The novel suggests that “think very hard” about philosophy and morals matters more than blind belief.

‘I'm going to leave you alone with your thoughts, now I want you to think very hard.’” However, the woman’s encouragement to respond to the Bible with profound individual reflection is a method John would himself adopt in later years. She would then ask us to think seriously about what we had heard-‘Silently and seriously, that's how I want you to think!’ she would say. Walker would read us an instructive passage from the Bible. In the opening pages of the novel, John disdains the Sunday school teacher who frequently leaves the classroom to go on smoke breaks: “ Mrs. One of the book’s most consistent messages about true faith is how difficult it is for most people, positioning genuine faith as rare and valuable. In light of these contradictions, the novel seems to suggest that a fully informed and thoughtful inner faith, not blind adherence to dogma, is the most meaningful way to approach religion and belief. Furthermore, once the war rolls around, God seems absent from a world filled with so much senseless violence and suffering, and John wrestles with how to overcome his doubt amidst so much pain and evil. However, many of their attitudes and actions throughout the book seem sacrilegious-the boys’ Sunday School is useless, the annual Christmas pageant is a farce, and the reverend fathered an illegitimate child, who happens to be John. In the opening sentence of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, the narrator, John Wheelwright, announces that his childhood friend “is the reason I believe in God I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” Neither John nor Owen are strictly religious in the sense of belonging to one specific church or practicing careful rituals, but they profess to believe in the existence of God.

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