Posted on 11/27/2001 9:28:58 AM PST by John O
The release of the first Harry Potter movie is pouring gasoline onto a controversy that already has many parents burning. Parents everywhere are grappling with the presence of Harry Potter in their child’s book bag, toy box and even their classroom.
Last spring, the children’s series reached a milestone, hitting the 100 million worldwide sales mark in only three years.
The J.K. Rowling series continues to top sales charts internationally. Four of seven titles have been published so far—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Each has been translated into 42 different languages, including Zulu and Albanian.
“This is an unprecedented publishing achievement anywhere in the world—either for adult or children’s books,” said Rowling’s agent Christopher Little. “Every time we publish a new Harry Potter book, the first one goes back up to the top of the bestseller list.”
Warner Brothers has spent about $150 million on the movie version of the first book, directed by Chris Columbus of Home Alone fame. A sequel is planned for release next year. And when anything is this captivating for children, there is marketing.
Harry Potter-themed school supplies, bed linens and toys are on store shelves waiting for the pandemonium expected from the movie’s release. Sears, Target and J.C. Penney are heavily marketing Harry Potter toys, bedding and even clothing. Mattel is marketing Harry Potter action figures. Hasbro is producing a trading card game, and video games are also available. Potter will appear in McDonald’s Happy Meals this fall, and the boy wizard will also become a new Coca-Cola spokesman.
Even before “Pottermania” reached this level, parents found keeping children away from the book’s occult themes an uphill battle.
“Beginning last school year, my 6- year-old grandson Jesse was ostracized from the reading class that his teacher conducted everyday,” said Verda Unrau of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Her daughter, Jesse’s mom, went to the teacher when she learned that the first Harry Potter book was to be read in class.
“She was told that Jesse could either sit in with the other kids or go to the office and sit. We assumed this would only be for a week or so, but it turned out to be the whole school year that this teacher dwelt on this book,” Unrau added. “Jesse and another little boy missed the reading time for their whole first year of school.”
That has been the essence of the two-year-old Potter-in-the-classroom debate. Parents who have been told that Christianity must be kept out of schools due to the “separation of church and state” are now trying to protect their children from classroom discussions about paganism and the occult.
Now, publications by Scholastic and Beacham’s SourceBooks have upped the ante. Not only are the Potter books featured on school shelves and read aloud in class, some teachers are also incorporating them into lessons. This means the Harry Potter phenomenon requires parents to deal directly with the topic of witchcraft, whether or not they allow their children to read the series or see the movie.
“That’s the way with all cultural change,” Rev. Robert McGee, co-host of the video Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged, Making Evil Look Innocent told Family Voice. “Cultural engineers establish change one small step at a time. Now that Harry Potter is seen as acceptable children’s literature, it’s not surprising that this series, and other occult themes, are being pushed deeper into the classroom.”
‘Shape Shifting’ and Druids
Beecham Publishing’s Exploring Harry Potter is written by Elizabeth Schafer, Ph.D.,* an expert on children’s literature. This immense volume directs teachers and parents on how to incorporate Potter into history, geography, science and English lessons. Ideas include sports played at the mythical Hogwarts school, the foods Harry and his classmates eat, spelling lessons on Potterisms, and the books’ symbolism.
The Beecham Sourcebook manual goes so far as to undermine Biblical faith by referencing theologians and mystics who deny the inerrancy of Scripture and the deity of Christ. Further, it covers mythology, witchcraft, and Wicca—a natureworshipping pagan religion. The book’s suggestions include:
“Make a collage of the habitat and food for an animal you would like to shapeshift into.”
(“Shape shifting” is a psychic phenomenon in which a person voluntarily and temporarily thinks he is taking on the form of an animal. In Harry Potter, Harry’s dead father appears to him in the form of a stag. Many pagans—those who follow occult religions—believe that meditation and concentration can change their form into that of an animal.)
“Write a paper about how efforts to ban the Harry Potter novels because of their themes of evil, sorcery and witchcraft, and to forbid children from wearing witch and devil costumes, resemble historic witch hunts.”
“Learn about the role of witchcraft in different cultures. Either make a costume for yourself or a doll, or use paint, crayons, or construction paper to design the attire of witches in a specific geographic area.”
