Ms. Rowling gave a lengthy interview to Dateline/TODAY and it focused on her “letting-go” of Harry-writing as her raison-detre. There have been interesting revelations on plot points and expansions on the intentionally spare Epilogue but very little about the meaning of the books, per se, or their political and spiritual content. Milk before meat, I guess, but the reporter’s insistence on keeping the conversation about Ms. Rowling’s celebrity was surprising. Incredibly, it was the children on the Dateline/TODAY program who raised the level of conversation from the personal to the literary:

Young voice: Voldemort’s killing of Muggle-borns, it sounds a lot like ethnic cleansing. How much of the series is a political metaphor?
J.K. Rowling: Well, it is a political metaphor. But … I didn’t sit down and think, “I want to recreate Nazi Germany,” in the– in the wizarding world. Because– although there are– quite consciously overtones of Nazi Germany, there are also associations with other political situations. So I can’t really single one out.

Young voice: Harry’s also referred to as the chosen one. So are there religious–
J.K. Rowling: Well, there– there clearly is a religious– undertone. And– it’s always been difficult to talk about that because until we reached Book Seven, views of what happens after death and so on, it would give away a lot of what was coming. So … yes, my belief and my struggling with religious belief and so on I think is quite apparent in this book.

Meredith Vieira: And what is the struggle?
J.K. Rowling: Well my struggle really is to keep believing.
Meredith Vieira: To keep believing?
J.K. Rowling: Yes.

This echoed Ms. Rowling’s comments in The Scotsman to Stephen McGinty in January, 2006. In an article titled ‘Life After Harry,’ he reported:

Rowling, who has three houses in Edinburgh, Perth and London, says she still found it “freakish” to find herself in a position where her PA could arrange for her to meet anyone in the world. She decided, however, not to pick up the phone to the Pope after he was critical of her novels “subtle seductions” which, he claimed, could “distort Christianity”. The author, who is an Episcopalian Christian, says of the complaints of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, that: “I can remember reading about it and thinking, surely there are more important things for him to worry about than my books – world peace, war in the Middle East.” In the interview she compares her own faith to that of Catholic author, Graham Greene: “Like Greene, my faith is sometimes about if my faith will return. It’s important to me.”

I look forward to reading your comments about Ms. Rowling’s public profession that she is a Christian but her faith is not that of a saint, an apologist, or an evangelical. Is this simple sobriety? Humility? Or a desire not to be pigeon-holed as a Christian writer because of the strong “religious undertones” of the Harry Potter finale?