Here are several ways of relating religion and literature. There is not a lot of stuff out there on the subject, and what there is tends to be mushily thematic. I've only seen one textbook on religion and literature, and it is pretty lightweight. My own preference in developing my Religion and Modern Literature class some years ago was to patch together materials from many odd sources. Our University copy center makes a bundle off my students.
 

I. The debate over the relationship of religion and literature has yielded three readily discernible theoretical approaches:

Heteronomy: ("the law is outside") This is the position of T.S. Eliot in "Literature and Religion" (Essays Ancient and Modern, 1936). He argues that since Christian faith is superior to literature, the norm for judging the greatness and truth of literature can only be found outside literature, namely, in theology. The determination of the question "What is literature?" can be based on literary norms alone. But in the evaluation of the greatness of literature (its adequacy, the truth it embodies, etc.) faith must intervene. All

notions of what is best and most true in the world depend upon what you think is most real. Religion evaluates the real; it puts us in touch with and mediates the real. Literature always involves some suspension of reality, a "what-if" or "once-upon-a-time" method. Tolstoy was a strong heteronomist after his conversion.

Theonomy: ("the law is God") This position is developed by Protestant theologian Paul Tillich in The Protestant Era (1948). Neither religion nor literature is an absolute and neither can finally sit in judgement upon the other. God above is the law, the root of religion's purpose and literature's meaning. Like literature, religion is also, at least in part, a human creation. This approach to the relationship of literature and religion tends to see most literature, even all literature, as "religious" as it deals with the deeper concerns of us humans. Tillich believes that even the most destructive urges mirrored in literature can be best understood as expressions of our deep need to locate the ground of our being.

Autonomy: ("the law is within") Developed in RWB Lewis' "Hold on Hard to the Huckleberry Bushes" in Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (1956). The norms for judging the achievement of a discipline must come from within the discipline. Therefore, literature cannot be subjected to any alien norm, be it God or religion. Great literature might have religious elements, or it might not. There is no necessary relationship between literature and religion.

II. H. Richard Neibuhr

Neibuhr was a 20th Century Protestant theologian. Among his books was one titled Christ and Culture, in which he examined the common stances that Christians have taken on the relationship of their religion to culture and the product of culture, including art and literature. Though I leave Neibuhr's presentation in his own Christian religious metaphor, his presentation is generally true of the ways religious people everywhere have understood the relationship of religion and culture.

Christ: the Christ is not to be finally understood by its ("his," I suppose) qualities of faith, hope, obedience, love, humility, or righteous anger. Rather, the Christ is most fully characterized by its relationship to us as mediator between us and God. The Christ is not the median, but the mediator. (This is pretty standard Christian theology, here.)

Culture: We have no choice but the understand human culture from a human perspective, and from such a perspective, it has five primary characteristics:

    1. Culture is fundamentally social, a group heritage

    2. Culture is a human achievement or construction, and thus not
       "natural."

    3. Culture is designed for an end or ends; that is, we live in a
       world of values

    4. We ourselves are the chief end and value of human culture; most
       people are pragmatic

    5. Human culture is always and inevitably pluralistic

The historical relationship of Christ and Culture falls into these five patterns:

1. Christ against Culture: This is the sometimes seen sectarian rejection of a mainstream culture as too spiritually polluted to be redeemable. An early impulse in Christian monasticism, seen also in ministers who some years ago made a splash burning rock and roll records. Tolstoy tends to this position (read What is Art? or The Law of Love and the Law of Violence).

2. Christ in Culture: Here the Christ becomes the great hero of culture, the constant (uncritical) support of OUR group, whatever group that happens to be. I think here of Bible Bob, who visits my campus in the Spring with a sign that still reads in part "Reagan '84, Jesus Forevermore." Think of Byzantium, too.

3. Christ above Culture: In this position, the Christ is discontinuous with social and cultural life as well as continuous with it. Christ rises above and relativizes culture and the demands culture places upon us, but He (It) supports and sustains culture, as well. This is the position of Thomas Aquinas.

4. Christ and Culture in Paradox: In this fourth option, the authority of both Christ and culture are held to be legitimate, and also inevitably in opposition. We are subject to two moralities from two opposed worlds. Have you ever wondered how Germans could be good Christians on the weekend and good Nazis during the workweek? Well, here is the answer -- this position is primarily a German Lutheran misreading of Augustine.

5. Christ the Transformer of Culture: This position admits that we are fallen and imperfect and that therefore opposition between Christ and culture are inevitable. But we don't just withdraw from culture as in position 1, nor do we passively endure it as in position 4, but rather we must understand that Christ is the converter of people through culture and history. All religion is social, and thus salvation is social, too. This is a very mainstream position on religion and society held by Augustine, Calvin, the Social Gospellers at the turn of the century, and the Christian Realists of the 1930s.

Positions 1 and 2 are inadequate for most Christians, outside of very popular (as in populist) and crude expressions of the religion. Positions 3 and 5 are historically far and away the most common.

III. Religion, Belief and the Fundamental Elements of Narrative Structure

The elements of narrative structure (character, plot, atmosphere, and tone) inevitably relate us to questions of belief. Thus, even in a society like ours that does not think of itself as particularly religious, the stories we tell tend to relate us to the big questions in life that religions have always asked and attempted to answer.

Character: When making decisions about character, authors cannot avoid fundamental questions of belief because of the questions that must be answered. Are people finally mean or worthy? What is the greatest evil to which human nature is prone? Can a person find an escape from the evils that surround him or her and, on a personal level, what is the nature of this "salvation?"

Plot: Again, people differ over whether life is good or bad, to be trusted or defied, and whether life has a larger meaning or whether it is meaningless. The plot of a tale will always imply answers to questions like these, and answers to such big questions have the status of fundamental beliefs.

Tone: Tone is the presence of the teller in the tale - a narrative is always belongs to somebody or some community. We can find in every narrative the values and beliefs of the teller, directly or indirectly, clearly or faintly.

Atmosphere: Atmosphere tells us what is possible in a tale, it sets the boundaries in a particular narrative. What is possible in one tale may be very different from what is possible in another: talking animals, space ships, wizards, messiahs, or hard-boiled New York cops. Because these questions of boundaries, limitations or conditions in life are always answered with belief, they are again big questions. Writers and readers are involved with the question of belief not by choice, but because the narrative element of atmosphere requires it.