Rowling has told one interviewer that she leads “an intensely spiritual life” but confessed to another that the Christian church did not offer her much solace at the time of her mother’s death and that she struggled with the “rules” and “institutional” aspects of ecclesial living.
This is a difficult subject for even serious readers to track because it requires that I argue on the one hand, as I hope I have demonstrated both in Deathly Hallows Lectures and How Harry Cast His Spell, that Rowling’s Hogwarts Saga finale was profoundly sacramental, laden with Christian symbolism and content, and about a Christ-like sacrificial love resulting in a victory over death, while at the same time being an allegory of a believer’s struggle between embracing skepticism or faith as his life orientation. Rowling has said that her faith is very important to her, that she is more than a “weddings and funeral” church-goer, but that her belief in God is a very tenuous thing.
Her core beliefs, as she has shared more than once, turn around the immortality of the soul and the importance of imagination. Religion, which is to say, the communal, exoteric, and liturgical practice of a living faith? Not so much.
I recently have been corresponding with a challenging new voice in Potter Punditry and Rowling Studies who has pledged to push back on my arguments that Rowling is more invested in her feminist rituals and public testimony than she is in any kind of church life. This thoughtful reader seems to be arguing (or preparing an argument) that I misunderstand Rowling’s Anglican faith despite my having grown up in the Episcopal Church. I very much look forward to reading that counter to my “spiritual not religious” position, especially as I have not given the state of the Anglican communion any thought since my departure from it soon after my marriage in 1987.
I hope this isn’t necessary to repeat, but I hope, if you’re thinking that I am contradicting myself here with respect to what I’ve written previously about the Christian content “baked into the cake” of almost everything Rowling writes, that you will review the “triple play” post I wrote last week in which I explained how this author’s interwoven literary alchemy, psychomachia, and chiastic structure combine to deliver a soul-transformative experience to readers via their imaginations. Rowling may not be a practicing Christian in any conventional sense, but she wields the most powerful tools of the English literary tradition, uniformly Christian until about fifteen minutes ago, to great effect.
My pre-emptive skepticism about my friend’s claim that Rowling is religious beyond weaving a Christian world view, allegories of the soul, and images of the sacraments into her fiction — between the Goblet of Fire grail image and the Bond of Blood, I trust few are disputing that today — springs from three sources, which I’ll discuss after the jump!
(1) The Absence of Public Testimony
As I’ve written about before, Rowling’s preferred language when speaking about religious faiths, to include her own, is that they are “fundamentalist” and “bigoted.” “Fundamentalist” is a term with a specific historical reference and meaning Rowling does not know or ignores in favor of using it to mean both “a religious person who takes the received positions of their revealed faith seriously” (as in “too seriously”) and “a know-nothing, non-thinking idiot I do not like.” Terry Mattingly explains:
As philosopher Alvin Plantinga of the University of Notre Dame once quipped, among academics “fundamentalist” has become a “term of abuse or disapprobation” that most often resembles the casual semi-curse, “sumbitch.”
“Still, there is a bit more to the meaning. … In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views,” noted Plantinga in an Oxford Press publication. “That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch.’ … Its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ “
She condemns routinely Islamicist crimes against women in Arab countries, Asia (Near East), Africa, and Indonesia, but never in the UK lest she be called an Islamophobe — and never mentions or criticizes the crimes committed by Islamicists against Christians anywhere, ever. When the UK government arrests Christians for praying silently outside abortuaries for thought-crimes, persecution in gross violation of any guarantees of free speech and conscience, Rowling is silent (and I don’t think she is praying for the persecuted).
We can speculate about the reason for this silence. It might just be prudence; she certainly has enough on her testimonial plate between publicizing overseas Islamicist crimes against secular women, fighting for recognition of the realities of sex and the need of protections and safe spaces for women and children, and calling out politicians and government officials, especially in Scotland, for their failings. Perhaps she has chosen to leave the cause of persecuted Christians for someone else to champion while she makes generous contributions in private to the cause or to her local church.
I get that English people are much more reticent about their faith than Yankees. I also understand that my HogwartsProfessor twitter feed never links to outrages against Christian communities, foreign and domestic. Having noted that, I think it still fair to conclude that what cannot be said about Rowling’s silence — on top of her “fundamentalist” language for any believer not celebrating infanticide as a “reproductive right” or same sex relations as something akin to a sacrament — is that it qualifies her as in any way “religious,” at least not with respect to her Christian faith.
