The Christian Harry Potter

Love, Friendship, Joy

I hadn’t realized how controversial Harry Potter remains—to this day!—among certain Christian groups. “How subtle the powers of darkness are!” says the preacher of “Good Fight Ministry,” accusing J.K. Rowling of listening to “demonic voices.” Most of us would call the moment when Harry Potter “strolled” into Rowling’s mind anything but “demonic.” That was inspiration. Inspiration is the reverse of demonic. Why assume demonic? The heroes, Harry, Hermione and Ron are all about love and friendship and battling the obvious demon—Lord Voldemort. Feeling inspired can be a divine influence leading to a sacred revelation. Others have pointed out scenes inspired by Christian myths, the killing of the basilisk in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as a re-writing of the tale of Saint George killing the dragon.

Harry’s Christian values stick out all over him: he goes deliberately to his death, a sacrificial lamb letting Voldemort kill him in order to save humanity. (Even Professor Snape is scandalized, accusing Dumbledore of raising Harry “like a pig for the slaughter.”) Frightened, Harry experiences his own Garden of Gethsemane in the forest. Surrounded by the spiritual presence of his beloved parents and mentors, namely Sirius Black, his godfather, and Remus Lupin, his teacher, he asks whether death will hurt. Drawing strength from the love of these beings and their willingness to stay with him “to the very end,” he presents himself to Voldemort, dying in a flash of green light: “Avada Kedavra!” When he comes to, he realizes he can choose to go “on” and avoid all further battles and pain, or go back and continue to defend the good against evil. Naturally, he returns to slay Voldemort, saving the magical world.

Similarities to the explicit crucifixion scene in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe are obvious. Aslan, a Christ figure, willingly allows the hags, werewolves and White Witch to shave his mane, name-call and torment him, and finally kill him. The scene is packed with pagan, occult and sadistic black magic, but Aslan’s sacrifice wipes out the evil, replacing sorcerers and endless Winter with Spring and renewal.

The White Witch is a skilled practitioner of what Snape in Harry Potter calls “the dark arts:” whipping out a bottle, she pours a single drop on the snow and it turns into a hot, foamy drink for Edmund. That’s sorcery; later on the talking beaver notes Edmund’s eyes; he can tell Edmund has “been with the White Witch and eaten her food.” Another drop from the witch’s bottle gets Edmund a box of Turkish Delight; by the time he eats that, he’s become her agent. She’s got a wand, too, which she uses to turn people and talking animals into stone. When the forces of good prevail, when it’s no longer “always Winter and never Christmas,” Father Christmas shows up, giving Lucy a little bottle reminiscent of the one the witch has—one drop of Lucy’s magic potion heals wounds. Pretty occult, I’d say.

Christmas remains an important holiday in the Harry Potter books; Hogwarts celebrates with a gigantic tree hauled in by Hagrid, and Harry gets presents for the first time in his life (the fifty cents and the toothpick from the Dursleys don’t count).  In the final book, Harry and Hermione go to Godric’s Hollow, where he visits his parents’ graves. Both he and Hermione feel uplifted by the carol-singing coming from the church, by realizing it’s Christmas Eve. In yet another Christian re-telling, they meet Voldemort’s gigantic snake, from whom they narrowly escape. The forces of evil don’t win that round, and the reader is left feeling that some sort of protection comes from the Christian holiday. Snakes never tempt the good guys with pleasure; Harry and Hermione want knowledge of the good, and that’s the unwritten reason they always ultimately defeat snakes. Harry’s last piece of advice before sacrificing himself to Voldemort is to tell Neville to kill Nagini, Voldemort’s snake.

Finally, Harry is in the rare position of being constantly exposed to potent evil without being tempted. In the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, he looks into the Mirror of Erised and finds the stone in his pocket; he doesn’t want to use it himself, but to return it to its rightful owner.

Harry is almost boringly pure as the driven snow. Power and fame never tempt him. In the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, he wins the Elder Wand, the most powerful wand in the world. The last thing he wants is to dominate others. After repairing his own wand, he puts the Elder Wand back into Dumbledore’s tomb. As master of the wand, Harry knows its power will die when he does; no one else can use it. No forces of evil here! Harry consistently rejects them.

