Theology and Harry Potter, Part 1

Hi everyone,

I recently gave a talk at our Theology on Tap series where I approached the Harry Potter series from a Christian perspective. The talk was well received, so I thought I would do some blogging about it so that everyone else could contribute to the conversation.

There has been a lot of controversy about the Harry Potter books, so I will address some of these issues up front. I am not going to go into great detail about these controversies because I want to move on to other issues.

The biggest controversy has centered around the idea that these books feature a fantasy world which appears a lot like our own except that certain people are gifted with magical abilities. These wizards and witches have decided to hide their existence from the non-magical people, called Muggles by the wizards. The Muggle world is almost in every way like our own. Wizards live completely secluded from the Muggles with their own culture and social institutions. They actively seek to prevent any integration of the Muggle world with their own.

The complaint, mostly from evangelical Christian and conservative Catholic circles, has been that magic use is immoral and condemned by Scripture and so to encourage young children to enter into an imaginary fantasy world where magic use is normal will lead young people astray. I have not done a lot of research in this area, but here is a piece of an interview that Rowling did for NBC’s Dateline in 2003:

Katie Couric: But Rowling’s ruthlessness has come under fire. Some parents have criticized her for over-emphasizing dark themes such as death. And some religious groups have gone as far as saying the novels are potentially harmful and promote occultism.

Rowling: “I think that’s utter garbage. I absolutely do not believe in the occult, practice the occult. I’ve never… I’ve met literally thousands of children now. Not one of them has said to me you’ve really turned me on to the occult, not one of them. Now I’m convinced that if that’s what my books were doing, I would by now have met one child who would have come up to me, covered in pentagrams and said, ‘Can we you know, go and sacrifice a goat later together, will you do that with me?’ It’s never happened, funnily enough.”

I am not sure how legitimate the source of this interview is. It seems pretty convincing to me. I would like to get the actual transcript of the show from NBC before asserting that the quote is absolutely authentic. It appears that Rowling explicitly denies any interest in promoting the occult through these books. This at least establishes that the author’s intention in writing these books was not to promote the occult, but was focused elsewhere. This is in contrast to Philip Pulman’s Dark Materials Series which Pulman has explicitly written to promote atheism and attack religious belief.

For a more thorough account of this issue, I would direct anyone to John Granger’s article in Catholic Digest, his blog and his book. He seems better equipped to deal with this question than I am. There are detailed debates about the nature of the magic referenced in Harry Potter which I am not really interested in or knowledgeable about.

I am an avid reader of G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, all of whom wrote in the fantasy genre with Christian thematics. I think that Rowling writes in this tradition as well. I cannot discern a substantive difference in reading Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter books. If one is going to complain about Rowling, then it seems to me that one is going to have to complain about Chesterton, Lewis and Tolkien as well. This has been enough to satisfy me that there is nothing really wrong with the Harry Potter series.

That is really all I have to say about the chief complaint about the Harry Potter books. I want to move on to other objections and philosophical analysis. I will do this in future posts. Peace!

Don

Update 1: I mentioned that some critics of Harry Potter were conservative Catholics. I do not really want to stereotype people in a mean-spirited way. I merely wanted to point out the circles from which critiques of the Harry Potter books seem to come. I will address more specific objections in future posts. I did not want to address the issue of the occult in great detail, so I am making some sweeping generalizations.

Update 2: In stating that Rowling's intention was not to promote the occult, I do not mean to say that it is impossible to promote the occult with the Harry Potter books. Certainly, other people may take the books and use them to promote the occult. But taken on their own, the books theselves are not propaganda for the occult. I hope to argue that one might use these books to promote a life of interiorized virtue at the very least. I would also suggest that one might use the Christian themes to point young people in the direction of love and sacrifice. I am not sure if this was Rowling's intention - but it is possible to interpret the texts in these ways. The texts are - like most things - open to good and bad uses.