How to tackle religion without being offensive or preachy?

Suppose this could be an interesting discussion, but Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment would apply heavily to the discussion; This is NOT to bash any religious ideas or any ideologies. This is to discuss how to tackle religion without offending anyone.

So, I went to see Saving Mr. Banks earlier today and, in the theater, I saw a few trailers for several pro-Bible/Christianity movies and, since coming home, I've seen two or three more (Not sure if they were for the same two I saw in the theater though). A few of them looked... well, preachy and sort of offensive (Gods Not Dead being the one I'm referencing).

So, I suppose this comes to a discussion on, How do you bring up the topic of religion in film without coming across as preachy or offensive?

The main ideas I've come up with are...

1. Don't

2. Don't name the religion or create a fake one

3. Ambiguity on weather said religious topic is correct or not; simply don't pick a side and allow the audience to come to their own answers

For example, a movie of the Jesus' story where his position as Son of God is incredibly ambiguous and his miracles are never shown on screen. There are a lot of tropes there you can play with.

4. The conflict about religion is within the order itself, so both sides portray people in the religion without ever discussing if said religion is true or not and, since both sides would be in said religion, it wouldn't come across as anti- or pro- by nature.

However, this doesn't even touch the gritty details of how its portrayed for 2+ hours or 300+ pages.

So, how do you touch the topic of religion without being offensive or preachy?

I also ask because I intend to discuss the topic of religion in my story and see how others feel can gauge on how to do that. At the moment, while my antagonist has a 1800s mindset on religion (and has grown hypocritical at that) and my protagonist isn't religious, I think making it clear that he believes religion to be a choice and other's religious beliefs aren't something he concerns himself with, but he knows the Bible well enough to say that the antagonist's actions are incredibly un-Catholic.

edited 25th Jan '14 10:42:07 PM by lancesolous13

I'm a critical person but I'm a nice guy when you get to know me. Now, I should be writing.

When's the story set? If it's now or the future (barring some sort of neo-Great-Awakening somewhere down the line) having a religious Straw Hypocrite as the antagonist is a dangerous road with landmines on either side. Is religion/the supernatural relevant to the plot, or just character material?

I mean, if you're doing something Dresden Files-esque, where angels and demons don't just exist but are movers and shakers in the universe, you're going to have to commit to some stance on religion. (Angels Demons And Squid is a personal favorite.) If it's a contemporary whodunnit, the religions of the respective characters won't be that relevant except for flavor reasons.

The main character is the person we spend the most time with, and the guy we assume the author wants us to sympathize with- and whether we do or not is key to getting invested in his struggle. So if you set up the conflict as "secularist protagonist versus evil backwards religious hypocrite," that kinda looks like a position.

edited 25th Jan '14 10:54:40 PM by edgewalker22

Its set in a world where all of fiction/art is real. Its more of a conflict between people as humans rather than a question of God's existence. The message I'm intending is that its wrong to force beliefs on other people who don't agree with you as well as a message on Cultural Appropriation (which relates more to how said Antagonist became this dictator figure).

As long as I make it clear that the Protagonist disagrees with his morals and points out the flaws between his leadership and what he says he believes and NOT saying "God is fake" or something like that, the story wouldn't be taking a stance on either side of it. Though it doesn't come up with the Antagonist, I do have a small conversation written up between the heroes which eventually comes to the conclusion that multiple religions should be able to live peacefully if they all really aim for the same goal; just simply being a good person.

What little dialogue I have written between said Protag and Antag are intended to make it clear that the Protag is not attacking his beliefs, and, in fact, doesn't care what he believes in, just that he's taken it way too far and there is clear contradiction between what he says he believes and what he has done to the world.

I think it would be true to say that... Well, no matter what I do here or how I phrase it, SOMEONE will take it as a religious attack regardless. Which brings us back to our question on how to do it as non-offensively as possible as to minimize the number of people who would take it as a religious attack.

I'm a critical person but I'm a nice guy when you get to know me. Now, I should be writing.

I'd agree. Maybe not so much as an attack, but I don't know if its possible to have a significant religious aspect to your story without rubbing someone the wrong way. From what i've seen, it comes with the territory. As to your methods, the first is probably the safest if you want to avoid any religious discussion at all. The second one doesn't really offer any protection, some readers will still read real world religions into your creations depending on how you write them.

I like the third and fourth ideas. If executed well, ambiguity allows the reader to interpret their own beliefs into the story which is nice if you're trying to be more open. Of course those who take their own beliefs very seriously might interpret it as wishy-washy. The conflict within the order itself is nice as well, as allows you to acknowledge both positive and negative aspects of the religion from an insiders perspective. The trick here would be controlling the amount of bias with which you present both sides. The best part is that none of these last three options are mutually exclusive.