The book also provides a bibliography of 28 books on magic, witchcraft and other occult variations that highlight the making of potions, casting spells and communing with the dead. Titles include:
Miranda J. Green’s The World of the Druids, which “describes the history, mythology and literature associated with Druids in addition to discussing modern witchcraft and sorcery practices that are Druid-inspired.” (Druidism is a pagan religion that attempts to recreate the practices of ancient Celtic peoples, which historically included human sacrifice.)
Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, which “describes modern witchcraft practices in the United States.”
Further, Exploring Harry Potter includes a large reference list of Web sites, including links to active pagan, Wiccan and Druid groups.
Enter Scholastic Publishing
Scholastic, the American distributors of the Harry Potter series, also offers online teacher discussion guides written by Kylene Beers, assistant professor of reading at the University of Houston, Texas.
“The following discussion guide … features summaries of the plot, theme, conflict, setting and characterization, as well as a number of questions designed to encourage conversation,” writes Beers on the Scholastic Web site.
Discussion questions include comparing various Potter characters to those in ancient mythology. Another asks about similarities between the masked wizards that torment “muggles” (normal humans) and real group members who have worn hoods when tormenting others.
Still other questions ask students to ponder moral themes, like self-sacrifice, choosing what is right over what is easy, and free will versus preordination—themes better left to parents, since they will likely lose their value under the morally relativistic constraints of today’s public school system.
Christian anti-cult expert Caryl Matrisciana finds this intrusion into classrooms disturbing.
“This is a complete indoctrination program in the schools,” Matrisciana says in the Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged video. “First they interest children in the occult with delightful fantasy literature, then they bring the books into the schools, along with teacher’s guides to fuel the interest in exploration of the occult. Now with this Beecham’s Sourcebook, any computer-literate child can access genuine witchcraft training classes right in his home or classroom.”
A Dangerous Trend
Many applaud the Potter series as harmless fantasy literature and credit the long tomes for getting children to read. But those familiar with the reality of the occult world aren’t taking them lightly.
Matrisciana says witchcraft is real, and she adds that elements of the books symbolize pagan deities. “J.K. Rowling majored in Mythology at Exeter University in England. She researched the occult in order to present an accurate representation in her books.”
Harry Potter is part of a larger trend to bring occult themes to younger children. Just as the seemingly innocent Sabrina the Teenage Witch is followed by darker, teen-themed Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so Potter is followed by darker and more ominous books like the Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman.
But Rev. McGee points out that the Potter craze has a particular danger.
“With Harry Potter children are for the first time seeing other children, step by step, learning to access demonic power to get what they want,” he said.
Marcia Montenegro, occult expert and founder of the ministry Christian Answers for the New Age, disputes claims that the books center on the theme of good versus evil.
“There is no moral center in Harry Potter,” said Montenegro. “Good and evil are depicted as being two sides of the same coin, which is an occult worldview.
“Why is Harry considered good? He breaks the rules, gets away with it, and is even rewarded for it. As one of Harry’s professors says in book three, ‘Harry is a law unto himself.’ From a Christian perspective, this cannot be.”
A former astrology professional and occult practitioner, Montenegro now serves as a missionary with Fellowship International Mission of Allentown, Pennsylvania. She is also working on her master’s degree in apologetics.
This seeming “training ground” for occult beliefs comes at a critical time in our culture. The Pagan Federation International claims its numbers have grown tenfold in the past decade. Online pagan networks estimate there are anywhere from 150,000 to 600,000 practicing pagans in the United States alone—and the Internet has provided an easily accessible resource for those seeking deeper occult involvement.
“The Internet is fabulous for learning about it,” 19-year-old Kes Davidson told the Evening Times of Glasgow, Scotland, where occult practices are flourishing. “There are millions of Web sites out there.”
Occult influences are also growing rapidly in the United States.
“When I first began speaking on the occult in 1995, it was mostly older teens who were experimenting with it. Now you see children as young as 11, 12 and 13 involved,” Montenegro said.
“The occult … is very attractive to kids who are seeking power, affirmation and acceptance, especially those from dysfunctional homes,” Montenegro added. “Harry Potter—targeted at children in the critical ages of 9 through 13—feeds that thirst with practices prohibited by the Bible. I can’t understand why Christian parents wouldn’t be concerned about it.”
Rev. McGee, who founded Rapha, a Christian counseling ministry, agrees with Montenegro about the power of occult influences.
“I counseled many with backgrounds in witchcraft and the occult,” said McGee. “Breaking an addiction to drugs or alcohol is easier than leaving demonic spiritual forces behind. Several of my patients confirmed that many of today’s witches, pagans and other occult practitioners continue the practices of the ancients including drug use and ritual sex.” he added.
Yet, the American Library Association (ALA) and other liberal groups label parents who oppose the trend of occult fantasy literature as “book banners.” Last September, the ALA issued its annual report on challenged or “banned” books. The ALA’s Judith Krug, head of the Office of Intellectual Freedom, told The Tennessean that the Potter books now top that list, becoming one of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the decade.
“The challenges we have had [to Harry Potter] have been in schools, which means the children are going to be deprived of what appears to be the biggest phenomenon children’s publishing has ever known,” Krug said.
Despite the heavy-handed influence on schools of liberal organizations like the ALA—and the book industry’s attempt to exploit the Harry Potter phenomenon in the classroom—Rev. McGee says parents can’t give up the battle for the hearts and minds of their children.
“Parents have to be prepared to look ‘foolish’ if they plan to stand their ground,” said McGee. “The media have been feeding us a candy-coated version of what the occult is really like, and kids today have lost the sense that witchcraft is dangerous.
“The challenge is also on churches to once again educate parents and children to the realities and dangers of the occult and spiritual warfare,” he said.
If a child is mentally and spiritually mature enough, Montenegro says parents don’t necessarily have to be seen as strict disciplinarians. She has spoken with many Christian children who have decided to stop reading the Potter series on their own.
“Explain to them why you are concerned. Show your child the Biblical passages condemning the casting of spells and contact with demons,” Montenegro said.
“Parents needn’t be alarmed or fearful. The Holy Spirit is on their side.”
Despite the impact her family’s opposition to Harry Potter had on her grandson, Verda Unrau says they will hold firm to their convictions.
“We are prepared to make the same stand this year,” she said. “If I have to go wear a placard and picket the school, I will!”
Martha Kleder is a writer and policy analyst for CWA’s Culture and Family Institute.
God Save America (Please)
eBay would work. Just have a big "Box Lot" auction and take care of all of them at once. FReepmail me a link to it. I will be sure to bid.
While I don't buy the "Harry Potter is Satan" schtick, I think this is a legitimate gripe. No overtly Christian fiction stories in school, but overtly occult fiction stories are ok? You have to have it one way or the other.
Or it could be that he stands up for other children that are picked on,shows kindness to strangers and risks his life to aid a friend who is in danger. Nah it must be an occult plot.
I am confident that a child reading the other books would walk away with a clear sense of what is right and what is wrong. I think the Potter books are murkier.
And they're also not nearly as well-written as the other series.
By now most readers in this country are aware of what has come to be
called the Harry Potter phenomenon. It's hard to be unaware. Any bookstore you might care to enter is strewn with giant stacks of the Harry Potter books-three of them now that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has finally been released in
the United States. This blessed event comes after some months during which the on-line bookstore Amazon.co.uk-Britain's branch of the ever-expanding Amazon.com empire-devoted much of its energy to shipping copies across the Atlantic, creating in the process a miniature trade war, as lawyers on both sides of the pond tried to figure out which country a
book is purchased in when it's ordered from a British company but on a computer in America. Whatever the legal status of cyberspatial commerce, anyone visiting either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk last summer could not but note that the best-selling books on both sites were the Harry Potter novels, which ranked a consistent one, two, and three.
Many people are also familiar with the story behind the most talked-about children's books in decades, perhaps ever: how Joanne Rowling, an out-of-work teacher and single mother living on the
dole in Edinburgh, started scribbling a story in a local café as her small daughter dozed in a stroller; how an English publisher, Bloomsbury Books, took a chance on this unknown author; and how, almost wholly by word-of-mouth reports, the
first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, became a best-seller not just among children but also among adults, for whom Bloomsbury designed a more mature-looking cover so commuters on bus and tube would not have to be embarrassed as they eagerly followed Harry's quest to discover what the enormous three-headed dog, Fluffy, was
guarding in that off-limits corridor of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. International success, as indicated by those great piles of books at 40 percent discount and the dominance of Amazon's best-seller lists, quickly followed.
