Harry Potter and Christianity

There are three interesting columns today regarding the criticism some Christian have for the Harry Potter series, and the obvious Christian themes contained in that series. First, from the Miami Herald:

J.K. Rowling gets the last laugh on the dwindling number of conservative Christians who have attacked her Harry Potter saga over the past decade: The most important plot point of the seventh and final book is unambiguously Christian.

Rowling cleverly scattered so many red herrings among the loaves and fishes in the previous books that she made it difficult to see the trail clearly except in retrospect. The Potter story is not a linear Christian allegory. And Harry's World is insistently devoid of explicit religion, right through the final chapter.

But Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows finally reveals plainly what the author had said for many years: that her Christian faith undergirds her fictional creation.

I won't spoil the ending for you if you haven't read the book, but having recently finished it, there are Christian themes aplenty as Harry faces his final battle with Voldemort. You can read the rest of it here.

The second column has to do with James Dobson and the danger of crying wolf one too many times. Mark Krikorian describes it this way:

A Baylor professor warns James Dobson and those Christian conservatives who still criticize the Harry Potter series that they're crying wolf and won't be taken seriously when they criticize real anti-Christian propaganda like "The Golden Compass," a movie scheduled for release at Christmas time based on the "His Dark Materials" series.

The actual article requires registration. And then there's the KKLA radio talk show host who shared his thought about Harry Potter with a Christian audience and generated quite a response:

KKLA is the largest Christian talk radio station in America. I hold a dubious record there – I am responsible for causing the largest number of complaint calls the station had ever gotten in a single day. The topic? Harry Potter.

This image supplied by Scholastic shows the cover of the U.S. edition of the highly anticipated "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Harry Potter charmed millions of readers this weekend, but the spell was broken at least briefly for some fans when they found pages missing from their precious copies of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." (AP Photo/Scholastic, HO) The Bowyers love Harry Potter: the novels, the movies, the video games, the midnight bookseller parties, we’re game for any of it. It didn’t start that way; ten years ago my mother wanted to give Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to one of my girls as a Christmas gift. “No way,” I said. “We don’t do witches and wizards here.”

A couple of years later my mother-in-law asked the same question. By then I’d become a little less rock-ribbed and quite a bit more disillusioned with the religious right wing of the conservative movement. Gracie loved the books and started sharing the story with me. As I noticed more and more references to classical and medieval literature my guard started to fall.

Eventually I went to see the movie version with my whole family. When I left the theatre, I knew two things: first, that I had been an ignorant blow-hard. This wasn’t Wiccan propaganda: it was standard-issue fairy tale magic like Cinderella and The Wizard of Oz. Second, that Joanne Rowling had spent a great deal of time immersed in The Greats – the long line of literary masterpieces that range from The Lord of the Rings and Narnia back through Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare, the Arthurian Legends, the Church Fathers, the Scriptures themselves, and into the best of the pre-Christian Greek classics. In other words, Rowling was one of us.

It's a good piece - read the rest here.

I, too, was hesitant at first about the Harry Potter series, but having now read all seven books and seen the five movies that have been made can easily recognize the many Christian allegories contained therein. I just saw the fifth movie last night, and I hope the next two aren't as dark and as little fun as that one was. The first movie, though with its moments of danger and drama, was a lot of fun. They've gotten less fun over the years as the climactic battle between Harry and Voldemort draws closer.

I've never really understood the insistence by people like Dobson that children shouldn't be exposed to the Harry Potter books. If you take your kids to Fantasyland at Disneyland, you'll see just as much good and evil magic as you ever find in the books, and I don't see Christians shielding their kid's eyes as they walk through the area. They're both fairy tale fantasy worlds, one is just a little more sophisticated than the other.

Without spoiling the end for you, I like the way Rowling wrapped everything up. I hope the last two movies live up to the books.