Why does O'Conner use for violence in her stories (like "A Good Man is Hard to Find") to get the attention of both readers & characters?

O'Connor is an Old Testament "hell, fire, and brimstone"
comic writer who uses grotesques to violently and comically expose her luke-warm
Christian characters.

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the
Misfit's accomplice takes the family into the woods and shoots them.  The grandmother
tries to save herself by pleading to the Misfit:

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"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:

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"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:

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"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."

O'Connor uses the
Misfit's violence and grotesqueness as a means of showing the grandmother's
self-righteousness and hypocrisy.  Violence is used as a leveling tool to expose the
grandmother's lack of spirituality.  To her, Christ is not a matter of life and
death.

One critic said:

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"...[O'Connor's] criminals...are Evil and are
fighting a religious battle within themselves--their belief or disbelief in Christ is to
them a matter of life and
death."

O'Connor provides her
grotesque characters, like the Misfit, higher spiritual ground at the expense of social
moral good because she cares more about their perfervid spirituality (their souls) more
than their nature (that they are evil).  "God, like the Misfit, is a force that can
obliterate anguish, that can destroy all the 'grandmothers' of the world."  Violence, or
the gun to the head, is a perfervid reminder that salvation is a matter of life and
death.