the first one that springs to mind from
Pride and Prejudice
the cousin of Elizabeth Bennett. Mr Collins not the most religious but the most applied one.
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the first one that springs to mind from
Pride and Prejudice
the cousin of Elizabeth Bennett. Mr Collins not the most religious but the most applied one.
It depends on what you mean by "religious". General King Dick in Lydia Bailey is religious in a way. The first main character in literature, Gilgamesh, was quite religious, andthe tradition of having religious main characters has been common.
Don't forget Miss Lonelyhearts.
Casey Jones from The Grapes of Wrath--religious. Casey Jones from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--not as religious.
Flannery O'Connor must have written some of the best religious characters in every sense of the word. I nominate Hazel Motes from Wise Blood and Francis Tarwater from The Violent Bear It Away.
John Ames from Gilead. One of the most beautiful books ever written.
Goldmund in Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund; the old man Zosima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I haven't read these books recently, but the pictures of these two characters from them have ramined in my memory as someones very wise and tender at the same time. They seem to me like embodyment of a pure religiosity.
As a mythologist, most of the characters in the things I read are gods... not that you'd want to worship any of them.
There's often a vicar in Victorian novels, usually the upper middle class twit who is too thick for academia, and too cowardly for the army. He's often "a looker", and because he has money, a respected job, and surface charm, he is often set up as the main opposition to the hero in pursuit of the heroine. The vicar in "Under the Greenwood Tree" by Thomas Hardy is a typical example - a modernising, meddling, fool who's more interested in chasing skirt than leading his flock. For instance, he tries to replace the string players in church by an organist (i.e., the heroine) thereby showing he's tone deaf, ignorant of tradition, stomps on parishioners, and is sex obsessed. This really gets us rooting for the hero!
The Tibetan lama in Kim is very religious. Henry James commended Rudyard Kipling on his credibility.
there's also Casey Jones the train driver. he didn't seem that religious either when he was steamin' and a rollin'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig3GcDBjQN4
Would Dante be a candidate?