How does the 1950’s setting of the short story inform its plot? Discuss three points of 1950’s culture and their relationship to the story.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a timeless story born from
the newly emerged 1950s Southern American culture which was
becoming secularized in its religious values, and
influenced by the "3 Ms": mobility, mass
media,
and materialism.

O'Connor uses
the Misfit's fiery sermon against the grandmother's "watered down" religious values as a
mouthpiece for her denunciations of what Ralph C. Wood calls the "newly emerging
American civil religion [which melted] particularized historic faiths into thin
religious gruel."  He says O'Connor "likened such saccharine religion to pornographic
literature: the achieving of cheap and easy ends at the expense of valuable and
difficult means."  Let's face it, the grandmother is a hypocrite, a self-righteous
back-slider, one who takes her salvation for granted because she hasn't had a Misfit's
gun (a symbol of suffering and death) to her head every moment of her
life.

O'Connor also uses the car as a secular symbol for
the religious state of the grandmother.  Indeed, she is lost and can't remember if her
old home is in Tennessee or Georgia.  So, the 1950s mobility and culture of the car is a
metaphor used to show how displaced Americans had become (a recurring theme
in O'Connors stories--also read "The Displaced Person").  Needless to say, car wrecks
and broken down clunkers are common in her work.

The car,
newspaper clippings, the contents of her purse, and the grandmother's cat worry her more
than the lives of her family and soul, showing a growing sense of 1950s materialism and
mass media messaging--all of which take away from the grace and revelation of belief.
 The grandmother is more worried about her possessions than she is about her own soul.
 The Misfit is a reminder that she can't take her possessions with her (after
death).