Martin Saunders, a Contributing Editor at Christian Today, a popular blog originating in the UK, has written a piece titled, ‘Harry Potter and the Christian concern: seven things we no longer seem worried about.’ Two friends have sent me the link with notes celebrating it as good news; they read it as Saunders’ implicit acknowledgment that the Potter Panic was a waste of time and effort on the part of those Christians who used the Hogwarts Saga as a litmus strip for orthodox faith over the better part of a decade.

Please read it. If you’re like me, you’ll come away with the thought that it really isn’t about Harry Potter. It seems instead to be a carefully framed warning to Christians around the world about how best to respond to a recent Supreme Court decision in the United States.

Here are my three thoughts:

(1) Christian Today, as noted, is not Christianity Today,  a magazine founded by Billy Graham. If you, like me, confused the two, you were likely shaking your head about Saunders’ editorial observations. Christianity Today is not the journal that has reason to be apologizing for fanning the flames of Harry Hatred in the pews. If anything, Christianity Today was the lone sober voice among widely read Christian periodicals — and CT has the largest circulation and most important reach in that market — and suffered significant back-lash because of their refusing to take a harsh and strict anti-Potter line. They published an excerpt from an early edition of How Harry Cast His Spell, for goodness sake.

But Christian Today? Like their assonant fellow Christian publication, it seems, as Graham said about CT at its founding during the segregation controversies of the 1950’s, “theologically conservative and liberal on social issues.” I appreciate Martin Saunders’ noting that he was in error years ago Christian Today but wonder at his timing.

So what is this published reflection about? Why now with this apology?

(2) Harry Potter is the lede item in Saunders’ list of seven things that “conservative” Christians seem to have come to accept because of the weight of popular culture’s embracing them (and Christendom’s not wanting to be left out or seem a “peculiar people,” as St Peter says we must be). As Saunders says, Harry Potter is just “the clearest” of many “bogeymen” that turned out to be things we could live with. All of these items, I think, are pointers to Saunders’ concluding paragraph, which is hard to read except in the context of the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling in ‘Obergefell v. Hodges.’

So what does all this mean? Are we becoming more moderate because that’s what it means to be ‘wise as serpents, innocent as doves’ (Matthew 10:16), or are we just slowly compromising ourselves into a state of total lukewarmness? (If so, worry about Revelation 3:16.) Perhaps it’s a mix of both, and if so, the best approach might be two-edged. On the one hand, we should probably be a little less eager to decry or campaign against those elements of our culture which seem to conflict with our faith before we’ve properly understood them. On the other, it’s a good idea to continually assess whether we’re really living lives that honour God and reflect his holiness, or turning the radical Christian faith into living what Katie Dowds calls “the PG version of what the world is living.”

“Don’t cry wolf on silly subjects like modest dress and D&D lest you have lost your authority on important matters like the meaning of marriage,” or even “Y’know, in a few years we may have embraced the unthinkable the way we have on these seven subjects.” Saunders is playing with Evangelical explosives on both counts here, he knows it, and is writing obliquely for ‘those with ears to hear’ lest he start a fire storm. But his message is certainly “we should probably be a little less eager to decry or campaign against those elements of our culture which seem to conflict with our faith.”

It’s no accident that Martin Saunders has also recently written at Christian Today that it’s time for Christians “to lose the fish car sticker” because:

We’re already seen as something of a cultural irrelevance, and putting odd-shaped stickers on our cars does little to help. Instead of appearing like the sort of people you could be friends with and welcomed among, the trappings of a sub-culture make us seem separate and strange.

Get it? He repents in humility from his Harry Hating of yore to show an example of how Christians should and should not be responding to the current events of the last month. Lest Christians become even more “culturally irrelevant.” Ouch.

(3) Saunders apologizes flat out for suggesting years ago that “Harry Potter is a large doorway to the occult, and if we lead children to it, there is a possibility that they may nudge it open.” He goes so far in his repentance as to say, “I can only apologise, but the shame will never fully leave me.” He acknowledges that “with it’s redemptive and ultimately Christ-imitating finale now revealed, many Christian parents are happy for their children to read all seven of JK Rowling’s world-conquering novels” and that he was wrong as “an earnest young journalist” to have been among the “chief scaremongers.”

Again, let’s be clear. Saunders was never a Richard Abanes or Michael O’Brien so this apology may be a little over-wrought (not to mention more than a day late), but he is good to share his acquired sobriety on the subject, even if it’s only as cover to deliver a message on another topic.

And then he slips and falls with “fifteen years on from the first book’s release, I’m still yet to hear the story of an actual witch or wizard who took their first steps into magic through Harry Potter’s ‘occult doorway’.”

