. My narrator is a man from roughly our own time, just before an apocalypse, and in death he had returned to the people in order to help them, coincidentally dying in November and returning to the world (as a ghost) in April. He slowly wanted to help his people, but those who could see him misunderstood him, and made him out to be a god. And, through actions and his life, that eerily enough did mirror the seasons fairly well, I'm trying to keep it fairly ambiguous if he ever did legitmately ascend to godhood after all.


....So I suppose I'm the black sheep out here. :)

whew, almost the last mention of religion has been made in my novel.
With all the details, the issues are more with people who abuse their authority (not necessarily clergy) rather than religion itself. My MC marches right into church to pray the rosary after her recently-ordained friend betrays her, to illustrate

Take that, organized religion!

-Shem

My novel has a lot to do with religion, since the FMC is a priestess of her own sort of non-church. The MMC is from a Lutheran background, and there are mentions of Mormons, including a Mormon off-camera character.