Why Reading Harry Potter Won’t Make You A Witch
(Or destroy your Christian faith)
28th January, 2019 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe
I find it puzzling how some Christian parents do not permit their children to read J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter on the grounds that it promulgates witchcraft. They fear that, upon learning of the school adventures of Harry, Ron and Hermione, their precious little Tim or darling Emily will be allured into the occult. I, personally, never had such doting parents. They became Christians in their thirties, when I was three- or four-years-old, and never inherited this peculiar angst.
It only took me so long to read Harry Potter because as a teenager I was disinterested. I had heard rumours, however. These books were “dangerous” and I must tread carefully. Explicable, then, was my surprise last Summer when upon finishing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—the first book in the series—I was left with profoundly “Christian” impressions. Let me list only a few quotations and their points of contact with Christian belief:
The power of truth (is there a ring here of the apophatic?): “The truth.” Dumbledore sighed. “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
Not pandering to Evil: [On He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Voldemort]:“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
Confidence in the face of death (a robust eschatology): “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
The endurance of Love (albeit not defined christologically): [Dumbledore to Harry:] “Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. Love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves it’s own mark. To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”
Do not take my referencing these quotations as me claiming that J. K. Rowling wrote a “Christian book.” Though in various interviews she has talked about her faith, she denies the suggestion that she is writing Christian theology in disguise, just as she rejects the accusation that she is a Wiccan priestess seeking to popularise paganism.
Instead, what I hope these references show, regardless of Rowling’s intent, is that Harry Potter can in fact be read profitably (and enjoyably!) by Christians. It seems to me, that what determines our assessment of the book’s appropriateness, whether it is dangerous or inspiring, lies somewhere other than in the book itself. It lies in us, the reader, and our worldview.
If we have a worldview that is, for want of a better word, sectarian or isolationist, then we will interpret things, people, and ideas that are potentially “other” as threatening to the integrity of our beliefs and practices; we will, therefore, put such “others” outside the boundaries of that which we allow to come near us. But if, on the other hand, we have a worldview that is more open to the “other,” which recognises wisdom and truth wherever it be found, and which knows that encountering new things, people, and ideas does not diminish but, while not necessarily compromising, can instead expand and enlarge, even reinforce, our worldview; if we have such a worldview, we will be much more open and receptive.
Reading Harry Potter won’t make you a witch any more than encountering talking animals in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will disrupt your theological anthropology and minimise the dignity of the human person such that you denounce “speciesism” and join Peter Singer.
Why won't it? Because that’s not how stories work. But I’ll say more on that next week.
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