Wow. He needs to get out more or just do an internet search. Berit Kjos, for one, is out there to let him know, forever and ever, amen, how wrong he is on this count (if anything she says is suspect, sadly). Because the recruiters for occult groups are supposed to have used the Hogwarts Saga aggressively as a recruiting tool, trolling online chatrooms for possible converts, I think it safe to say that it is probable that Harry’s adventures, inadvertently and contrary to their spirit, served as a gateway for some to occult beliefs. It is possible to use any text, to include the Bible of course, for perverse ends but suggesting it doesn’t happen instead of simply noting that it didn’t happen in the tsunami culture-changing fashion predicted is to invite the few cases of misuse and abuse to be offered once again as evidence of Harry’s evil.

Someday I should publish the many notes I have received through the years from readers of my books who have written that reading Harry Potter and my explanations fostered their faith or founded their conversion.

Thank you to the friends who sent me links to this article. It’s almost certainly only about Harry Potter because the writer wanted the most ‘hits’ from the article title, but it is a pointer to how much things have changed.

Thanks, too, to Luke for pointing out a gaffe that required my pulling this post’s first draft.

Your comments and correction are coveted as always.

As I wrote at HogwartsProfessor last week, Rita Cipriano, a reporter from the Portuguese online newspaper Observador, sent me questions for an article she was writing about the Harry Potter phenomenon today, eighteen years after the publication of Philosopher’s Stone. Our exchange was delightful, but, as I explained to her, I had to wonder if I weren’t being foolish in expecting fair treatment from a journalist named ‘Rita.’

Well, the results are in. This is not a reporter from the Skeeter School of Quick Quotes Quills. You can read the story, ‘A geração Harry Potter nasceu há 18 anos. A magia não morre‘ online here.

The paragraphs in which I am quoted:

Para John Granger, investigador norte-americano que dedicou os últimos 12 anos a estudar o fenómeno de Harry Potter, apottermania tem apenas uma explicação — a “mestria e significado” dos livros de J.K. Rowling. E nada mais do que isso.

“Vamos apenas dizer que Rowling conseguiu escrever um livro que é simultaneamente um romance de escola, um drama alquímico, um romance gótico, um bilungsroman [um romance de formação] órfão e um ótimo exemplo da melhor fantasia inglesa”, dentro do género de As Crónicas de Nárnia, de C.S. Lewis, e das obras de J.R.R. Tolkien”, explicou o autor ao Observador. “É uma grande façanha!”

Para explicar o fenómeno, Granger desenvolveu aquilo a que chama a “Tese Eliade”. Na obra O Sagrado e o Profano, Mircea Eliade defende que as histórias têm uma função religiosa ou mítica na cultura secular. Ou seja, “quando o divino é atirado para a periferia da praça pública”, o homem experiencia o transcendental através da imaginação.

Para Granger, isto significa que as “histórias que oferecem uma experiência mais profunda, muitas vezes com um conteúdo espiritual implícito, significado e mestria”, são aquelas de que gostamos mais. “Os romances de Rowling são isso tudo. Em resumo, ela dá aos leitores aquilo que eles querem.”

Para além disso, o investigador acredita que o sucesso alcançado por J.K. Rowling fez com que a literatura de fantasia se tornasse num “género mais respeitável para todas as editoras e para a maioria dos autores”. “Iria mais longe e diria que Harry Potter mudou as expectativas de leitura de seis gerações. Estamos a viver a era de Joanne Rowling em termos de história, quer gostem disso ou não.”

“Estas histórias mudaram as expectativas de leitura de várias gerações. Ignorá-las é perder um dos eventos que moldaram o nosso período histórico.”
John Granger, autor de “How Harry Cast His Spell”

Run that through the Google translator for Portuguese and we get:

For John Granger, an American researcher who has dedicated the last 12 years to studying the phenomenon of Harry Potter, Pottermania has only one explanation – the “artistry and meaning” of J. K. Rowling’s books. And nothing more than that.

“Let’s just say that Rowling could write a book that is both a school boy novel, an alchemical drama, a gothic romance, a bildungsroman with an orphan, and a great example of the best English fantasy” within the genre of The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S.  Lewis, and the works of J. R. R. Tolkien,” explained the author to the Observer. “It’s quite a feat!”

To explain the phenomenon, Granger has developed what is called the “Eliade Thesis.” In his book The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade argues that stories have a religious function or mythical in secular culture, i.e., “when the divine is thrown to the periphery of the public square,” men will seek transcendental experience through their imagination.

To Granger, Eliade’s thesis means that the “stories that offer a deeper experience, often with an implicit spiritual content, meaning and artistry, “are those that we like more.” Rowling’s novels are all that. “In short, she gives readers what they want.”

