The 7th and final book on Harry Potter was released around the globe on July 21. People-adults and children- stood in line for hours to be the first to read the book. A co-worker’s wife and children went to Border’s bookstore and stood in line for a few hours just so that they would be among the first to have that book.
“Will Harry die?” was the question Potter’s fans had been discussing even long before the book was released. I even wonder if gamblers would wager their money on this. (Perhaps they did!).
Many prominent figures- James Dobson, Pope Benedict XVI, John Hagee, and many others both from religious and secular circles- condemned Harry Potter books. John Hagee in his October 2005’s newsletter wrote, “When demons invade your life, they do so by your inviation. You accomplish this by the books you read. When you read the Bible, you are inviting the presence of the Holy Spirit into your life. When you read occult books such as, Ann Rice and gothic books, you invite demons in. Similarly, when you allow your children to read Harry Potter, whose theme is witchcraft; you give Satan an invitation to invade your life and the lives of your children.“
May Christians read Harry Potter? For those who are not familiar with the storyline, the Rev. John Barach of Reformation Covenant Church of Southern Oregon provided the following summary and opinion in one of the discussion groups that I belong to:
BOQ (Beginning of Quote):
Here’s the basic plot: A young boy named Harry Potter, whose parents have been killed somewhat mysteriously before the books begin, discovers that he is actually a wizard. He’s being raised by his hateful uncle and aunt, who are emphatically not wizards though his parents turn out to have been.
Harry is whisked off to Hogwarts, a “public school” (British; we’d call them boarding schools) for wizards, where he is to be trained to use his gifts. At school, his two best friends are Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.
Each book starts with Harry back at the home of the Dursleys, his uncle and aunt, and then covers a school year at Hogwarts. There are seven books, in part because there are seven school years to cover.
In the course of each book, Harry has a number of adventures at the school. Here we have to recognize that the author, J. K. Rowling (pronounced to rhyme with “Bowling,” I’m told), is writing in a genre that’s more familiar to British readers than to Americans. That is, she’s writing a “school story.” British “school stories” often deal with pranks pulled by students in the dorms, students sneaking out after hours, etc. And there’s a lot of that in these books.
But there’s also danger. The evil wizard who killed Harry’s parents, Lord Voldemort, known to many as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” is still powerful. He had attempted to kill Harry at the same time as Harry’s parents, but failed, though Harry bears a lightning-bolt shaped scar on his forehead as a result of the attack. But Voldemort still wants Harry dead.
Each book carries the story a bit further. The first book is the lightest, but as the series continues later books draw on details you’d almost forgotten from the earlier books, details that you might have thought weren’t all that important.
There are a number of recurring themes, among them * The challenges of growing up as a celebrity. Everyone in the wizard world knows who Harry is, since he’s the only person to have survived an attack by Lord Voldemort, whom most people are afraid even to mention.
* The challenges of submitting to authority. Some readers complain that Harry and his friends don’t keep the school rules. (Perhaps those readers were never young themselves?) A broader concern has to do with Harry’s morals. Sometimes, for instance, Harry or other characters won’t tell the truth. In some of the books, Harry goes through a bit of adolescent anger.
For me, those things aren’t problems in the books. I don’t believe that a moral book has to show only moral characters. In fact, I agree with Chesterton who said “If the characters aren’t wicked, the book is.”
Harry isn’t perfect. He’s flawed. He does things that are wrong, and often he gets in trouble. On the other hand, sometimes he gets away with it, just as you did when you were young.
But along the way, Harry is learning when to submit to authority and when (and how) not to. Not all authority, we recognize, is godly authority. We are allowed to resist tyrants while at the same time we mustn’t become revolutionaries. That isn’t the easiest thing to learn, and it’s especially hard to learn when you’re a young teenager who may be the only person who can stand up to a great tyrant and defeat him.
In fact, Harry’s disregard for rules (to say nothing of his temper) is one of the temptations that he faces. Those who disregard the rules and fail to submit to authority, even though it may sometimes be unjust authority, can end up in Voldemort’s power. (See the discussion in Alan Jacob’s article here: http://www.firstthings.com
* Race and gifts. Before I get into this one, let me say something about magic. There are lots and lots of magic in the Harry Potter books and I don’t think that should pose a problem for us. The fact that some characters are able to practice “magic” is simply a fun and effective plot device.
It’s fun, I repeat. For instance, people in pictures hanging on the walls can talk and move around. You can look at a photo and ask the characters lined up in the front to move aside so you can look at the people in the background.
