How does Flannery O'Connor express her religious viewpoint through her stories set in the Deep South?

Flannery O'Connor once wrote that she lived in the "Christ-haunted South." That is, O'Connor found herself in an area of evangelicals and their horror of sin which is part of the "landscape," while at the same time her own faith gave her the sacramentalism of Catholicism.  This strange juxtaposition of theologies has provided O'Connor with the paradox of nature's playing the role of a hostile and even evil force as, for example, in "A View of the Woods" in which the trees are "sullen" and "gaunt," while in other works humans are describes as "wheezing horses," "hyenas," "crabs," and "goats." But, at the same time, this "worst of paths" provides the epiphany which leads to sacramental grace and salvation from sin.

Further, O'Connor has felt that the Catholic mind separates nature from grace, thus perceiving the fictional depiction of nature as sentimental.  Because she has perceived sentimentality an excess, O'Connor uses nature to emphasie the negativity in the lives and mentality of her characters, thus avoiding this sentimentality.  In his essay "The Dark Side of the Cross:  Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction," Patrick Galloway writes that O'Connor utilizes nature as a 

hard, sharp tool with which to hew and chisel her work from the living rock of the real world....and it is by keeping nature constantly in view that the author avoids the sentimental, as well as its flipside, the obscene.

Thus, with the grotesque and violent, O'Connor brings her characters to epiphanies of the horror of their sins and grace without sentimentality.  This technique O'Connor herself terms the "reasonable use of the unreasonable"; and, for O'Connor's readers, this provides a greater vision of spirituality without faith-based beliefs of either the Evangelical or the Catholic.

What characteristics make Flannery O'Connor a southern writer?

The identification of “southern writer” may be applied to any author who lives in, sets their works in, or writes about characters who hail from the US South. It is often applied to those authors who indicate that the Southern environment played a significant role in shaping those characters and who excel at evoking an atmosphere that seems uniquely Southern. For 20th century writers, this often includes evoking antebellum ideologies, emphasizing spirituality and death, and exploring the implications of unwholesome sexual activity or desire.

Flannery O’Connor created memorable characters, many of whom experience crises of faith, in a variety of Southern settings, especially small town and even more remote rural hinterlands. Their behavior is often so exaggerated and outlandish that they have been called “grotesques.” Writing about this classification in the essay, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” she noted the preoccupation, often misplaced, on “monstrosities” and “everything deformed and grotesque.” These exaggerations often place O’Connor as second only to William Faulkner in the sub-genre of Southern Gothic fiction.

What is Flannery O'Connor's view of the South?

O'Connor depicts the South in her stories as backwards place populated by unsophisticated people who are behind the times. Many of her characters are what are called grotesques, because O'Connor gives them bodily distortions, a disability, or a disagreeable quality such as racism. Many of the stories take place in tacky places we don't like to think about too often: a crowded doctor's office, a bus, a family road trip, a roadside diner, an out-of-the-way farm, or a drab part of Atlanta. Her Southern characters are missing limbs, are overweight, have severe acne, speak poor English, and often are anything but the "beautiful" people we might wish them to be.

However, while O'Connor never provides a flattering portrait of the South, she sees the region and the people in it as both local and universal. They represent the sins of all people. Her characters, though they often repel us with their narrow-mindedness, their petty pride, their false sense of superiority based on race or class, their lack of self-awareness, their deceptions, or their physical issues, are all of us. We are all in need of God's grace, O'Connor is saying, as much as these people are, and just like them, we are undeserving of it, though often granted it by a God who can see the good in even grotesque individuals.