Like most things it all comes down to execution. My main advice for the story itself is simply show, don't tell. I find it very helpful to understand a character's religious beliefs when writing them, but I very rarely actually state them in the story itself. Not that there's anything wrong with them having a religious discussion, I just don't find them as compelling. So for your protagonist, I'd suggest making sure that the scenes where he talks about accepting others and peaceful coexistence are heavily outnumbered by scenes where such coexistence is actually occurring. Show them working together, cooperating, perhaps having heated discussions, perhaps awkwardly avoiding such discussions. Perhaps add a character or scene that shows what people who actually take the teachings of the religion to heart are like. That way when the confrontation goes down, we'll know that the antagonist doesn't speak for everyone who shares his supposed belief and that it isn't the religion itself that the protagonist has a problem with.

Nobody wants to be a pawn in the game of life. What they don't realize is the game of life is Minesweeper.

Last bit of the post above is definitely one to consider; if the only characters of a given religious or philosophical viewpoint we see in the story are baddies, it will make people who share that religious or philosophical viewpoint suspect you are trying to insinuate that that viewpoint makes them bad people.

Length has something to do with your approach as well—if it's a short story with a limited cast, you don't have a lot of time to go into deep consideration of different religious viewpoints within the story, and your audience is more likely to forgive a witch-burning preacher or nihilistic atheist as the only representative of their viewpoint. Longer works with larger casts need more finesse proportionately.

Consider the works of George Mac Donald; he was firmly on the Protestant Christian side, and made no bones about it in his books, but was unafraid to show hypocritical or downright evil Christians, or intelligent, good-hearted atheists who have valid points.

Don't worry about it to much. People who are prepared to act like adults about the subject won't care to much even if they do find it offensive, and those who will react badly would have likely done so regardless of what you did.

I am a little concerned about this too considering what I'm writing.

I briefly worried about offending religious people. Then I realized I didn't particularly care all that much.

To whit: Christianity is fake, a copy of a pre-existing religion created by the brother of that religion's patron deity in order to mock it. Contradictions in the Bible? Put there on purpose. Christians are jerks? Welcome to the point. Jesus? He was real, but he didn't know the god he endorsed wasn't who J-diddy thought he was. Boy did that turn out badly for him.

I'm sure there's a point in there somewhere, but at any rate you're not going to get far if you worry about who you might offend, not least because someone somewhere will take offense no matter what you do.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!

I guess the main thing is that there are a zillion prophets running around and the "gods" who decide to talk to them are pretty damn amoral.

Why is Christianity always the target for this kind of thing? I mean, it's not the only coercive religion and it's not the worst of them either. When you pick on a particular group, it seems like you're intentionally being offensive.

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

I don't know about other people when writing (and, I do not agree with that above post), but I chose Christianity simply because of how well known it is and, well, its has had a very vocal and well known use to have justified bad things in the past, such as preachers in the 1800s going on about White Man's Burdon bs. I am not saying that that's what Christianity is, as that's also a major point of the more religious section of my story, but you cannot deny that people have use Christianity to justify terrible things.

You can pretty much expect an audience to know Christianity and its associated... for lack of a better word, lore and mythology while choosing a religion from the East or from Africa would result in having to explain that all out. Additionally, its far more common to hear about radical misinterpretations of the Bible than it is to hear Radical Misinterpretations of... say, The Buddha or something.

I'm a critical person but I'm a nice guy when you get to know me. Now, I should be writing.

Pretty much.

Christianity is well known for the bad things that people have used it for, so it's something everyone will recognize.

Edit: I wrote some other stuff here, but decided to play it safe and remove it.

Just try and be fair. Tell the tale truly, good and bad, and the rest is silence.

edited 27th Jan '14 4:19:56 PM by Handsomerob

One Strip! One Strip!

Because you get called a bigot if you do it to anyone else.

Because if you target a worse religion, Christians can claim to be "not as bad as" those. It'll seem like you draw the line of acceptable coercion at more oppressive religions and that a bit of coercion is acceptable. If, however Christianity is targeted, those religions who are even worse have no excuse either.

It's also the religion with the most power in our societies. Attacking Christianity is similar to fighting a dictator with power, while attacking minority religions is like assaulting a powerless hobo. Christianity has influence on society that the other religions don't possess. It's mostly pointless to attack those.

The majority of the people on this forum are from the USA (where Christianity is dominant, even compared to officially Christian countries like the UK). The rest of the population of this forum are largely from anglophone countries (which are all Christian-dominated), with the rest of the world making up maybe a few percent of the membership (and a lot of those are from Europe, where Christianity is still the largest and most influential religion). Plus, Christianity is the largest religion in the world, followed by about half the world's population.