In the twenty-some-odd years that I have been pretty closely following trends in American publishing, no development in the industry has been nearly so inexplicable to me, nor has any development
made me so happy. For I adore the Harry Potter books. I read the first one-under its silly American title, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (the American publisher evidently judged that no book with the word "philosopher" in the title
could sell)-thinking that it might be something I could read to my son. Though I decided that he wasn't quite old enough, at six, to follow the rather complicated plot, I myself was hooked, and in my impatience ordered each of the next two novels in the
series from Amazon.co.uk, thus making my own personal contribution to the perplexity of international trade law. (The remaining books in the series-Rowling plans a total of seven-will be published simultaneously in the U.S. and the U.K., thus cutting the legal Gordian knot.)
J. K. Rowling, as the books' covers have it-the name rhymes with "bowling"-simply has that mysterious gift, so prized among storytellers and lovers of stories but so resistant to critical explication, of world-making. It is a gift that many Christian readers tend to associate with that familiar but rather
amorphous group of English Christian writers, the Inklings-though the association is not quite proper, since only one of the Inklings, J. R. R. Tolkien, had this rare faculty, and few of the others even aspired to it. Tolkien, however, possessed the power in spades, and gave useful names to it as well: he spoke of the "secondary worlds" created by the writer, and of
"mythopoeia" as the activity of such "sub-creation." The sine qua non of such mythopoeia, for Tolkien, is the making of a world that resembles ours but is not ours, a world that possesses internal logic and self-consistency to the same degree that ours does-but not the same logic: it must have its own rules, rules that are peculiar to it and that generate consequences also peculiar to it.
It is important to understand that C. S. Lewis' Narnia books, great
though they may be, are not in this strict sense mythopoeic: Lewis does not want to create a self-consistent secondary world, but rather a world in which all the varieties of mythology meet and find their home. In Narnia there is no internal consistency
whatever: thus Father Christmas can show up in the middle of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Bacchus and Silenus in the middle of Prince Caspian. It may well be that this mythographic promiscuity, so to speak, is key to the success
of the Chronicles of Narnia, but it makes them very different books from Tolkien's, and it is the reason why Tolkien hated the Narnia stories. They lacked the clearly demarcated wholeness which he considered the essential virtue of his own Middle Earth.
Joanne Rowling has expressed her love for the Narnia books-one of the reasons there will be, God willing, seven Harry Potter books is that there are seven volumes of Narnia stories-but as a
literary artist she bears a far greater resemblance to Tolkien. One of the great pleasures for the reader of her books is the wealth of details, from large to small, that mark the Magic world as different from ours (which in the books is called the
Muggle world): the tall pointed hats the students wear in their classes, in which they study such topics as Potions, Transfiguration, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and even Care and Feeding of Magical Creatures; the spells that are always in Latin ("Expelliarmus!"); or the universal addiction to Quidditch, a game that shares some characteristics with basketball,
cricket, and soccer but is played in the air, on broomsticks, and with four balls. Rowling's attention to such matters is remarkable and charming, especially when the details are small: once, when he is visiting the home of a friend from a
Magical family, Harry steps over a pack of Self-Shuffling Playing Cards. It's an item that could have been left out without any loss to the narrative, but it offers an elegant little surprise-and another piece of furniture for this thoroughly imagined universe.
I have made my enthusiasm for these books quite evident to many friends,
but some of them are dubious-indeed, deeply suspicious. These are Christian people, and they feel that books which make magic so funny and charming don't exactly support the Christian view of things. Such novels could at best encourage children to take a smilingly tolerant New Age view of witchcraft, at worst encourage the practice of witchcraft itself.
Moreover, some of them note, Harry Potter is not exactly a model student: he has, as the Headmaster of Hogwarts puts it, "a certain disregard for rules," and spends a good deal of time fervently hoping not to get caught in mid-disregard. This second matter, I think, poses no real problem. It is true that
Harry is often at odds with some of his teachers, but these particular teachers are not exactly admirable figures: they themselves are often at odds with the wise, benevolent, and powerful Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, whom they sometimes attempt to
undermine or outflank. But to Dumbledore, significantly, Harry is unswervingly faithful and obedient; indeed, the climax of the second novel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, turns on Harry's fidelity to Dumbledore.
Moreover, Harry's tendency to bypass or simply flout the rules is a matter of moral concern for him: he wonders and worries about the self-justifications he offers, and often doubts not just his
abilities but his virtue. He is constantly aware that his great unchosen antagonist, Voldemort-the Dark Lord, the most evil of wizards and, after Dumbledore, the most powerful-offers temptations to which he cannot simply assume that he is
immune. And when Dumbledore mentions Harry's "certain disregard for rules" he does so in a way that links such disregard with the forces of evil, thus warning Harry (though his larger purpose in that scene is to encourage the troubled young wizard).
