I recently read yet another Christian complaint about Harry Potter. The critic’s thesis was that Joanna Rowling is a “contemporary transgressive artist par excellence,” who holds lightly to the canons of Judeo-Christian morality and of traditional children’s literature in the west, the Potter tales being a catalog of rule-breaking, disobedience, lying, vengeance-taking, and whatnot, its final installation containing the revelation of the Snape-Dumbledore murder-suicide pact that insinuates euthanasia into the minds of children--not to mention that all of this is done in a pagan context by witches and wizards, no less.
My reaction was--yes--but did he miss something? Like the Point of it All?
One wonders just what kind of literature a person like this can read.
I'm not suggesting there's no cause whatever for concern. With movies, for example, I like to be warned what my kids are going to be confronted with --esp. since visuals penetrate the imagination more easily. Parents have to make judgment calls about age-appropriateness, and for that reason it's helpful sometimes to just have a flat, pragmatic list of offenses: 3 profanities, 2 blasphemies and a love scene, e.g.
However, I have wondered in the course of reading HP criticisms how dumb parents think their kids are and whether these parents read with their kids or discuss matters with them? Continuing:
Christian children who are old enough to read Harry Potter are old enough to understand the imperfections of heroes, and judge the flaws of literary characters, if they have been given the standards by which to render the judgments. Shall we train their instincts to flee imperfect human beings rather than love and embrace them--not for the imperfection, but in spite of it--in hope of redemption, both of their imperfect selves and those they embrace? If we train them to flee, those who castigate our faith for making people who hate first themselves, and then by extension, others, are quite correct about our faith, but wrong in thinking it Christian.
These children are also old enough to understand that murder/suicide pacts are the sort of things that can be entered by pagans with noble and admirable ends in mind, but which Christians know are sinful--they are old enough to understand what is splendid even in the virtutes paganorum, and to think of Dumbledore and Snape accordingly. If Dumbledore’s creator thinks of him as a man of homosexual orientation, why does that mean Christians are obliged to belittle his excellences--particularly if he lives, as he is depicted, a chaste and celibate life? In that case might homosexuals be justified in saying we train our children to hate the sinner along with what we allege to be the sin? If we did, and they did, they would be right about our faith, but wrong in thinking it Christian.
Okay, a little more.
One wonders what critics like this do with Odysseus, with David or Solomon, with Simon Peter, with Hamlet, Lear, or, Bunyan’s Christian, for that matter. Or the Bible. The Christian literary tradition, because it is grounded in the perfection of God, the primordial goodness of creation, and a redemptive teleology, does not require perfection of its heroes, only perfectibility, and--this is critical--the ability to represent Christ, whether by authorial intention or not.
This is what I meant in earlier postings about Christians being able to handle snakes and drink deadly poisons without harm. While parents have to protect the innocence of those too small to think critically, Christian formation of children does not consist primarily in insulating them from the reality of sin, but preparing them to battle it.
I'm not sure which HP critic this author read, but I just finished devouring Island of the World, the latest from Michael O'Brien, who's been severe with Our Harry. It (Island) is a gorgeously-written story of a young Croat growing up in Bosnia at the close of WW II and chronicles the transition to Yugoslavian communism through to the present time. It's odd to me that O'Brien can be such a keen observer of human nature and shrewd critic of the relentless materialism of Western culture and not recognize his kinship with Rowling, who addresses precisely the same themes, although for an adolescent audience.