What I'm getting at is that the people you're likely to come across on this forum will generally be more familiar with Christianity than any other religion. Even if you come from an atheist household in a mostly-secular country, like I do, you will end up with at least some knowledge of Christianity. Most people you come across here — and in the literature you are likely to read — are simply much better equipped to criticise Christianity than Hinduism or Islam.

Even then, you get The Satanic Verses, which is taking a broadly similar line to Eagal's idea, but towards Islam (the Koran is in some way corrupted, though in this case it's very ambiguous what with taking place in a dream sequence, and it's men doing the corruption rather than any kind of god). Notably, it was written by a man from a Muslim background, which is probably why it wasn't shit. Also notably, the author had to go into hiding for a decade after it was released...

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

There are no "better" or "worse" religions. With the exception of small fringe groups and cults, every major religion is more or less on the same ground morally. Every one of them has been used as an excuse for abuse. Human nature has pretty much the same potential for rationalizing doing bad stuff to other people pretty much all around the world regardless of belief system- balanced by the equally powerful impulse to do good stuff.

...no, they're really not. A comparative of the canons of their works tends to give an obvious edge to the Far Eastern.

Nous restons ici.

It depends on how one is defining religions.

I mean, if you want to compare the actions of their followers as justified by religion, the Buddhists are still going to win unless you also count Confucian thought as religious, which it arguably is. But you can justify your actions via the lense of Twinkies if you want to and that was a real court case and people really took it seriously.

At some point you're going to have to ditch the followers as a metric, because somebody with enough ranks in Fast Talk can convince an idiot of anything, and look at the works that compose the canon of the religion.

Nous restons ici.

I would definitely count Confucian thought as a religion. Buddhism more comfortably fits into "religion" by basis of preconceived western definitions but Confucianism has an influence more like it. You need to expand what is typically meant by religion (which in English was heavily influenced and dare I say created by Christianity) if you want to actually study and compare things. Like Raelism explicitly denies any existence of the supernatural, which many believe to be a core tenet of classifying something as a religion, whereas anybody who looks at it would definitely say it was a religion, etc.

Back to the OP: you might've asked the wrong question in the thread title. From where I'm sitting, the narrative isn't equipped to tackle religion. You have the secular, heroic, Obviously Right (TM) good guy, and the religious, hypocritical, backwards, Obviously Wrong (TM) bad guy. Any analysis of of the meaning of life or the existence of the soul or why the toast always lands butter side up is dead on arrival, because the audience knows whose side the author is on and who the narrative will ultimately favor as a result. The game's not worth watching if we know the deck is stacked, and that will kill audience buy-in if you try to actually address the issues. In fact, you could make the antagonist Unintentionally Sympathetic as a backlash- one thing I find with "message" fiction is that it often has me Rooting for the Empire in reaction to the author's attempt to manipulate me. (You don't want to know how hard I laughed when the Littlest Cancer Patient got her IV ripped out in {{Airplane!}}) To properly explore real, multi-dimensional concepts, you need real, multi-dimensional characters to do go exploring with.

Now, if you're writing a political thriller (which the comments about a dictator seem to indicate) sure, go for it. Have you villain twirl his mustache, tie the blonde to the train tracks, and place the hero in an easily-escapable situation involving an overly-elaborate and exotic death. But that's not a natural medium for Bluff Hardcheese to take a break to speculate on the nature of man's inhumanity towards man. As far as the "message" portion of it goes, I think Limyaael put it better than I can.

Also: Catholicism is a really weird pick for this one, since 1) "knowing the Bible" will give you at best limited insight into the doctrine and practices and 2) it has a hierarchy and codified set of beliefs that you can refer to, and somebody would've noticed if he was insisting on Mass being said in Latin with the priest facing away from the congregation. Fire and brimstone-type rabble-rousers generally have some sort of Baptist or Lutheran homebrew as their vehicle- something that lends itself less to contradiction from on high.

I suppose a question to stem from that is, how do you write such a narrative that doesn't inherently support every single trope of the hero? Though, I think maybe its a bit to an extreme in the way you phrase it as I can think of a number of 'Heroes' from lit that have bad traits and good ones.

I suppose this is an opportunity to explore in the narrative what defines the character and a hero or a villain and, by extension, are those traits of them 'good' or 'bad' in this narrative because of said traits. Is my villain 'evil' because of his religious side? I would say no, he isn't. He's a villain because he does bad things in this world.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, is my hero 'good' because he isn't a religious person? Not at all.

I do have religious characters on my hero's side, which I suppose balances the scales a bit more?

One could technically argue that the 'narrative will ultimately favor' the hero in every single story presented ever. I mean, it seems obvious that Harry will ultimately win at the end of Harry Potter, right? But we bite for seven books and eight films. His Dark Materials favors Lyra, the series' protagonist, while Voldemort and every villain of the HP series has the label of 'Death Eater' slapped on them from the 'get-go'. A narrative is going to favor SOMEONE somewhere, but it not be for every last thing that character stands for. They also may drag them through the mud before eventually they reach their goal.

