Or, to put it another way, there are good reasons to consider the novel a secular form. Narrative corrugates dogma, puts truths in motion.
Religion works to arrest narrative.
Its interest is not in what people multiply are, but in what they singly should be. Religion corrects those who deserve it, while the novel hands down sympathy for those who do not deserve it. Drama needs the dialogical in order to exist, whereas one feels that religion becomes drama only when humans insist on talking back. Coleridge argued that Job proved that the Bible must have been written by humans, because God would never have made such a powerful argument against Himself. Tolstoy, while developing his unorthodox Christianity, renounced his own great novels.