(2) The New Salem Philanthropic Society
Rowling makes the world a much better place for women and children by her public advocacy for women’s safe spaces, for protections against the chemical castration and surgical mutilation of young people by ‘Transgender, Inc.,’ and the closing of institutional children’s homes or orphanages in favor of life with a family. This discussion is not about her virtues and good deeds, however, just about her religiosity, which is to say, being open about her membership in a specific church community and acting in conformity with its creeds and practices (the “rules”). Allowing that she may be very religious in private and enter her local parish sanctuary through a side door out of admirable modesty, her public comments and silence are not religious as we use the word conventionally.
Let’s turn, then, to her fiction. How does Rowling depict the Christian church in her stories?
She doesn’t, which isn’t really unusual, to be frank, especially in the genres in which Rowling has chosen to write. Orson Scott Card may be correct in saying the fantasy part of most science fiction today (and always) has been the absence of religious belief and organized worship communities within the worlds depicted; as every anthropologist and archeologist will tell you, only the postmodern West thinks a profane (‘outside the temple’) world view and existence is anything but subhuman. I think Card is correct — but it’s a rare bit of fiction, not just science fiction, be it YA, fantasy, detective, even Christmas stories, that turns on prayer, fasting, parish life, public worship, et cetera. That Rowling chooses to only have a wizard pastor appear at Dumbledore’s funeral doesn’t mean that she is shutting God out of her world-building. In this, she is uncharacteristically conformist to literary convention, George MacDonald’s ‘pastor-al’ fiction being the only exception that comes immediately to mind.
In Casual Vacancy, the only religious characters are a not especially devout Sikh family, whose sometime devotions are to Guru Nanak, a remarkably Christ-like figure (see Beatrice Groves’ discussion of that here). There are more than one Vacancy scene in the village church — and neither is a flattering portrait of the spiritual condition, not to mention the mental health, of those in the pews. “Fundamentalist” wouldn’t be the word for them, but hypocrisy and bigot would work.
The only two books that Rowling has authored that feature churches are the New Salem Philanthropic Society in the first Fantastic Beast film, a community of orphans pastored by no-Maj Mary Lou Barebone, and the Universal Humanitarian Church in Running Grave, a para-church cult led by the charismatic Johnathan Wace. Neither is a flattering image of the church or of church life, but, then again, neither community very much resembles a church as such. The ‘Second Salemers‘ are an especially bizarre faith:
Based at Pike Street, New York, they held weekly meetings on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays. They also published and distributed a pamphlet entitled Witches Live Among Us!. They would have orphans distribute the pamphlet in exchange for food and water. Chastity Barebone was in charge of handing out the pamphlets to the children.
The group came to an end following the destruction of their church by Credence Barebone’s Obscurial form and the deaths of Mary Lou and Chastity that it caused as well.
Rowling seems here to be killing two birds with one stone, which is to say, depicting two organizations she despises with a single image. Most obviously, because the ‘Philanthropic Society’ is focused not on fidelity to Dominical commands, Scripture, or Tradition but on the culture war battle to expose the wizard community, she seems to be presenting her acidic portrait of the Harry Hating Christian communities that seemed to forsake all touchstones of their faith during the Potter Panic of 1999 to 2007 except decrying the popular Hogwarts stories as satanic. It’s an inverse portrait necessarily because, unlike the Harry Haters, Mary Lou Barebones was right; there really were witches living among the no-Majs, albeit “really” only in a movie.
Which is a pretty funny take-down, frankly, except for the depiction of the orphan urchins and adopted Barebones children, especially the much abused Credence. In that, Rowling was taking aim at the para-church groups that run orphanages for profit, the closure of which institutions is the goal of Lumos, the author’s greatest philanthropic effort and investment. As much as these para-church orphanages are aligned to churches over-seas and identify as or are supported by actual churches, Rowling is taking a dig at the quality of philanthropy in such a ‘Philanthropical Society.’
Again, you can make of that what you will, but it escapes me how one can argue that the religious-not-spiritual Barebones cult on Pike Street is an invitation to any kind of church.
(3) The Universal Humanitarian Church
The same is true in spades of the only ‘Church’ as such that plays a part larger than the location of a wedding, baptism, or funeral in the Strike-Ellacott series. The horrifying cult drama Rowling wrote in Running Grave around the Universal Humanitarian Church (UHC) ‘farm,’ if one thinks of this as a ‘church’ or the life there as ‘life in church,’ would prevent any seeker from wanting to be associated with any church, anywhere, any time.
I suspect, too, that Rowling was not just taking a dig at historical para-church cults in the UK that somewhat resembled Jonathan Wace’s UHC. Read Robin’s thoughts in the first Epilogue chapter about the UHC:
Robin, watching Becca at home, found herself again thinking of the church as a virus. She was certain many, if not most, members would be cured by this eruption of revelations, by the evidence that they’d been thoroughly hoodwinked, that Papa J was no hero, but a conman, a rapist, and an accessory to murder. Yet so many lives had been destroyed….
