Defending Harry Potter

WorldNetDaily ^ | 6/21/03 | Joel Miller

[Xenalyte]

If provoking others to sneer is your thing, I've got the trick: Just walk into a room of Christians and say, "I love Harry Potter!" It works like magic.

Take the case of Beliefnet writer Anne Morse, who has taken it on the chin for her support of J.K. Rowling's series of children's novels centered on the muss-haired, bespectacled boy wizard.

"Dear Ms. Morse," one reader began, "You are the handmaiden of Satan, a succubus from the pit of Hell." I suppose few folks ever win points for timidity, but isn't this going too far?

The four Potter novels I've read have been very well written. The characters have deepened and grown considerably since book 1, making their continued stories of great interest. Rowling's humor works, and her sense of pace is nearly perfect. As the plots gain complexity from book to book, this is especially important. Rowling carried off the 700-plus pages of book 4 with hardly a bump – unless we're talking about "witchcraft."

Sure to trip up at least some Christian readers (Frank Sinatra did say it was "strictly taboo"), I put the term in scare-quotes because the kind of "witchcraft" you get in the Potter novels is like the stuff you get from the green lady with the warty nose in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

My wife, a Wiccan before converting to Christianity, can well attest to the fact that flying broomsticks, wands, magic potions and the like are all, for lack of a better term, hocus-pocus. The use of these items in the Potter novels is pure fantasy and fancy.

Rowling ties some of the "magic" to the darker arts, sure, but that is only to create the necessary evil in the story. No conflict, no story. No bad guys, snore. In the end, the type of "magic" used in Harry Potter is no more diabolical than the so-called "magic" of the Tolkien or Lewis stories. (Note also a few other great Christian novelists who use "magic" to entertaining ends: Charles Williams, George MacDonald, Stephen R. Lawhead.)

What's more, Douglas Jones, senior editor of evangelical culture-and-thought magazine Credenda/Agenda, makes an insightful argument about the general shape of worldviews and the hat-tip that Potter – however unconsciously – makes toward Christianity, not against it:

One of the most overlooked features of modern stories like the Potter series is their implicit confession of the triumph of Christianity. This compliment to Christianity is not just the fact that the Potter stories are decidedly Christ-figure stories – an elect son, threatened at birth, who sacrifices His life for his friends and triumphs over evil in an underworld, even coming back from death for a feast. Those narrative categories are complimentary enough, but the deeper compliment is the story's use of a Christian psychology. In its generic sense, a psychology is just a worldview's characteristic way of interacting with life. There is a distinctive Christian psychology, a Hellenistic psychology, a modernist psychology, a postmodern psychology, a Wiccan psychology, and so on. The Potter characters could have been written with any of these. They could have acted like those resentful infant-adults of the Iliad; they could have had the psychology of ancient druids. But they don't. Instead, the Potter stories give us largely Christianized witches, witches who have fully absorbed Christian ethical categories: love, kindness, hope, loyalty, hierarchy, community, and more.

Young Potter and his friends learn the importance of bravery, self-sacrifice, duty and defending the weak. And the story portrays a striking moral divide.

Take just the first novel: The lie of the main antagonist, Voldemort, spoken through an enslaved professor from Potter's school, is that "There is no good or evil, there is only power, and those too weak to pursue it." Harry knows the truth and fights to the point of death to keep Voldemort from seizing the power he desires.

On a more minor scale, The Mirror of Erised ("Desire" backwards) teaches a lesson about covetousness, contentment and spending too much time wishing after things wanted instead of going out and actually doing.

Some have complained about Potter's disrespect for authority and how he is seemingly rewarded for breaking school rules. This is poppycock. Rowling puts Harry into situations that make for good storytelling: The rule says one thing, but not confronting the danger lurking around the corner is far worse than the consequences of breaking the rule. The dilemma creates the tension that motivates the character. Moral and ethical dilemmas are what make or break stories. In short, Harry isn't rewarded for breaking rules; he's rewarded for sacrificing himself, saving lives and fighting evil.

What about the danger that people will miss the obvious moral message and heroism and succumb instead to the supposed proselytizing for paganism? Jones has the blunt instrument: "Harry Potter can't be a threat. Wizardry doesn't really work. And if your kids are really tempted to join a coven, then it's not a giant leap to say that you've failed miserably as a parent."

This may be too general a statement, but I think it's generally true: The morality of the Harry Potter novels is impossible to miss; the immorality has to be blown out of proportion or imported entirely.

Perhaps instead of railing, my fellow Christians should start reading. The Potter novels certainly get many things wrong, but they get a lot of things right, and if we are discerning, we can learn from both.

[rwfromkansas]

Harry Potter is fun fantasy, which is why I am not upset by it.

As for real witches (both Wiccans and those practicing more dark arts), I have no sympathy for. They are all in league with Satan.

[discostu]

As a matter of fact I know just the place:
http://www.whatarerecords.com/

[rwfromkansas]

What kind of twisted individual said you were going to hell for reading the "Lord of the Rings?"

They are mentally deranged.

I have not read the works, but you can spot so many Christian parallels in the movies it is incredible. I love the movies.

