The important one's gone, and it improves the book. I'm left with 2 minor Baptist characters, missionaries, and I already know I want one, "Robert," to be a sort of go-off-half-cocked-and-give-up-when-it's-tough type. The most natural thing I can find for his wife "Alicia" is to make her strict, critical, with poor social skills: by "natural" I mean that it accentuates Robert's conflict if she's no help. OTOH it bugs me when a writer picks some group and makes them all awful. These are still minor characters: no scenes from their POV at present.

John Barnes's advice on characters like this is either remove them, or stick their flaws up the reader's nose: don't avoid it.

Anyway, I'm rambling here because I'm not sure what to do. Maybe there's some other set of character traits that would hook me (and then the reader). I haven't thought of them yet. What I'd rather do is have these characters be unsympathetic without seeming to make a statement that Baptists are bad. What are your thoughts?

 

Frank Peretti, a popular Christian author of supernatural thrillers with his own enjoyably unique style, has even gone a step further in a few of his novels. In one (I think it was called This Present Darkness) he has several parishioners of a local church manipulated by demons because of their 'false faith,' basically making them major antagonists in the mortal aspect of the story. However, he carefully distinguishes between the faithful and these faithless in the congregation (since it is Christian fiction, after all). You wouldn't necessarily have to go to such lengths...just keep in mind that his books have gone over very well with Christians and non-Christians (and likely Baptists and non-Baptists) alike, despite his vilification of supposedly 'religious' characters.

I highly recommend his novel The Oath, by-the-way, but that's completely off-topic.

In any case, I wouldn't worry too much about insulting Baptists, as long as your dialogue- and expository-based presentation of information doesn't directly paint them as inherently evil. Here's a thought...if you know any Baptists (preferably several, to get a half-decent sample size), have them read the passage in question. That might be a better litmus test than anything we can postulate here.

Godspeed.

Inkwell
-----------------
"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous

[This message has been edited by Inkwell (edited August 01, 2006).]
 

If you are uncomfortable poking fun at Baptists, then make mention of it once, and move on. Certainly anyone from ANY religion can come across as strident, pushy and narrow minded. Show them being narrow minded in other ways... then it becomes a character trait and not a direct result of their denomination.

The reality is that for those of us who CHOOSE our religion (ie, not born to it), our character traits in large part determine which religion we fall into. We share a common belief system with others who hold some common character traits. People of like-mind tend to congregate together.
 

But from what you've said, it sounds as if you have two flawed characters who happen to be Baptists, and they're not even flawed in the same way - I'm not sure what message you could abstract from what you've described above. Baptists are flawed? I'm sure they're not the only flawed characters in your book.

Let them rescue orphaned kittens or something if you're worried.
 

That said, can a writer ease the dilemma by looking at his characters in groups? Using your example, say we want "Baptists" to be a character in our book, and we need this character to be fully balanced. So we take an unsympathetic character trait, go-off-half-cocked-and-give-up-when-it's-tough, and name it "Robert." Then we take another trait, strict, critical, and poor social skills, and name it "Alicia." Now, in order to balance our character, we need "Tom" and "Gladys" to be calmly objective and generous. There's a decent cross-section, and our "Baptists" are believably balanced. Do Tom and Gladys need to be characters of equal plot-time with Robert and Alicia? Not at all. But to leave them out entirely skews your greater group-character and risks creating a flat impression, which is what you mean when you say "...it bugs me when a writer picks some group and makes them all awful."

So, are there times when it is useful and necessary to include a flat character in your writing? Someone so one-sided as to be definitively "bad" versus definitively "good"? I think we've hinted at this in other threads, but not quite in this context. I think it depends on whether your story is "character driven" versus "plot driven", but what does everyone else think?
 

You probably do need to mention that they're missionaries. But as long as you make it clear that you're condemning them for their failure to be good missionaries, and not for their missionary efforts, you're in the clear there as well.

A lot of this depends on your POV. If the primary POV character looks at these people and says " they're not very good missionaries", that's very different from looking at them and saying "stupid// missionaries".

Now, the same would hold true if there were some particular reason to mention that they were Baptists. It would only matter that they were Baptists if they betrayed the POV's expectations (perhaps based on previous experience) of what Baptists should be.
 

I.e:

Protagonist: Stop being a jackass
Bad Baptist: You sound like my deacon father-in-law. [continues being a jackass]

And if you really want to see how this is done, read Graham Greene's THE POWER AND THE GLORY -- about a pretty rotten Catholic priest you can't help loving and admiring.