Murphy was inclined to be triumphant about the church’s demise, but Robin found it hard to celebrate… Even worse than her personal fear of prosecution was her dread of the church reforming and rebuilding. When she said as much to Murphy, he’d told her she was much too pessimistic, but watching Becca smiling on television, clearly unshaken in her belief in the Lotus Way, Robin could only hope that the world would watch more closely and ask more questions, when the next five-sided temple appeared on a piece of vacant land (930-931).
To my eyes, that passage suggests Rowling is depicting in broad strokes satire the Roman Catholic Church, its believers after the 2002 ‘Spotlight’ revelations of the sexual abuse of children and adolescents by priests and prelates. the Pope’s indifference (‘Papa J’), the easy ecumenism of Vatican II, and the language of “reformation” extending this to the Protestant churches. She’s ‘having a go,’ if you will at the inability of believers to see that their churches are anything but sacred spaces for their transformation in Christ.
But.
In the dead center of the book, the turn of the Part 5 chapter ring, Rowena/Robin and Will Edensor talk with Noli, the clueless celebrity that is riding the wave of UHC life. In this chapter and a subsequent conversation, R/Robin and Will discuss verses from the first epistle of St John (4:1) and the Bhagavad Gita (16-7). I detailed the meaning of each of those passages in my Part 5 discussion of Grave and concluded:
We only learn in the next-to-last chapter of Part Five that Will paid for this effrontery [in quoting 1 John 4:1 and Gita 16-7 to noli as rebukes]. When Robin in the Retreat Room brings up what he said to her and to Noli in the kitchen, he responds, “Forget that! That’s why I had to go in the box. I shouldn’t have said it. If you’re going to talk about that, I’m leaving” (572). She uses that opening, though, to confront him with his contradictory behavior and hypocrisy, what he did to Noli, and, when he learns about his “flesh object” mother’s death, he cracks, “material possessiveness” be damned. That night he heads to the farmhouse and doesn’t stop at the fountain for a Drowned Prophet blessing.
All of which is to say that, as repugnant as Rowling-Galbraith makes the UHC and perhaps to non-believers all organized religion, the central chapter of the central Part of Running Grave features a seeker speaking the truth, “not a memory or opinion” but the truth in the language of revelation, the scriptural kind of revelation rather than the peer-attack brain-washing session type. This with Strike’s “admitting the possibility” and confessing the importance of the cross to him suggests strongly that the message of Strike7 is about the brain-washing of the prevalent narratives of today rather than odious religious dogmatism and cults.
Quoting the Evangelist of Love and the Gita, and especially these passages [about the dangers of apostacy from faith], suggests that there are true prophets as well as false prophets, authentic divines as well as demonic people. Robin’s cry to Will in the Retreat Room, her call for him to snap out of it and recognize his love for Qing, Lin, and Sally are greater truths than the UHC ideology. “So you’ve voluntarily brain-washed yourself?” is the invitation of a CBT seeker to all her readers to look at our beliefs and to test them against the realities of love in our experience and our hearts.And perhaps to “admit the possibility” that the revealed paths to be found in traditional faiths may contain better, more truthful beliefs than the ones we have as “bubble persons” and “materialist” cultists with our unexamined postmodern narratives.
If I’m correct in that conclusion from a structural reading of Grave and its “meaning in the middle,” two things seem clear to me.
First, as with the Second Salemers being inspired by Rowling’s nightmare experiences with church groups that condemned her work for being a “gateway to the occult,” so Grave (and Ink Black Heart) are Rowling’s not transparent but not especially opaque rebukes to the fandom, celebrity, and government leaders, as well as the twitterati online, who were caught up in the TWAW cult and who were willing to cancel if not crucify anyone not totally onboard with Gender Theory Extremism. There’s no strain here in seeing the Lake story “stuff” of unresolved unconscious issues that, if not inspired this story, certainly colored and shaped it.
Second, and my conclusion to this piece, it seems to confirm my “spiritual not religious” thesis as the best tag for Rowling’s relationship with the Absolute. She remains a celebrant of traditional doctrines and the spirituality of the revealed religions that she embeds in her work, sometimes obviously, more often than not subliminally. Her surface stories, though, ignoring the occasional unicorn, griffin, or phoenix, evidence her great discomfort with the “institutions” of religious life and the “rules.” She’s very much an advocate of the Enlightenment project on that score.