Anybody who says the LOTR is evil needs to get his head checked.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

I need to keep something around - granola bars, slimfast or something. I know there's some month old turkey in the office fridge, and several 3 year old cans of Coors, but those all scare me.

[rwfromkansas]

I am ID myself, but I can only hack so much of those threads. Basically because a lot of the ID folks come off as ignorant and it is quite embarrasing some of the things they say. And then I can't stand the arrogance of the evolutionists. Those threads never go anywhere productive unfortunately.

[rwfromkansas]

Indeed. But lighten up, unless kids start going out and actually dabbling in sorcery or divination.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

I'll be damned - somebody still prints them. I've got hundreds hogging perfectly good storage bins in the basement - I'd like to think there is some small market for 'em.

Some is good, some utterly reprehensible (like that awful ELP "Love Beach").

[rwfromkansas]

I read books about King Arthur when young and some fantasy books about witches.

I turned out okay.

[rwfromkansas]

Jonah was not swallowed by a whale necessarily, just a "big fish," some aquatic animal of some sort.

[rwfromkansas]

But yes, he really was swallowed.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Best King Arthur movie by far - Excalibur.

Merlin rocked, Guinevere was a babe, and many of the Knights were very cool.

[ican'tbelieveit]

I have been told the same thing by members of fundamental christians. They feel because there is a wizard, and magic, and... on and on, it is evil, and by reading it you were opening yourself up to possession and a trip to hell.

[TheBigB]

Depends on your translation...

"For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Matthew 12:40 (NIV Bible)

Here is the same verse again in the King James version:

"For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Matthew 12:40 (KJV)

[discostu]

Not only that but you can get new record players:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=electronics&field-keywords=record%20player&search-type=ss&bq=1/102-8236127-0492904

10 dollars worth of cables and connectors from Radio Shack will plug one of these puppies into your computer. I've been converting old LPs to CD, kind of fun because my musical taste and musical media tended to "cluster" in my youth (my heavy King Crimson phase was also a heavy LP phase) so I'm rediscovering some great music in my library.

I think these guys http://www.stroud-clayshooting-club.netfirms.com/Club.htm have a better solution for Love Beach though.

[rwfromkansas]

When I was in HS, we decided to do an editorial over Harry Potter because for some reason, lots of HS students read this book. Anyway, there were some good conservatives on staff and a couple liberals, so we had a hard time deciding what to say. We did locate a quote from a coven leader who said Harry Potter helped their recruiting, but then found out the quote was fraudulent. There just was no evidence we could locate that the series inspires significant numbers to practice witchcraft.

Ultimately, we decided to come down saying the books were good for getting people to read and that parents should make judgments about the material contained therein.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Damn - my wife just called, begging to go to some spa in Dallas - but this may be more important, depending on what I can get already printed on CD, what I can find online and what I'll need to use my old records for.

F'rinstance, have you ever tried to find CDs of Keith Emerson with the Nice, or the Quincy Jones version of "Smackwater Jack" (beats the hell out of the Carole King cut, and the albums got some other great stuff on it)?

[Chancellor Palpatine]

I looked for it before - its the first time I found it. Great album, but damn, its pricy.

[discostu]

Actually it's not too suprising they be popular in HS, they really are more young adult (YA) books than kids. The series starts when he's 11 and will end when he's 18, in America that's 6th grade through Senior year, in the latest book he'd be a Sophomore. So it's pretty much in line with HS aged kids. That's also one of the reason it's success is so remarkable, traditionally YA is a tough field, kids that read a lot tend to skip past it straight to adult books, kids that haven't caught the reading bug tend to have stopped reading by then (I work an SF convention, I've scheduled and attended a few panels on these issue). What's happened though is that Potter has good cross age appeal so it's doing well in age brackets above and below the traditional YA demographic (IMHO given the increasing darkness Potter should be read by any kid more than 4 years younger than Potter in that book, that's just IMHO).

I also think that's why those that try bashing it are taking so much guff, this isn't like previous times when they've attacked fringe hobbies and moderately popular music, during those most people didn't know what they were talking about so it was just a few people trying to defend their entertainment from wild accusations. They're now going after something wildly popular now, lots of people know they're full of it.

[rwfromkansas]

First, some children may find witchcraft as a way to have power. True. But until I see hard evidence that more than just a few Harry Potter readers are converting to white or black magic, I don't think this should mean the books are evil in themselves. They are fantasy.

Next, there is no doubt that Ouji Boards etc. open the doors to the demonic realm. I had HS classmates who had some incredible and unexplainable things happen to them after using a ouji board. But Harry Potter is not the equivalent of actually trying to initiate contact into the other realm. Reading a fantasy book does not do this. It is only if they act on what they read and start reading spell books, the Book of Shadows, etc., that the door to the evil one is truly opened.

Most kids are able to see Harry Potter is fiction, not reality.

[discostu]

Some of that stuff can be really hard to find, one of the other advantages of the conversion is that it's cheaper (once you have all the equipment and software that is, but that cost pro-rates) than buying it on CD especially if they haven't added boonus tracks for the CD (or they suck, lots of curddy bonus tracks out there), blank CDs are about a buck a piece. Also if you're an audiophile you can play with your mix levels and get the CD pressed your way (something I always loved in my recordable cassette days).