How do you do a religious and biblical themes and parallels without being preachy or disrespectful?

I was raised Christian (and actually was involved in the church til my late teens as a choirgirl), and I think it can work, but you have to be careful where you push or it starts to feel "preachy". The Narnia books are a good one to look at, because they work in places, but not so much in others.

Generally, Narnia works (at least prior to the end of the last book) by having a great Fantasy story where there's a magic lion who is hinted (often not too subtly) to be Jesus. There's a great analogue to the Crucifixion in The Lion, the Witch and the Warderobe that doesn't feel obvious if you're not looking for the parallels, and the messages Aslan and the heroes espouse about honesty, redemption, forgiveness and hope feel universal enough to be enjoyed by pretty much anyone.
Where Narnia tends to fall down for me is when it stops just being about general spirituality, metaphor and ideals about being a good person, and starts explicitly laying out that "Yes, Aslan is Jesus" and "If you don't know him, you can't really be good". For example, even as a christian child, it grated on me that the narrator felt it necessary to say that Eustace is an entitled brat because he went to a secular state school and so wasn't familiar with Christian teachings. Or how at the end of the series, we're meant to be happy that the characters all died in a freaking train crash because they're in heaven now, while oh... that silly Susan wanting to have a life and stuff and be an adult woman who has love and sex instead of an eternal child, she doesn't get to die in a train crash, poor thing!

I think the line may be when you go past the greater spiritual themes and lessons of Christianity and get bogged down in some of the specific patriarchal and exclusionary dogma. Like nobody's going to mind if there's a character who espouses the importance of forgiveness and charity, and perhaps makes a heroic sacrifice on behalf of a group of people. But if you put in somebody who is like... bad because they're not in the good religion and who immediately turns good on embracing it, or say... there's an evil gay person trying to seduce the good guys to their debauched atheist ways and whose evil stems from being detached from the light of the one true god.... Or you have a character who insists an abused child must "honour their father and mother" while the narrative frames them as right because it's in the Bible.... this is where it starts to feel preachy and uncomfortable. The general themes of Christianity tend to be decent enough; don't hoard money, be kind to people, take a day off once a week, don't take revenge etc. It's usually the more specific dogma that's often barely in the bible but widely used to oppress others that people take issue with like "abortions are always wrong", "having sex without having been married by a priest is evil", "having literally any other beliefs, even just being the wrong sect of Christianity means going to hell", that people have issue with, as well as things like using Christian priest imagery for good guys uncritically, presenting all priests as kind, trustworthy authority figures, ignoring all the coverups of Child Abuse and similar. Priests are ultimately just people; I've met some who were lovely, kind, wise people, and some who were absolute assholes.

In other words, if it's just metaphor rather than an advert for Christianity, and the lessons you're trying to teach are things people generally across most cultures can vibe with because they're just generally good life lessons or morals, there's generally not going to be a problem.

My story has lots of christian themes in it. It has angels, mentions god, and demons. I'm playing pretty straight as its just the world the characters live in. I think that is the best way to do it with any religion. Don't make it a parody of the religion or stereotype it. No one like edgy-boy takes on religion. If your story deals with it, just write your story.

Kinda going off what @allenT said, I think the biggest fault if most of the more preachy types of stories I can think of is don't monolithize your groups or ideologies - you shouldn't anyway but especially not based on prejudice or caricature. Often the more preachy stories use this technique to create strawmen for their preferred ideology to easily overcome. It can be pretty easy to fall in this trap but remember that even in some of the craziest of cults or religious groups there have been differences of opinions. There are recordings, for instance, of people begging the Jones town leader to not go through with the mass suicide at least for the children. Consider all the various schisms and denominations of Christianity. It's natural for ideologies, ethnicities - just people - to have fractures. Having these fractures or just differences reflected in your story can go along way to grounding your story. As long as those are understandable given your world (and woven in accordingly so readers can see them, not only be told them) it shouldn't come across as preachy or disrespectful - usually since to do this it requires a decent understanding of the ideologies and how they are in the real world anyway.

I mean... if you ascribe to the concept of "death of the author" and that it's valid to interpret a text's meaning by the contents of the text alone, without the author giving further explanation of their choices or elaborating further... I feel like what I said is a valid way to put it for the discussion in the thread.

Yes. I am aware that Lewis said outside of the text something to that effect, but this thread is about what a creator puts in their text, and how to avoid having what is in the text cause upset. It's not an advisable solution to tell a creator "just explain yourself outside the story". I don't want to encourage any creator to be like J K Rowling and to keep filling in lore on social media instead of concentrating on how best to get across key lore or intended meaning in the story itself.

I've been writing a story that is religiously inspired as well, and just like in your case it was somewhat an accident. I started by throwing in an aside reference to a mezuzah and next thing I knew the main character was an observant Jew and the story was based on what it's like to be a religious minority in a place where nobody gets it. In my case, there are not so many direct parallels to Biblical narratives, though the main character is aware of the stories (in altered version as befits the world she lives in), but still steeped in more modern practice.

