Are the Harry Potter books spiritually dangerous and subversive, glorifying the occult and evil?
My answer is “NO.” Early Christian critics, when the first book came out, branded it as dangerous and warned Christian parents to keep their children away for fear that they would become sucked into witchcraft and magic. (Unfortunately, the tendency of conservatives is often to attack anything new. Many conservative pastors in 1939 and 1940 rejected the film The Wizard of Oz as teaching dangerous witchcraft to American youth!) These attacks by Christians were hard on Jo Rowling, who is a Scottish Presbyterian Christian. But she decided not to publicly defend herself or describe her faith in too much detail (for fear that secular people would then avoid her books, and would not receive the message contained in them). One contemporary scholar has summed up Rowling’s place within world literature as follows: “Ms. Rowling writes in the great tradition of symbolist literature, beginning with Chaucer and Dante, and continuing in modern times in the fantasy writings of George MacDonald, G.K.
