: 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

@Reiling826

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Your task as an author is not to moralise, it is to tell a story. This may sound like an odd distinction, but what I mean by this is that the writing style should be objective even if the narrative structure is subjective.

Quality fiction is similar to good journalism or history; it shows what happened and leaves it at that, explaining different perspectives, allowing a window into a lost moment in time. Truth is more potent than opinion, it is better to show why something is wrong rather than to say it is.

In politics there's a tendency to misunderstand the perspectives of others, because they do not fit into a subjective narrative the individual has constructed. For example, many struggle with the fact that Hitler loved children. If Hitler is a bad person, how can he have a likeable trait (assuming you like children)? This simplistic tendency is what an author of fiction or non-fiction should endeavour to overcome.

I don't think avoiding religious experience is actually helpful. The ambiguity of the supernatural is an interesting way of examining the difficulty we all have in trying to figure out what reality actually is, and where to draw the line.

What is helpful however is having a narrator which is not agnostic, but is ambiguously objective. Yes, this character just had that experience, that is what I have told you... but I have not told you whether their perspective after the fact was factual or subjective!

An excellent author would add to this by deliberately acknowledging either internal doubt or internal consistency, and gradually revealing how the individual's changing memories inform their gradual rewriting of their own narrative.

Some people have beliefs, be they religious, political, or otherwise, which are so foundational to their personal identity and emotional stability that they cannot accept anything to the contrary, not even to themselves. Some people just don't suffer doubt, for better or worse. So to present a religious character as a scholarly doubting Thomas may not be appropriate if they genuinely have the psychology of a fanatic.

Importantly, that's not preaching or judging, it's just stating the fact that this person never doubted their belief. That is the way this person is.

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