Christian values radiate from almost every plot point. Whenever Harry finds out something about dark magic, he also learns why it’s bad. Voldemort divides his soul by seven, storing each part in a horcrux. Murder creates the divisions, and each murder he commits shreds his soul into more pieces. He becomes irredeemable, a tragic, flayed worm lying under a bench in a crossroads between heaven and hell, completely alone. Why? Because Christianity is all about the saving of an intact, whole, sinless soul—the reverse of what Voldemort has become.

Few Christians object to Lewis’s writing in the way that they object to Harry Potter. Why?

A Christian friend’s husband—teaching at a Christian school in a small Canadian town—started reading the Harry Potters to his sixth-graders until the school principal demanded he stop. The husband wrote the principal defending the story, but too many parents were worried about “witchcraft,” even though, my friend remarked, “the Harry Potter universe is all about formulas and skill and not about the powers of evil.” The principal was right, my friend thinks, since the series “was new and Christians were all freaking out about Y2K anyway and looking for the world to fall apart in all kinds of ways.”

This is where I, the non-Christian, part company with that notion. I’m with FDR: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Why assume the books “might become dark” in a bad way? You might just as well assume they wouldn’t—except for the Christian story iself, which gets worse before it gets better. Jesus dies horribly on the cross and is laid to rest; everyone thinks he’s gone forever before he rises from the dead.

Just like Harry Potter.

So what is the real reason some Christians get into a lather about these books? Possibly because the world of Harry Potter is so much closer to our own: a bureaucracy with politics, a ministry of magic, administrators, a hospital, schools. None stumble into this world accidentally, the way Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy do when they walk through the wardrobe into Narnia. Actually, we muggles are explicitly excluded. We can’t get in except by special dispensation: muggle parents of wizard children are assisted in getting onto Plaform 9 ¾. Could there be a nod to Saint Peter deciding who’s good enough here?

The Narnian world is different from the real world—except, of course, for Aslan, the Christ figure. When Aslan tells Lucy she won’t get to come to Narnia again at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he gives her a consolation prize: the whole point of Narnia was so she could get to know him better in her own world, where he goes by a different name. In case anyone can’t guess that name, Aslan appears as a lamb and serves everyone roast fish.

Much of the talk of witchcraft, paganism and the occult as evil influences strikes me as having the same specious quality of arguments pegging Dr. Seuss and Raggedy Ann as racist. For Philip Nel, the Cat’s white gloves, hat, and behavior are all drawn from blackface imagery and therefore racist. No, no, no. There’s a failure, in this narrow-minded academic, to grasp how artists think. A failure to recognize inspiration (for Nel and others who see racism everywhere, Dr. Seuss is hearing demonic voices, not feeling inspired). An artist sees, say, white gloves and thinks: “Gee, those are cool. I’ll put them on my cat.” He may or may not be aware the gloves came from blackface, and I bet the source of the gloves isn’t a concern. What looks good? What feels right? Fun? What fills me with love and joy? 

Poor Dr. Seuss. His best work is often seen as a demonic voice—as if he were sitting behind his drawing desk thinking (like a witch!) “Heh, heh, heh, how many racist markers can I add to my cat?” Academic minds categorize and compartmentalize—they are often not filled with either inspired or demonic voices. There were the greats—Erich Auerbach comes to mind—but that’s another story. Inspired academics—like inspired artists—are in a class by themselves.

Yes, I’m well aware of the banned Dr. Seuss titles. And have argued, in detail, why they should be celebrated, not banned; see earlier posts on this Substack.

The oddest fear I came across—the notion that a child who knows Harry Potter better than the King James Bible might want to “use magic” on a friend struck me as the most silly. Children of all faiths or none play at magic. A friend’s four-year-old waved a wand and said he could open doors with it. When the door declined to open, an adult asked the kid, “Do you think your magic doesn’t work?”

“No!” said the kid, “The door is at fault!”

That’s the magic we lose when we grow up. But it’s fun to return to it in fantasy—all you Christian parents (and all you parents of other or no religious faith) enjoy these books.