Harry Potter and Theology, Part 2.

Having briefly disposed of the chief complaints against J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books regarding the influence of the occult in my previous post, I now want to engage what I feel are some of the more interesting issues evoked by the books.


Beyond the complaints about the occult, there are another set of complaints that are typically made about Harry Potter by many Christians. They say that Harry Potter is a poor role model for young people because he is a disobedient rule-breaker. If there is a boundary set up by an authority figure, Harry will be sure to step across it. He goes into off-limits parts of the castle, breaks curfews, defies teachers and causes all sorts of mischief. Christian parents who want obedient children charge that Harry’s disobedience makes him a poor role model for young readers.


Personally, I sometimes wonder if people are so prejudiced against the books that they are looking for things not to like. But I want to take this complaint seriously and over the course of these posts, I will argue the opposite. I want to assert that Harry is an excellent role model and teaches us a valuable lesson about standing up to evil in the modern world.


It is going to be a circuitous route to get to this conclusion. I want to start by looking at the role that bureaucracy plays in the Harry Potter series, especially in the last three books. At first this struck me as a curious feature of the fantasy world which J. K. Rowling has woven for us. Despite the separation of the magical and non-magical (Muggle) human communities, wizards have adapted a similar form of government and institutional organization. The British wizarding community is governed by a Ministry of Magic complete with a Prime Minister. The Ministry of Magic is a bureaucratic institution with various agencies for carrying out its dictates and programs. There are various departments for Muggle relations, Law Enforcement and the Office of Aurors who are supposed to fight dark wizards. It even runs the newspaper, the Daily Prophet. The visits that Harry makes to Ministry of Magic give us a picture of a typical government or corporate bureaucracy. The interoffice memos may fly through the air as paper airplanes, but the power structure is not different at all. It is a picture of irrationality and inefficiency.


The role played by the Ministry of Magic increases significantly in the last three books of the series. At the end of the Goblet of Fire, the powerful dark wizard Voledmort, who has been a threatening presence in the first three books, returns to his corporal form and full magical power. Harry is witness to this event and returns to warn the wizarding community of this serious threat to their well-being. As the Order of the Phoenix opens, we find that the Ministry of Magic has not wanted to accept Harry’s warning and in fact they have waged a campaign to discredit Harry and his mentor, the head of Hogwarts School for Magic, Albus Dumbledoor. They do not want to admit that a dark wizard has come to power on their watch. Instead they opt to deny the existence of the threat.


One result of this is that Dolores Umbridge, the consummate bureaucrat, comes to Hogwarts in order to assert Ministry control there. I will have a lot to say about Dolores Umbridge in my next post.

Partly Cloudy

Check out this really cute Pixar short, entitled “Partly Cloudy.”

Cloud - Watch a funny movie here

This short film presents a lovely account of creation – storks bringing newly minted creatures down to earth. We start with a vision of cuteness – babies, puppies and kittens. The world is a beautiful place. As we ascend into the heavens, we see the creative forces represented by these cloud beings sculpting each new creation to be delivered to earth. One of these angelic clouds stands apart from the others – Gus is slightly different. He does not create puppies, babies or kittens; he sculpts sharks and rams and porcupines. His assistant, a stork named Peck, is hard pressed to deliver these dangerous creations to their place on earth.

This short reminds me of the power and diversity of creation. God creates everything – even things that are dark, dangerous and bizarre. No matter how little sense it makes to us, God loves these beings as much as he loves babies, puppies and kittens. These aspects of creation represent the fearsomeness and power of God. They are wild and dangerous. Despite this, in some way they are vestiges of God. Too often we take the world we live in for granted. We forget that it is created by God. We think that we can control the natural world so that all our experiences will be happy. This short film reminds us that the natural world reflects the wideness, diversity and fearsomeness of God’s love. We cannot control God – he is bigger than us.

If you are interested in further reflections on this short film, check out this blog.

Let me know what you think of the film!

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.