But it’s also effective. “Magic” in the Harry Potter books functions the way Superman’s or Spiderman’s powers do in the comic books and movies: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Or, as the Christian literary critic Alan Jacobs says (http://www.firstthings.com
That’s something we all wrestle with in real life. Some people have gifts that others don’t, and the people who are specially gifted have options. They can use their gifts for their own self-gratification or even to hurt and harm other people. Or they can use their gifts for service. In terms of the novel, you can follow the path of Lord Voldemort or you can follow the example of Harry’s mentor, Dumbledore.
In the world of Harry Potter, there are two groups of humans. There are humans who have these magical powers (“Wizards”) and there are others who do not (“Muggles”).
(Incidentally, the magical powers are something that people in this world are simply born with. No Muggle could ever study to become a Wizard, and so the books themselves offer no incentive to kids to “learn magic.” Rather, the “magic” in these books is simply a gift, a power, that you’re given from birth. Either you have it or you don’t, and if you do, then everything depends on whether you use it to get power over other people and put them under your thumb or to serve people in love.)
Some of the Wizards are proud of their ancestry and their heritage and their pure wizardly blood. They regard the Wizards who have intermarried with Muggles as degraded: their offspring are seen as half-breeds, “mudbloods.”
There’s tension in the wizardly world between those who accept the Muggles and those who hate them and even sometimes seek to do them harm. There is, you could say, a great dividing wall between the Wizards and the Muggles, a wall that needs to be knocked down so that the two can become one.
Most of the Muggles have no idea that there are wizards out there. They know nothing of them. Harry’s uncle, aunt, and bullying cousin do know that Harry’s a wizard and they both fear and hate him. He responds to them in much the same way. And right there, I think, is a major problem that needs to be dealt with in the books: Somehow THAT hatred needs to be overcome by love and self-sacrifice.
* Love and Self-Sacrifice. What I just said is actually a major theme — arguably THE major theme — of the books. Various characters lay down their lives for the sake of others.
Harry himself has to learn that lesson again and again as he faces increasing challenges in the course of the books, and it’s no accident that he goes through some “deaths and resurrections.” His magical superpowers don’t shield him from all harm or make anything easy for him. Rather, they give him greater responsibility which he must use to serve others, not himself. But greater than any superpower is love.
Perhaps you’re saying, “Hey, you’re making these books sound almost Christian.” Well, yes. And that’s deliberate on the part of the author.
Some of you may have seen e-mails or articles warning about the Harry Potter books, telling stories about children who have been caught up into the occult. You may have heard that J. K. Rowling promotes witchcraft and Satanism. Maybe you’ve even seen the one that quotes Rowling as saying, “These books guide children to an understanding that the weak, idiotic Son of God is a living hoax who will be humiliated when the rain of fire comes….”
If so, you need to know that those e-mails (and even published articles!) are HOAXES. They’re based on an article in The Onion. The Onion is a satirical newspaper. That is, it’s a newspaper that *makes up stories* in order to be funny. And the whole story about kids becoming witches and Rowling committing blasphemy is a *made up story*. (Here’s the link to a page that debunks this hoax: http://snopes.com/humor/iftrue
The truth is that Rowling herself is a member of the Church of Scotland. In one interview (http://tinyurl.com/3yfxsb), she talks about her belief in God:
E: You do believe in God.
JK: Yeah. Yeah.
E: In magic and…
JK: Magic in the sense in which it happens in my books, no, I don’t believe. I don’t believe in that. No. No. This is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I’ve written book seven. But then maybe you won’t need to even say it ’cause you’ll have found it out anyway. You’ll have read it.
And in this article from the Vancouver Sun (http://tinyurl.com/2vj6gg), she affirms that she is a Christian:
Harry, of course, is able to battle supernatural evil with supernatural forces of his own, and Rowling is quite clear that she doesn’t personally believe in that kind of magic — ”not at all.” Is she a Christian?
”Yes, I am,” she says. “’Which seems to offend the religious right far worse than if I said I thought there was no God. Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books.”
In other words, not only is she a Christian; she’s also writing books in a deliberately Christian way and so much so, she says, that an intelligent reader could figure out the Christian stuff in them and guess where the series is heading.
So am I saying that J. K. Rowling is like C. S. Lewis, telling fantasy stories with Christian themes? In short, yes.
EOQ (End of Quote)
In July 2005 Dr. Michael Horton of the White Horse Inn interviewed John Granger, the author of “Looking for God in Harry Potter“. Click here to listen to the interview in .mp3
The July/August 2007’s issue of Modern Reformation has an article about Harry Potter by Donald T. Williams. Click here to read the article
Let me know what you think about this…….