I can send you a link to my story if you want (since you did ask for such) but I'll warn you that it probably is too preachy. I'm not really writing the story for anyone except for myself, so I'm going with the "fuck it" approach and writing whatever I feel like with little regard to anything else. Some parts are directly based on things that happened to me or stories I've heard from my parents about things that happened to them in college. As such it's probably kinda terrible X_X. But it is, at the very least, in a similar sort of vein to what you describe.

If you want to avoid preachy narratives, avoid “us vs them” type of stories. When you are setting up the Christian character as being better than everyone else and vilifying all non-Christian, it gets super annoying. Especially how I met a lot of people who were raised Christian and dealt with trauma from the religion. Or people who have different religious beliefs or are just not religious. Not everyone agrees with Christian beliefs and that doesn’t make them evil.

I have an angel in my story but he’s not a messenger of god. He’s just some guy with wings, because people with wings look cool. Nothing religious about it.

Edit: I forgot I also wrote a comic about a Christian character but it is not really about him converting people. He prays and talks about God and works at a Christian thrift store but the story isn’t about religion or anything.

I say that you put effort into the parts of the story that have no religion involved, like character development.
For example, take the film The Prince of Egypt.

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Try to avoid being preachy or obsessive, and simply write the religious aspects with care, make them a part of the story yet not the ONLY part.

That's good. Although I'm an atheist I feel that Christians media is oversaturated with poorly written, annoyingly preachy programmes, and not enough decent stories that involve religion.

We Jews have it a little better in that regard but only slightly so. I've learned lately that interestingly enough, the highly orthodox Jewish children's media is often a lot more interesting, nuanced, and better-produced and written than the ones meant for more reform/"modern" (with massive quote marks to be clear) audiences, which I find striking and kinda fascinating. It's almost the opposite of how Bibleman is described above - without feeling as much need to cater to every audience, the creators have more room to use their extensive knowledge of the source material in fun and creative ways because they're more confident their niche audience will get it, rather than water it down into nothingness. To be honest, I think that's the true irony of shows like Bibleman (again, based on the above description rather than personal experience): If one presents your religion to your children as something so bland and dumb as "Bible and Jesus = good, anyone who doesn't think that = bad" then surely you have nobody but yourself to blame when your children grow up to think there's nothing meaningful to be had and so stop being religious?

Regardless, one of my pipe dreams is a Talmud-themed heavy metal band. I like to imagine it would be the sort of thing religious Jews could get a lot out of, while also increasing awareness and interest among the sorts of people who are Jewish but never actually learned anything beyond basic information growing up and found themselves drifting away because they didn't know there was any depth there. Maybe a song about the Oven of Akhnai would convince a few people to read the story themselves and learn that the tale of the Laser Eyeball Rabbi, y'know?

I think there's not going to be a general set of rules to follow, and I think what works for some may not work for you. You know your faith. You know your story. You know there's such a thing as banging the drums too hard and the music goes away. I believe if you keep those in mind as you write and edit, you'll do well. You may not make every reader happy & you may get suggestions that you went to heavy or too light on faith. But it's your story. It will resonate with others if it does to you. <3

hmm interesting question,myself i am of no mainstream religion and for my series the "church" is one of the enemies, but i would think like any message in story is to not pound it over peoples heads or making it so black and white, it needs nuaunce and subtilty

Messages are told. A theme is merely an idea that is explored in your story, without necessarily coming to any concrete conclusions. Leave that up to the reader to decide for themselves instead of ramming it down their throat. Avoid expository statements from characters that are just a mouth piece for your religious thoughts on the subject because readers will immediately pick up on that and get irritated. Instead, all angles of said idea should be introduced and explored via the actions and choices of the characters (and be completely understandable) and via the consequences that ensue as a result. Also if you want it to be truly engaging, avoid obvious statements like 'genocide is bad.' Yeah. Most people you encounter on the street would agree with that and you aren't really adding anything that challenges the reader to think about a problem that may be difficult and uncomfortable to explore.

A lot of the time, stories are nothing more than a 'what if' scenario. What if we become competent enough with genetic engineering for it to be publically viable? It could save lives and potentially eliminate threats such as cancer and extend human longevity. But if it was highly available, would it eventually develop into a for-profit industry that paves the way for a more cosmetic and eugenics-based use that is only available to wealthier people and potentially erase an entire people group such as autistic people? How dramatically would that kind of advancement affect our society and culture as it is now and in what ways would it be better and what ways would it be worse?

Generally, problems are more nuanced and complex than we like to paint them, and it can be a good way to engage readers and have it be something they have to think about even after they stop reading it. Of course, certain genres can get away with simply being a fun ride but it sounds like you have something in mind that you want to say, especially with your biblical metaphors.

Star Trek: The Next Generation does this really well where they present a problem that doesn't seem to have an obvious answer and you can understand why any of these potential methods of dealing with it make sense for each character. You can also display characters that are at complete opposite ends of the issue and observe through the lens of the protagonist how this affects their lives and their surrounding environment and allow the reader to determine who is right in that situation or to conclude that there is validation in both responses and that there simply isn't a good answer.