In the story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," what qualities about the family are meant to be taken seriously?

 

O'Connor would want us to care about the family's souls.  She would want us to ask,
"Why does this family, if 'saved' by the blood of Jesus, try to save themselves from
death?"  Her implicit answer seems to be that most people ironically worry about their
souls most when they are about to lose them.  If this is the case, she seems to be saying that
we should live every day as if we had a gun to our head.  She certainly did: she was diagnosed
with a fatal case of lupus, which was a death sentence that looms over all of her
writing.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1955) tells the story of a
family en route from Tennessee to Florida for vacation. Through a series of the mishaps by the
grandmother and her cat, the family car wrecks near some woods in Florida. Two witnesses from a
following car stop to aid the family, all of whom are relatively unscathed. The grandmother
identifies one of the witnesses as The Misfit, a mass murderer on the loose.

Her admission is a death sentence for the family. The Misfit's accomplice takes the
family into the woods and shoots them. The grandmother tries to save herself by pleading to the
Misfit, "You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you come from
nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money I've
got!"

The Misfit responds:

Jesus
was the only One that ever raised the dead and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything
off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything
and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you
got left the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other
meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.

Just before it
is her turn to be shot, the grandmother says:

Why you're
one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" She touches the Misfit on the shoulder,
and he springs back "as if a snake had bitten him and [shoots] her three times through the
chest.

The Misfit tells his accomplice to throw the
grandmother into the woods with the others, adding: "She would have bee a good woman if it
had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."