: Re: How to write a sincerely religious protagonist without preaching or affirming or judging their worldview? I am writing a book in which one of my main characters is a devout Catholic. His struggles

@LarsenBagley300

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Most people are largely prone to sympathize - with themselves

If you're writing "close 3rd-p limited", your character will probably see himself as basically good, perhaps with occasional doubts. I'm not sure what you mean by having the narrator be mildly agnostic, since I thought close third-person limited generally involved the beliefs of the POV character bleeding slightly through into the narration.

More generally, treating a character fairly will look a lot like being sympathetic to the character - as long as you're showing us life in that character's shoes. In a story with multiple close-POV characters, this is balanced by having characters "observing" contrasting sides to the same or similar events. When the Catholic character is paying his tithing, maybe it's reasonable, and the right thing to do, and can be filled with his gratitude for the fact that he has an income which provides for his family's needs. When his atheist wife thinks about what else could have been done with the money, maybe it's a stupid waste that's doubly bad because it props up an outdated institution with a decidedly questionable history.

You should probably err on the side of portraying the religious character as sympathetic and justified - whenever that's your POV character. After all, why would he be who he is if it doesn't seem like the right thing to do? Also, if you're really, truly fair to the character, you'll let him be "really right" sometimes. That is, you won't fully explode and even mock, in an unanswered way, all of his perspectives when you've stepped out of his shoes.

(In single-POV stories, hinting that the character's self-justifications might not always be exactly right is somewhat trickier, but that is a different question.)

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