In addition, the investigator believes that the success achieved by JK Rowling made fantasy literature become a “more respectable genre to all publishers and for most authors.” “I would go further and say that Harry Potter has changed the expectations of six reading generations. We are living in the era of Joanne Rowling in terms of history, whether we like it or not. “

“These stories have changed the expectations of several reading generations. To ignore them is to lose one of the events that have shaped our historical period.”
John Granger, author of “How Harry Cast His Spell

I haven’t checked this against the answers I sent her, but, just reading the instant translation from the cloud, it’s clear she was very faithful in her turning my English responses into Portuguese sense. [Sigh of relief]

If Joanne Rowling modeled her Rita Skeeter character after a journalist in Portugal, where she lived while plotting and planning the series, her model wasn’t Rita Cipriano. I think we can accept this as negative evidence that, as I’ve argued since my first book, this name is to be read as ‘Read-a ‘Squito,’ which is to say,  The Presence is likening reporters to mosquitos (ahem: blood-sucking, disease-carrying parasites) and other disgusting bugs. Her opinion has if anything hardened in the treatment given the Fourth Estate in the Cormoran Strike novels.

Thank you, Rita Cipriano, for the thoughtful questions and for translating my answers as faithfully as you have in this article!

The Oyster Review online has published a feature story called ‘Beyond Hogwarts: Muggle Studies‘ which argues that “At Hogwarts, young wizards study magic. In the Muggle world, students read Harry Potter.” I was interviewed for the piece and two University professors I know — Linda Pershing, California State – San Marcos, and Philip Nel, Kansas State — offer their experiences teaching the Hogwarts Saga in real world classrooms.

I suppose there is residual resistance to the value of teaching the world’s best selling novels in university settings so these articles serve some purpose. I’m glad, too that Prof Nel’s explanation for the series’ importance and popularity was used as the article ‘closer’ and reader-take-away, especially because of their use of a certain phrase I don’t think the journalist picked up from Prof. Nel:

The Harry Potter phenomenon forced us to legitimize these books as more than just a kid’s story—it was something much bigger, and more gripping. The reason behind this, Nel argued, was J.K. Rowling’s perfect literary alchemy.

“There’ve been earlier great fantasies, realist novels, school stories, and mysteries. But her combination and transformation of these traditions sets her work apart. Her fully imagined alternate world truly transports us, her psychological realism makes us care about the characters, and the mystery narrative keeps us turning the pages,” Nel said.

It is in this combination that we can locate the beating heart of the series, and what draws all of us—from casual readers to intrepid scholars—to get so willingly wrapped up in these books. With J.K. Rowling’s gentle guidance, we’re able to consider big questions and witness, as Nel says, “the kinds of work literature can do.”

 

One of the bigger (and better!) surprises I experienced at the MISTI Con gathering in New Hampshire this May came during a Big Tent ticketed discussion (and catered luncheon) I moderated between the two keynote speakers and the 200 serious readers who paid for the privilege. I received my surprise after the speaker’s presentations when I opened the floor to questions — and Patrick McCauley was the first in line to ask his.

If you don’t know Patrick McCauley and you are a long-time reader wanting to come to terms with the artistry and meaning of the Hogwarts Saga, you’re missing out. Besides being one of the founders and a host (with Karen Wendling) of the annual Chestnut Hill College Harry Potter Conference, he is doing the most exciting thinking and writing about Harry’s adventures I have stumbled across in several years. Both his talk at Chestnut Hill last fall (‘Violence Against Women in the Harry Potter series’) and the one I caught at MISTI Con this year left me delighted — even gobsmacked? — by the challenging ideas he is presenting.

So what? Two things.

First, the Chestnut Hill Harry Potter Conference this year is Friday, 16 October. It is the weekend of the Chestnut Hill  Harry Potter Festival, an event with the Conference that is not to be missed. No expensive sign up fees, no long lines, just a town that turns itself into Hogsmead and a college that hosts a first tier academic conference, Wizard Rock concerts, and Quidditch tournament. This year’s conference promises to be extra-special because it will be only days before the release of Cormoran Strike’s latest mystery-thriller, Career of Evil.

I urge one and all friends of HogwartsProfessor to attend, or, much better, to present a talk. The site to submit your paper abstract is right here. There is a High School category, too, with three $10,000 college scholarships in the offing. No joke. Last year’s presentations from this group were mind-blowing; I was very glad I wasn’t on the panel that had to choose the winners.

Nota bene: last year’s best conference papers are being published in a real book by a real publishing house — and I suspect such collections will be an annual thing. Just sayin.’

Second, Patrick McCauley’s long-awaited book, Into the Pensieve: The Philosophy and Mythology of Harry Potter, will be available for purchase that weekend, ten days before you can buy it in stores or on Amazon. I plan on attending the conference, as well, giving at least one talk, and sharing with friends there some important news about the future of this web site and my work as “the Dean of Harry Potter scholars.”

I look forward to catching up with you there, listening to your talk and discussing it with you, and hearing your thoughts about my latest adventure. Sign up today!