On that small comment of Unintentionally Sympathetic, that could theoretically apply to any villain I care unless I make them a complete monster. On some minor levels, there is supposed to be some sympathy there for him; being immortally trapped in another world with no escape sounds like a horrible existence, but the things he's done by that are what make him the bad guy.

On a side note, I do find Ron the Death Eater and Draco in Leather pants tropes to be fascinating. Sometimes (NOT all the time), when I see them on pages, I see it as a testament to the writer's ability to convince an audience member to see differently than simply 'Character A is the hero' and 'Character B is the villain' and nothing more. I feel like its a bit boring if everyone sees a character exactly as the same way. However, this doesn't apply to every example of those tropes.

While I'm not trying to have any 'message' that'll suddenly pause a massive battle sequence to give exposition on really stupid shit, almost anything you read is going to have some message behind it regardless of genre and setting. I suppose it really depends on how explicit on makes that message and depending on if the anvil is dropped with subtlety or if it lands on your face.

Additionally, this Villain is NOT the core obstacle of the story as, really, the story is about the hero's development as a character and other such things that it would take too long and be off topic to discuss here. A part of me is slightly worried that said villain may not appear enough for the audience to have time to figure out who he is to the narrative (Supporting Character? Big Bad?) which I'm trying to find more scenes to give him time to explore his character.

My story is not about racism, or sexism, or homophobia the same that Harry Potter isn't about Magic Nazis. My story is about growing up the same way that Harry Potter is about The Power of Love.

In reply to your link, I would say that that's exactly what this villain did and one of the reasons why he is a bad guy; He's taking our world issues and throwing that shit into places it doesn't belong. Just, on a far more literal scale that the author probably ever intended.

I'm a little unsure about that last paragraph, but I'll respond as best I can. What I meant by 'knowing the Bible', is that he has had Catholic Education for a large portion of his life. Go all private high schools being religiously organized! And, I do know how it is organized? I'm afraid I don't follow exactly on what you were saying there.

God... I need to stop talking in paragraphs... lol

I'm a critical person but I'm a nice guy when you get to know me. Now, I should be writing.

So you think that if Christians watch a work targeting another religion, they will automatically claim moral superiority, and that because of the possibility of the audience misinterpreting the work as accepting less coercive religions that a writer is wrong for targeting any other religion besides Christianity? It seems to me that you are making a lot of assumptions and leaps of logic there.

This is an interesting discussion point, as two people or groups can say they believe in the same canon and yet interpret it differently and have vastly different actions.

I might be treading on thin ice for asking this, but does a Catholic Education actually involve reading The Bible? If someone says they 'know the Bible', I'm going to interpret that as someone actually reading the book. Not to mention that such a statement can be read as implying that Catholics know more about the Bible than other denominations.

@ lancelous 13: What about the possibility of both the 'hero' and 'villain' being religious. The two could be members of different religions, or the same religion but of different denominations, perhaps one being more popular than the other. You could even have one view the other as a "heretic". After all, much of Christianity's history has seen a lot of infighting. The athiest versus fundamentalist conflict is so cliche.

edited 28th Jan '14 5:45:49 PM by shiro_okami

Only if the other religions are worse. It doesn't necesserily need to be Christianity. Just don't take the worst example but the mildest. If you portray FGM as wrong people will go: "Ah, yes mutilating children so much is wrong but circumcision of boys isn't as bad." But if you portray circumcision of boys as wrong, FGM will be wrong too.

Exactly there is a possibility. With targeting Christianity there is a much smaller possibility for misinterpretation.

My only assumption is that Viewers Are Morons. A very save assumption. Of course other religions lend itself to cristicism as well. But if you want to change soemthing you have to address the people watching your stuff, which will be largely Christians. Otherwise the audience just engages in othering the bad religions and reaffirming their own beliefs.

European men in the 18th and 19th century priced themselves for treating their women well in contrast to muslims. This gave them a tool to say: "See how bad it could be for you women" instead of giving women equal rights.

I know I'm just splitting hairs, but you do realize that circumcision was Judaism, and not Christianity, right? And who or what are the FGM?

As to misinterpretation, yes, there might be a possibility of it, but so what? If an author makes their message as clear as possible and the reader misinterprets it, it's the reader's fault for misinterpreting the message, not the author's. Not to say that an author is never responsible for being misunderstood, but an author should not be restricted on their subject matter because of a risk of being misinterpreted or misunderstood, and saying that they should be is absolving the reader of all blame and responsibility. That doesn't apply just for religion but for any subject. If the Viewers Are Morons, it's their fault that they are morons.

edited 28th Jan '14 8:13:02 PM by shiro_okami