My questions remain, outside of the Potter Panic and the attempts to cancel her during the peak years of Gender Mania, crises that explain in part Rowling’s hostility to the church and to believers who are ideologues in Beasts and Grave, why and when did this first become an issue that stirred the waters of her Lake? How could a writer, the Christian content of whose work is not icing but baked into the cake itself, have come to think of herself as outside the institutional church, even the large umbrella of Anglicanism? What was the crisis of faith in Rowling’s life that inspired the story of Harry’s interior conflict permeating Deathly Hallows, a struggle that the previous six books set-up?
More on that in coming days!
I’m surprised you don’t mention the other crucial scene at the centre of Running Grave; Strike’s encouter at Aylmerton Church with Charlotte’s ghost and a pious churchman.
To me the setting for this scene is the clearest sign in all her writing for the sacred power of the physical church. Still perhaps more spiritual, but a big acknowledgement of religion.
Thinking about the significance of that building, there’s a very meaningful juxtaposition of the false church of the UHC farm and the visible but unreachable spire of St John looking down on it.
As usual, Ed, an excellent point. The ‘King’s Cross’ parallel scene in ‘Running Grave’ is an important “Yes, but –” counter-argument to my ‘Spiritual, not Religious’ thesis.
Three quick notes:
(1) I have been given serious reason to re-consider my thesis in the days since posting that piece, “reasons” I should say, none of which I am at liberty to divulge except in outline. The essence of it is that ‘Spiritual, not Religious’ has such an anti-Church pejorative meaning that is all but impossible for readers, if they embrace the label as an apt description for Rowling, to grasp the profound and substantive Christian content of Rowling’s work, especially but not exclusively in the ‘Potter’ series. And that would be to ignore or forget all the work I have done to explain Rowling’s ‘Shed’ artistry and meaning, which I am certainly not willing to do. I look forward to introducing readers here to the correspondent who has been writing me the last few weeks and her ideas about how best to understand Rowling’s works’ Christian content.
(2) As I have shared with her and others on the moderator back channels, the ‘Lake’ inspiration of Rowling’s work, its biographical point of origin, remains the principal challenge to the text based reading of Rowling’s work as having a Christian foundation. There is little to no evidence in Rowling’s life of exposure to not to mention study of Christian doctrine, symbolism, sacraments, or art beyond familiarity with writers who were profoundly Christian in their artistry. Not her upbringing though next door to a church, not her Comprehensive or University education, not her life choices post Exeter, not in her life-time friends and family, not in her public testimony or known philanthropic efforts. The Grand Canyon dividing that life from works in which the Christian content is both “obvious” and remarkably subliminal in its delivery — I think of the ‘Potter’ series and ‘Christmas Pig’ especially, but the other books as well — is a mystery I hope Rowling will make some ‘ante morte’ effort to explain in her interviews with the Team Rowling anointed and authorized critical biographer.
(3) To address your point about “Strike’s encounter at Alymerton Church with Charlotte’s ghost and a pious churchman,” besides acknowledging it as an important counter to my thesis, I am obliged to push back a little. Is that scene not as easily read as a ‘Spiritual, not Religious’ moment? Yes, it is in a proper Anglican church and I embrace your point about the contrast with the UHC cult, but there is nothing sacramental or pastoral in the moment; the church itself is empty except for the token churchman, almost a historical relic. And the assumption among serious readers here, as wildly speculative as it must seem to many, is that Charlotte did not commit suicide but was murdered which makes Strike’s ‘King Cross’ conversation something much more “in his head” than “real.” If that turns out to be the case, Strike’s “encounter” with the ghost of Charlotte Campbell in the Alymerton Church will be read in the future as part and parcel with his conversation with Charlotte’s living sister at the book’s close, i.e., his understandable but still delusional and self-excusing initial response to his first true love’s demise and his responsibility for it (“she was always a walking suicide,” etc.).
Rowling said in a post ‘Deathly Hallows’ interview that she hoped to foster a “debate” in readers’ minds about what happened at the Harry-Albus meeting in his head’s ‘King Cross.’ I offer for your consideration, Ed, that it is possible she is doing the same with its parallel in the Alymerton Church and that it may be a mixed bag of meaning about what type of thinking ‘life in church’ offers than the clarity and means to truth a first reading of the “encounter” there suggests. Better than the UHC, of course, but grounded in the same psychological morass and confusion? We’ll know much more, I hope, after reading ‘Hallmarked Man.’
Thank you again, Ed, for the as always challenging counter-point!
Kings Cross… Such a key location. A modernist cathedral. The portal to the supernatural world. And now a place of pilgrimage. And a name which could barely be more Christian!