In short, Rowling's moral compass throughout the three novels is sound-indeed, I would say, acute. But the matter of witchcraft remains, and it is not a matter to be trifled with. People today, and this includes many Christians, tend to hold two views about witches: first, that real witches don't exist, and second,
that they aren't as bad as the evil masterminds of the Salem witch trials made them out to be. These are obviously incompatible beliefs. As C. S. Lewis has pointed out, there is no virtue in being tolerant of witches if you think that witchcraft is
impossible, that is, that witches don't really exist. But if there are such things as witches, and they do indeed invoke supernatural or unnatural forces to bring harm to good people, then it would be neither wise nor good to tolerate them. So the issue is an important one, and worthy of serious reflection.
It is tempting to say, in response to these concerns, that Harry Potter is not that kind of wizard, that he doesn't do harm to anyone, except those who are manifestly evil and trying to do harm to him. And these are significant points. But an answer to our question must begin elsewhere.
The place to begin is to invoke one of the great achievements of twentieth-century historical scholarship: the eight volumes Lynn Thorndike published between 1929 and 1941 under the collective title A History of Magic and Experimental Science. And it is primarily the title that I wish to reflect upon here. In the
thinking of most modern people, there should be two histories here: after all, are not magic and experimental science opposites? Is not magic governed by superstition, ignorance, and wishful thinking, while experimental science is rigorous, self-critical, and methodological? While it may be true that the
two paths have diverged to the point that they no longer have any point of contact, for much of their existence-and this is Lynn Thorndike's chief point-they constituted a single path with a single history. For both magic and experimental science are means of controlling and directing our natural environment (and people insofar as they are part of that environment). C. S. Lewis has made the same assertion:
[Francis Bacon's] endeavor is no doubt contrasted in our minds with that
of the magicians: but contrasted only in the light of the event, only because we know that science succeeded and magic failed. That event was then still uncertain. Stripping off our knowledge of it, we see at once that Bacon and the magicians have
the closest possible affinity. . . . Nor would Bacon himself deny the affinity: he thought the aim of the magicians was "noble." It was not obvious in advance that science would succeed and magic fail: in fact, several centuries of dedicated
scientific experiment would have to pass before it was clear to anyone that the "scientific" physician could do more to cure illness than the old woman of the village with her herbs and potions and muttered charms. In the Renaissance, alchemists were divided
between those who sought to solve problems-the achievement of the philosopher's stone, for example (or should I say the sorcerer's stone?)-primarily through the use of what we would call mixtures of chemicals and those who relied more heavily on incantations, the drawing of mystical patterns, and the invocation of spirits.
At least, it seems to us that the alchemists can be so divided. But that's because we know that one approach developed into chemistry, while the other became pure magic. The division may not have
been nearly so evident at the time, when (to adapt Weber's famous phrase) the world had not yet become disenchanted. As
Keith Thomas has shown, it was "the triumph of the mechanical philosophy" of nature that "meant the end of the animistic conception of the universe which had constituted the basic rationale for magical thinking." Even after powerful work of the
mechanistic scientists like Gassendi the change was not easily completed: Isaac Newton, whose name is associated more than any other with physical mechanics, dabbled frequently in alchemy.
This history provides a key to understanding the role of magic in Joanne Rowling's books, for she begins by positing a counterfactual history, a history in which magic was not a false and
incompetent discipline, but rather a means of controlling the physical world at least as potent as experimental science. In Harry Potter's world, scientists think of magic in precisely the same way they do in our world, but they are wrong. The counterfactual "secondary world" that Rowling creates is one in
which magic simply works, and works as reliably, in the hands of a trained wizard, as the technology that makes airplanes fly and refrigerators chill the air-those products of applied science being,
by the way, sufficiently inscrutable to the people who use them that they might as well be the products of wizardry. As Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, "Any smoothly functioning technology gives the appearance of magic."
The fundamental moral framework of the Harry Potter books, then, is a familiar one to all of us: it is the problem of technology. (As Jacques Ellul wrote, "Magic may even be the origin of
techniques.") Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is in the business of teaching people how to harness and employ certain powers-that they are powers unrecognized by science is really beside the point-but cannot insure
that people will use those powers wisely, responsibly, and for the common good. It is a choice, as the thinkers of the
Renaissance would have put it, between magia and goetia: "high magic" (like the wisdom possessed by the magi in Christian legend) and "dark magic."
