After Wright’s mother has been paralyzed, he goes in to talk to her. She tells him that she cannot bear the pain any longer, and wants to die. Richard says that he is now numb to reacting to his mother. He no longer has a reason to react to her. She gave into her problems, and Richard does not want to do this.
Richard has a hard life, full of racial prejudice and religious pressures. He does not want to give into them, and just do what he is supposed to do. He will not just give in to the idea that as a black boy he is supposed to be poor and not amount to anything. He continues to try to find work so that he is not hungry. He works to fill both the hunger and the Hunger. Working fills the Hunger because now he has something to do with himself. He isn’t following the rules of his aunt or Granny.
Religiously, Richard says that while sitting in church, he is emotionally attracted to religion and God, but that it does not make sense to him, and he cannot believe in it. He wants to believe in it because it would give him hope, but he knows he cannot because of his life and the world around him. There is nothing good in his life to prove that there is this higher power. There is no evidence, therefore, he can’t believe in the religion that his grandma so desperately wants him to.
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Yes, I think that you're right that he can't believe in religion because there's no evidence. I think that it's more than just there's nothing good in his life, though it must be hard to really believe in God if your life's that bad. But he hasn't had the education or the intellectual stimulation to think of things in higher terms. His whole world is very concrete. He's physically hungry, yet doesn't yet understand his mental hunger. He worries about practical things like his mother, where he lives, what Granny might do to him. So thinking in the abstract with no supporting evidence must be difficult.
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