The Rain God - Religion

Religion

In the novel The Rain God religion plays an important role.

There are different religious influences presented that affect the Angel family. First of all there is the Roman Catholic belief, which is personified by the character of Mama Chona. She expects every family member to become an angel, which means that everybody has to have a perfect, innocent soul and has to follow those strict religious rules she had followed, like marriage in church or taking part in religious activities. So one could say the family name Angel has also got a symbolic function. Nevertheless there are a few family members who cannot fulfill these expectations of Mama Chona, and as a consequence she considers some members of the family as sinners. On the one hand, for example, there are her two sons Miguel Grande and Felix; the first one mentioned has an affair with another woman, Lola, and Felix is homosexual and the affection for other men leads to his downfall in the end. On the other hand, as another example, there is Mama Chona’s sister Tia Cuca, who has a love relationship with Mr. Davies for several years, but she is not married to him, because of that she is stamped as a family sinner. As said before, there are different religious beliefs described in the book and another one of them is Nina’s, who believes in spiritual contacts with the dead and could also be considered as a family sinner, since this doesn’t fit to the Roman Catholic belief of Mama Chona. The belief of Miguel Chico’s nursemaid Maria is also an important one, because it might have caused Miguel Chico to lose even his faith in any kind of religion. Maria belongs to the Seventh Day Adventists, who believe in the bible word by word. She is sent away from the Angel family, because she secretly took Miguel Chico to her congregation.