The Gospel according to Harry Potter

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRY POTTER:
Spirituality in the Stories of the World's Most Famous Seeker
By Connie Neal
Westminster John Knox Press
168 pages. £8.99
ISBN 0 664 22601 9

Evangelicals Now's budget sadly was unable to cover a stretch limo and a seat at the launch of the new Harry Potter film, but they did send me in lieu this very attractive paperback with a request for a review. It's been a refreshing read.

Connie Neal's book stands in the tradition of Robert Short's Gospel According to Peanuts and Mark Pinsky's The Gospel According to The Simpsons; like them it originates in America. It is closer to Short's book than to Pinsky's closely argued analysis, in that Neal simply quotes key themes in Harry Potter and provides biblical parallels. Readers making the same criticism as was often made of Short - that far too much is being read into the books - receive a disarmingly simple response. Some people have read the Harry Potter books and condemned them for their occult echoes: so, 'What if I can use the same techniques of interpretation and selective reading, but look for the Christian gospel in the Harry Potter books?' She quotes author J.K. Rowling: 'People tend to find in books what they look to find.' You will find these remarks in a very bracing Introduction in which Connie Neal, a prominent speaker about Harry Potter, robustly defends herself against her critics.

Conviction

The book is not especially well written and its style can be a touch cloying for non-American readers. But Neal writes with conviction, knows her Potter and repeatedly identifies the points at which Rowling touches on very important issues - the complex overtones of the Sorting Hat, for instance (p. 22), and the fact that childish naughtiness cannot be separated from the fact of original sin (p. 103). Sometimes she seems to settle for some rather tenuous links - the connection between the magical meals at Hogwarts and the feeding of the five thousand (p. 96) is pushing things a bit, especially when you remember the much more profound treatment of magical meal tables in C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But even in those chapters she has some good things to say, and her basic point that Harry Potter at Hogwarts eats and is satisfied in a way he never was at the home of his foster parents the Dursleys is worth making.

This book is going to be very useful for adults, especially parents and teachers, who would like to use the popularity of Harry Potter as a way in for the gospel. It doesn't patronise the books nor exploit them, and its handling of Scripture is thoughtful and often illuminating. You won't find much in this book about the problems that do exist in the Harry Potter books - the uncertain handling of the afterlife, the comparatively weak treatment of good as opposed to the power of evil (e.g. in the opening of the fourth book), and the like - but the author has pre-emoted criticism by acknowledging that her reading is selective.

Value

The value of this book is all the greater when one considers the way Harry Potter has been argued over in the Christian press. An American Christian video Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged, for example, never suggests that Christians should read the books and make their own minds up. The implication is that one should watch the video and stay well away from the books. This throws a huge onus on the presenter, who is the nearest many viewers will get to J.K. Rowling's books, and it's therefore disturbing to find many dubious arguments, weak links and special pleadings, which undermine what is clearly a very well-intentioned video.

Read for yourself

For example, her argument that if Harry Potter were an inaccurate picture of witchcraft there would have been protests from wizards all over the world is weak. You didn't get thousands of teachers complaining about the idealised school world of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers school stories, and teachers who wanted children to be attracted to the idea of school must have been very pleased indeed. And black witchcraft in particular has always been delighted by any media attention to celebrity Satanists like Aleister Crowley, who distract the public from what is really going on.

Connie Neal ends her book with an appeal to the reader to read the Harry Potter books for themselves. 'It is hard to be adamant if you choose to remain personally ignorant by relying only on impressions and hearsay without reading the story in question for yourself' (p. 163). But she extends the challenge in one more parallel: 'All seekers of truth owe it to themselves to read at least one of the four gospels.'

This is an eminently sensible and thoughtful book. The publishers have taken great pains to point out that it is not authorised by J.K. Rowling, her publishers or by Warner Brothers. I would have thought all three would have been happy to see the book published. I recommend it.

The film 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets' was released on November15.

Spirituality in the Stories of the World's Most Famous Seeker

Conviction

Value

Read for yourself

David Porter

Main Articles

Other articles