Hogwarts was founded by four wizards, one of whom, Salazar Slytherin, at least dabbled and perhaps reveled in the Dark Arts, that is, the use of his powers for questionable if not downright
evil purposes, and for centuries many of the young wizards who reside in Slytherin House have exhibited the same tendency.
The educational quandary for Albus Dumbledore, then-though it is never described so overtly-is how to train students not just in the "technology" of magic but also in the moral discernment necessary to avoid the continual reproduction of the
few great Dark Lords like Voldemort and their multitudinous followers. The problem is exacerbated by the presence of faculty members who are not wholly unsympathetic with Voldemort's aims.
The clarity with which Rowling sees the need to choose between good and evil is admirable, but still more admirable, to my mind, is her refusal to allow a simple division of parties into the Good
and the Evil. Harry Potter is unquestionably a good boy, but, as I have suggested, a key component of his virtue arises from
his recognition that he is not inevitably good. When first-year students arrive at Hogwarts, they come to an assembly of the entire school, students and faculty. Each of them sits on a stool in the midst of the assembly and puts on a large, battered,
old hat-the Sorting Hat, which decides which of the four houses the student will enter. After unusually long reflection, the Sorting Hat, to Harry's great relief, puts him in Gryffindor, but not before telling him that he could achieve real
greatness in Slytherin. This comment haunts Harry: he often wonders if Slytherin is where he truly belongs, among the pragmatists,
the careerists, the manipulators and deceivers, the power-hungry, and the just plain nasty. Near the end of the second book,
after a terrifying encounter with Voldemort-his third, since Voldemort had tried to kill Harry, and succeeded in killing his parents, when Harry was a baby, and had confronted Harry again in the first book-he confesses his doubts to Dumbledore.
"So I should be in Slytherin," Harry said, looking desperately into Dumbledore's face. "The Sorting Hat could see Slytherin's power in me, and it-" "Put you in Gryffindor," said
Dumbledore calmly. "Listen to me, Harry. You happen to have many qualities Salazar Slytherin prized in his hand-picked
students. Resourcefulness . . . determination . . . a certain disregard for rules," he added, his moustache quivering again. "Yet the Sorting Hat placed you in Gryffindor. You know why that was. Think."
"It only put me in Gryffindor," said Harry in a defeated voice, "Because I asked not to go in Slytherin. . . ." "Exactly," said Dumbledore, beaming once more. "Which makes you very different from
[Voldemort]. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." Harry sat motionless in
his chair, stunned. Harry is stunned because he realizes for the first time that his confusion has been wrongheaded from
the start: he has been asking the question "Who am I at heart?" when he needed to be asking the question "What must I do in
order to become what I should be?" His character is not a fixed preexistent thing, but something that he has the responsibility for making: that's why the Greeks called it character, "that which is engraved." It's also what the Germans mean when they
speak of Bildung, and the Harry Potter books are of course a multivolume Bildungsroman-a story of "education," that is to say, of character formation.
In this sense the strong tendency of magic to become a dream of power-on
the importance of this point Lynn Thorndike, Keith Thomas, and C. S. Lewis all agree-makes it a wonderful means by
which to focus the theme of Bildung, of the choices that gradually but inexorably shape us into certain distinct
kinds of persons. Christians are perhaps right to be wary of an overly positive portrayal of magic, but the Harry Potter books
don't do that: in them magic is often fun, often surprising and exciting, but also always potentially dangerous.
And so, it should be said, is the technology that has resulted from the
victory of experimental science. Perhaps the most important question I could ask my Christian friends who mistrust the
Harry Potter books is this: is your concern about the portrayal of this imaginary magical technology matched by a concern for
the effects of the technology that in our world displaced magic? The technocrats of this world hold in their hands
powers almost infinitely greater than those of Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort: how worried are we about them, and their
influence over our children? Not worried enough, I would say. As Ellul suggests, the task for us is "the measuring of
technique by other criteria than those of technique itself," which measuring he also calls "the search for justice before God."
Joanne Rowling's books are more helpful than most in prompting such measurement. They are also-and let's not forget the importance of this point-a great deal of fun.
I don't know if this has been posted before, but it explained the situation to me and afterwards I read all 4 books that are currently out and I saw the movie. And you know what? It was great.
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