Home | Reviews | Blog | Daily | Glossary | Orrin's Stuff | Email

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999)

A great deal of angst has been expressed in the Christian press and amongst conservatives over the notion that the Harry Potter books sanction magic and are, by the very nature of the story, irreligious. Though many commentators have had great fun with this worry, feeling that it somehow shows how fundamentally silly Christians are, I'm not inclined to dismiss it so quickly. In a society in which Wicca has begun to be taken seriously as a belief system, even receiving IRS tax-exempt status, a parent has to be concerned about the possible effects on their child of such a phenomena as Harry Potter. But a responsible parent who reads with their child and discusses the books and their themes presumably has no more need to worry about the witchcraft within them than have preceding generations of parents needed to lose sleep over the sorcery in The Lord of the Rings. In fact, it's hard to escape the nagging feeling that most of us simply accept that Tolkien won't warp our kids because we know him to have been a devout Christian himself, and influential in converting C. S. Lewis, whose Narnia books are too explicitly Christian-themed to worry anyone. Presumably, if J. K. Rowling were known to be religious (I've no idea whether she is or not), and outspoken about her beliefs, many of these concerns about her writings would likewise disappear. But this is neither a realistic nor a productive standard to hold authors to; instead we should judge them by the moral message of their works. By this standard, the Harry Potter books should give Christians, and religious parents of all stripes, reason to be grateful, not worried.

This is the case because Harry is a quintessential example of Man's struggle to choose between good and evil. In fact, we've reached a point in our culture where the simple acknowledgments that Evil exists, that the propensity to behave in an evil manner is an essential aspect of Man's character, that Evil is seductive, and that we are susceptible too it--the bifurcated nature of Man which is the very basis of Judeo-Christianity and, thus, of our civilization--are in themselves conservative notions. The political and spiritual philosophies of the Left are premised on a very different conception of Man, that he is fundamentally Good and that selfish, antisocial, and antihuman behaviors are products of external factors : of faulty social institutions; political oppression; or errant belief systems. The Left believes that if all of these artificial accretions could be stripped away Man would return to his natural state of goodness. J. K. Rowling obviously disagrees.

Famously, or at least it will be famous to anyone who's read the books, when Harry arrived at Hogwarts the Sorting Hat hesitated over what dorm to place him in. Eventually he was assigned to Gryffindor, but the Hat also noted that he would fit in Slytherin, the dorm associated with Salazar Slytherin and the study of the Dark Arts. Merely noting that the capacity for evil, as well as good, resides in Harry is unusual enough, but Rowling also makes it clear that Harry will be defined by the choices he makes between the two. At the end of Chamber of Secrets, worried about his ability to tap into skills that are usually associated with Slytherin (like communicating with snakes [note the Biblical echo]), Harry confesses his self-doubt to Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts. Harry wonders if he really should be in Slytherin :

'[The Sorting Hat] only put me in Gryffindor,' said Harry in a defeated voice, 'Because I asked not to go in Slytherin. . . .'

'Exactly,' said Dumbledore, beaming once more. 'Which makes you very different from [Voldemort]. It is our choices, Harry, that show
what we truly are, far more than our abilities.' Harry sat motionless in his chair, stunned.

Well might Harry, or any other modern child, be stunned by this revelation, that it is our moral choices in life that define who we are, that we bear the responsibility for who we become in life. Adults hear this seldom enough, children almost never. It is this message that makes the Harry Potter books so valuable to parents and makes their appeal to children such a welcome development. Concerned parents--though they may obviously prefer that kids not be exposed to such themes in public schools, which antireligion activists have rendered so morally neutral and hostile to Christianity that they are incompetent to address them--should embrace the books, should read them with their kids, and, without sucking the fun out of them, should take advantage of the lessons that they teach.

Meanwhile, the popularity of the books suggests a genuine thirst among kids for the kind of moral clarity that they provide. The Education establishment, the Left, and parents who leave such matters to the public schools to fulfill would do well to engage in some soul searching about the inadequacy of the moral education that the schools are apparently providing. One approach that conservatives and Christians might take is to, quite disingenuously, suggest that just as these Wiccan novels have valuable non-religious lessons to teach, so might some of the great children's novels of the Christian tradition, like Swiss Family Robinson, which is usually horribly bowdlerized to strip it of religious themes. Rather than trying to ban a worthwhile series of books, one which has kids reading enthusiastically, they should be used as a lever to get more good books into the curricula, to at least make sure that the same schools are reading Tolkien and Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle. After all, what's good for the Wiccan goose is good for the Christian gander, right?

(Reviewed:25-Dec-01)

Grade: (A+)

Home | Reviews | Blog | Daily | Glossary | Orrin's Stuff | Email

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999)

Websites:

See also:

Comments: