HARRY POTTER: SON OF SATAN OR WIZARD FOR THE LORD?

Note: The following is a post I wrote a long time ago but never got around to posting.

A few months ago, I posted a brief, innocuous piece on the phenomenon that is Harry Potter. I hadn’t read the books, and had no plan to read them. I had seen both movies, and wasn’t impressed. I found them boring, the world they outline implausible, and the characters and situations less than interesting. I fell asleep during the second one. I was not impressed with Harry the character, who struck me as a child of privileged lineage whose reputation far outstretched his actual acumen as a sorcerer. Sure, he’s a great quidditch player, but what else? That just makes him a sort of magical jock. He’s a rule-breaker, a procrastinator, a less than ideal student, and often snotty and bratty, but he does get lucky when Voldemort comes around and manages to defeat the bad guy in the end. In the first two films, Hermione is the only child character that seems to know what she’s doing, while Harry gets all the glory. I found Harry faintly irritating. Given his upbringing among the almost simian Dursley family, he is less bitter than one would expect. And he fears expulsion from Hogwarts, his school, in spite of the fact that he's the famous Harry Potter. Who would really expel the Boy Who Lived for some trivial offense?

But my opinion of Harry was based on the films, produced from book I hadn’t read. And I hadn’t read them because I hadn’t been interested in them. They’re kids’ books, and beyond the reach of my three-year-old. Since Harry first burst into our consciousness a few years ago, lots of other people have gotten interested in him, though. He has made his author, J.K. Rowling, richer than her queen. He outsells all other fiction. He has generated massive controversy, particularly within Christian circles, where some see him as an invitation to Satanism while others see him as either a harmless fairy tale or an outright manifestation of Christian thinking in literary disguise.

As a veteran of earlier culture wars with Christendom, that argument got me interested in Harry. In my mind there was every possibility that Harry had simply re-ignited an old fight between people who want to advance the cause of Christ while maintaining the ability to speak to the broader culture, and those who just want to stick to the old ways of doing things. Or, between those who see a devil under every bed and those who don’t.

Don’t get me wrong; there was also every possibility that the anti-Harry forces were right. The books do construct a culture based on witches and wizardry, and they’re having a huge impact on the public. To a public that no longer believes in a persistent evil personality bent on countering God, dabbling in a bit of magic is no big deal. But to a Christian, it is a big deal and rightly so. And some churches seem to have embraced Harry in the way they always embrace the latest fad, teaching him in Sunday School instead of teaching the Bible. On that, I was already sure—such churches are wrong.

So I read up on the Potter series from both perspectives, and neither convinced me that they were right. Pro-Harry writers argue that Rowling is an admirer and follower of C.S. Lewis, a giant among Christian writers and thinkers, and their evidence for this is strong. Rowling has said she admires Lewis and his band of colleagues and friends, the Inklings. Rowling’s style, at once immediate, comic, tragic, and moralistic without resorting to heavy-handedness, fits the Lewis mold well. She has constructed a fantasy world to teach real lessons in a way that makes the teaching less scary but more interesting, again not far off from what Lewis did with Narnia and his Space Trilogy.

Anti-Harry writers also have a strong case. The books are full to the brim with occult ideas and knowledge. Rowling draws from real medieval occultists to put skin on her characters. The Sorcerer’s Stone, which plays a prominent role in the first book, is the real medieval name for alchemy, an occult practice. Wherever she got her knowledge of the occult, she certainly knows her stuff. And while encouraging reading among children is a good thing, it’s only good thing if they’re reading good things. Surely it’s better that kids don’t read at all than if they fill their minds with Mein Kampf or the collected works of Anton Levay? The question for me was, is Harry Potter a good thing or a bad thing? Or neither?

So I set out to read Harry Potter, from cover to cover to cover—five straight books in succession. It’s actually a great way to read them, as it lets the reader see how the stories hang together as a whole. Are they consistent? Is there an overarching theme that might be missed from sporadically reading them as they’re released? Are they worth the multi-billion dollar hype? Is Harry Potter the son of Satan or a wizard for Jesus?

After reading all five, I confess that I don’t know the answer to that last question. The series hasn’t ended yet. It could go either way at this point. I have an opinion as to how things will turn out, but I could be wrong. Regardless, churches should not incorporate Harry into their teachings. Let Rowling finish the series first, at least. As to the other questions, yes, they’re very consistent. They could be put together as one novel and aside from the heft, there would be no drawbacks to packaging them that way. They are remarkably consistent from character to character and from story to story. The world Rowling builds in the novels is very believable, but just unreal enough to make the lessons she tells about the reality of evil go down better. They are like medicine wrapped in sugar. Evil is a real lurking force in Harry’s world; good often lacks the nerve to combat it. People die in terrible ways, unjustly and innocently. Those who decide to confront evil are mocked and discredited until it’s almost too late for them to succeed. Good people, even good people who have been wronged, sometimes get death rather than justice. While doing the right thing is good, courageous and noble, it isn’t always rewarded, and often carries a price. The press is worse than useless when it chooses the wrong side in the struggle against evil, as it does both in our world and in Harry’s.

Putting such hard truths in a non-magical world actually would make it all scarier; the magic in Harry’s world insulates children (the target audience) from the true edge of fear while imparting to them the truth behind the story. It’s cleverly done, and I believe that that’s why the magic is there—to teach without inducing nightmares. The magic is also there to make it interesting, as it gives the characters lots of bizarre things to see, study and do that not only advance the stories but also keep attention focused. It’s also there to sell books and make splashy movies. As a whole, the Harry Potter series consists of good, not great, books. They are probably the best thing going in children’s lit right now, but they are by no means worth all the hype that adults have built into them.

In my opinion, the series will end well. Harry won’t be lifted up as a Christ substitute, but he won’t get buried in political correctness either (perhaps the best part of the Potter world, apart from the reality of giants and dragons, is that political correctness seems absent). He will win, and evil will meet a lasting defeat. More major characters will die, and evil will make a terrible and dangerous last stand or two before it falls. Evil’s allies will be exposed, their plots laid bare. And Harry will continue to fear expulsion from Hogwarts until he graduates, in spite of the fact that he’s the famous Harry Potter and no one would dare actually expel him. Rowling milks that particular fear in every single novel, to a ridiculous degree. Maybe kids buy it, but no adult should. On the continuum of Inkling or Satanist, I’d say that thus far Rowling is closer to the former to the latter.

The world will survive the juggernaut that is Harry Potter. It may be loaded with enough hefty tomes of pulp fiction to alter its rotation, but it will survive.