Fire and Knowledge

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…. Christians are apparently supposed to be people for whom everything is a monochromatic moral tale, and who operate on the maxim that people are what they read. But this is only true of fools, and one cannot account for the actions or opinions of fools.

–S. M. Hutchens, “The Helpful Discovery of Dirt in Potter’s Field“