Thanks for your comments, kimtsu, I’m glad you enjoyed my paper. I did, in fact, read many more books than are mentioned in the paper, and could easily have written pages more. I had to prune a lot and cut it down to the bare bones to get it within the limits. Despite the small number of books listed that had overtly negative religious figures, I stand by my original premise, which is that religion is largely ignored in YA lit–that is, most books just don’t talk about it at all (and therefore didn’t get into my paper). When it is mentioned at all, it is often portrayed negatively. You’re right that a really thorough survey would be needed, but the statements you’re nervous about are based on comments from articles written by people who spend a lot of time reviewing YA books, and I think if you go to the library and read at random, you’ll find that they’re pretty accurate.
OK, you’re right about the SF authors. But my point is that their rationalistic/areligious outlook is a serious flaw in their writing, because it gets transferred into every book written. Humanity has yet to come up with a culture that doesn’t need or want anything to believe in, and if you’re inventing whole new human cultures, you have to take that into account. When you don’t, and leave out the question of religion because you think it’s old-fashioned, then every character in your book will be spouting your 20th century intellectual American belief that religion is irrational–and will therefore be more like a 20th century American than anyone 200 years (or whatever) in the future has any right to be. And you, the author, won’t even know it, because it will never occur to you that people could be different. This is because invented cultures are only different from the writer’s own culture when he thinks of making it different and actively tries to do so. Read an old fantasy novel, and everyone is hilariously old-fashioned, because it never occured to the author that it could be otherwise. Perhaps what I should have said is that I think you’ll be able to identify all of 20th century SF writing by the lack of religion–people 200 years in the future will look at our writing and wonder what we were thinking. (Aside: even now, it leaves big holes. I can remember, as a particularly clueless 13-yo, reading the Pern books and vaguely wondering how you could have an entire planet populated by people with relatively little technology who never once wondered about fate, or free will, or God, or any higher power.)
I can’t really comment on whether this stuff applies to adult fiction–I prefer almost anything to adult fiction and almost never read it.
As for whether religious fiction portrays non-members of the group sympathetically, it depends. “Left behind”–well, not really, no, but then it’s dealing in a world that is explicitly black and white, good and evil. Other, less fundamentalist (or better written) fiction–often, yes. The LDS fiction I’ve read has usually portrayed non-LDS people, whether religious or not, very realistically and sympathetically–maybe because the LDS church has so many converts from other religions and cultures. Those books have little application for non-LDS people, though.
To a first approximation though, I don’t think that it’s Hollywood’s fault if pro-Christian movies are made but are not sufficiently popular.