Harry Potter redux, part seven.

I don't know why I'm surprised to see it. It's happened with the release of every Harry Potter book and movie thus far, and with the fifth film and seventh book coming out so closely in succession, it shouldn't shock me that it's happening again. Yet somehow it always catches me afresh.

I'm talking about the Christian fundamentalist calls to 'protect kids from Harry Potter'. Witchcraft! cries the Christian establishment. Doorway to the occult! Even satirical site Landover Baptist (which, by the way, I recommend as comedy gold) gets in on the action with an article entitled "Harry Potter Driving Our Children Insane!". The Potter series is in the top ten on the American Library Association's list of 'Most Challenged [for banning] Books' from 1990-2000. Why the worry about these books?

Well, supposedly they promote witchcraft in children. I would argue even this point, but let's grant it for argument's sake. Now let's take a look at some of the most beloved Christian allegories of times past. The Narnia series? Yup, contains magic, children doing magic, and a magical lion that is not-so-subtly associated with Jesus. The Wrinkle In Time series? Yup, contains magic, children participating in magic, and a series of magical creatures not-so-subtly allegorical of angels and demons. Let's assume, for a second then, that the right-wing fundamentalists aren't actually objecting to the magic in the books (which, after all, resembles real-world paganism much like the smiling and dancing orphans in Little Orphan Annie resemble the real-world foster care system).

What could they be objecting to? I would guess that their objections are more about the lack of a clear biblical allegory in the books than anything else. After all, prior to Harry Potter most of the wildly popular children's series did have something to do with Christian symbolism. There wasn't really a series written for children who grew up in time when Christianity wasn't a strong enough cutural influence to shape the narrative of a text. Harry Potter marked the first enduringly popular, completely secularist work for children and young adults that nonetheless addressed questions of morals and ethics. In a time when Christianity was already struggling to impart religion to an increasingly well-informed young population, the Potter books were a serious blow. Thus, the consistant fervor over their content. If it wasn't witchcraft people complained about, it would have been something else. By accurately representing the secular humanist worldview as one which could nonetheless imbue a hero with morals and a strong sense of the good, the Potter books were a church's bad dream. Luckily for the reading public, they're too many people's best fantasy for church criticism to keep them down.