One of the interesting phenomenon in the wake of the hype over the last Harry Potter book is the amount of squalling from the fundies over the very existence of these books. Like this nutty lady:
From a reality-based standpoint, there is no reason to think that these particular fantasy books are worse than any other blatant fiction that lays no claim to challenging religious faiths, but you wouldn’t know it from the attention that it’s getting. I am forced to conclude that this is base opportunism, mixed with a heavy dose of the fundamentalist belief that they should be the center of attention at all points in time and everything needs to be about them. Someone with her nose in a book about a fantastical wizarding world is most likely not sitting around thinking about great it is to live in submission to an anti-intellectual, authoritarian religious order, and the popularity of these books is a scary reminder to the fundies of exactly how many people don’t sit around hating themselves for Jesus.
Still, I can’t really blame someone for being opportunistic on this count. Shared narratives in a culture beg for opportunism; if you aren’t using the shared narratives to communicate with others, they have no real reason to exist. It would be hypocritical of me to applaud with one hand the people who queer up the Potter narrative with their slash fiction while denying the right of religious lunatics to create their own meaning out of Harry Potter, however horrible and anemic that meaning is. Plus, I do think there’s more going on here with the antagonism towards Harry Potter from the fascist 25% than just opportunistic irritation that anyone dares have interests outside of the ones they dictate for you.
Fundamentalists and their relationship with stories fascinate me. Now, being able to hone in on themes and symbols and articulate their meaning isn’t exactly the most common skill, and you usually have to train people to be any good at it. If you’ve ever helped teach some sort of basic literature course, this much becomes obvious. But even though most people aren’t very good at exposition doesn’t mean that they don’t understand themes and symbols. Getting it, feeling it, and being able to explain it are all very different things. For instance, your average Bible-thumper and I get the story of Adam and Eve and the snake. I’m probably better at parceling out the themes (women are morally inferior to men, male sin is the fault of women, the Original Sin was sexual, sins like murder and petty jealousy are secondary to lust and female curiousity), but your patriarchy-loving, Genesis-obsessing Bible-thumper certainly understands the themes just as well, and moreover, he feels them in a way that I just don’t. (That section of Genesis reads less like revelation to me and more like post hoc justification for women’s oppression.) With that in mind, I do think there’s a lot going on in the Harry Potter series that does in fact cause genuine offense, not just opportunistic offense. Without spoiling the last book (I promised the slowbees I’d wait until Saturday to engage spoilers), I can point to a number of pretty obvious themes that insult Christian conservatives, who are, mind you, as much about being the religious arm of the Republican party as being religious for its own sake.
Anti-authoritarianism and thinking for yourself. Not that there’s anything new in this; 99% of stories written nowadays outside of the Christian bookstore market preach the virtues of independent thought. Hell, even the authoritarians are trying to push lock-step conformity as the new rebellion—think of Wendy Shalit trying to push the idea that traditional feminine virginity is somehow counter-cultural. If the Potter books are particularly offensive in this regard, it’s probably only because the books push the idea that thinking for yourself is a critical part of growing up. In each book, the children are given more and more freedom and this is portrayed as the right and proper way to grow up. I happen to agree, but under the conservative Christian view, rearing children is more about tearing down their will and only setting them free when you’re sure that they don’t have enough gumption left in their soul to start thinking for themselves once they’re out in the real world.
More knowledge is better than less knowledge. Perhaps the most frustrating narrative cheat Rowling uses is building tension by having the characters not sharing crucial information for badly explained reasons. Personally, I think that works okay in a children’s series, since a lot of it is a jab at adults who often are too stingy about sharing knowledge with children and teenagers, often because said adults are weak and scared. You can probably see where I’m going with this; so much of the political activism of the religious right is about reducing knowledge acquisition for children and teenagers. It’s certainly true that by depriving people of knowledge of sex or science, you probably will maintain more control over their minds. In the Potter books, though, the denial of important knowledge is the source of much of the danger.
The banality of evil. In the real world, Dolores Umbridge would be humming “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love” while mutilating small children as punishment for imagined trangressions. Even the most willfully ignorant can’t miss that anvil.
But mostly, I think that the woman above’s uneasiness with the portrayal of magic and Lev Grossman’s uneasiness with magic that doesn’t explicitly come from god is what, in the end, upsets the religious nuts the most about Harry Potter. For one thing, they admit that outright. But mostly, it’s because fantasy fiction is a threat to religious faith, particularly those faiths that insist on the literal truth of the Bible. Harry Potter doesn’t lay claim to be the truth, yet in many ways, the narrative is much more coherent, cohesive and therefore believable than the Bible’s stories of magic and mystery. Which makes it undeniably obvious that it’s completely possible that someone just made the entire Bible up just as surely as J.K. Rowling made up Hogwarts. And that you don’t have to believe that a story is literally true to have an emotional tie to it or derive some meaning out of it, either. If fundamentalist Christians feel a threat to their religion from admittedly fictional tales, they have good reason to be threatened.
72 Responses to “Harry Potter: Subverting Jeebus?”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
But, fantasy fiction is a real threat because magic is real. That is, I think, an important part of their thinking. These folks believe that there are evil spirits out there performing magic tricks to steal their souls.
One of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard was on a radio program while I was driving through Wisconsin on my way to Massachusetts. These folks were going on and on and on about all the sources of false magic that could be invading your home, be it a gift from a muslim friend or a baghavad gita. These folks’ belief systems are silly and magical and mystical to begin with, thus they really can’t differentiate between the Bible and Harry Potter.
When she paused after “Let me say something about Harry Potter”, I sort of thought she was going to bust out with “FUCK Harry Potter!” and storm off the stage. I know that’s what I’d do if I were a children’s pastor.
Amanda, kudos for taking on the anti-authoritarianism criticism. After the maigc, that’s the fundies’ favorite criticism of Harry Potter. Most people get hung up on the magic criticism and just dimiss it all wholesale without trying to understand the source of the criticism and trully refute. I’m also glad I’m not the only person who picked up on the banality of evil theme. My friends missed that one.
Which makes it undeniably obvious that it’s completely possible that someone just made the entire Bible up just as surely as J.K. Rowling made up Hogwarts.
And they can’t deal with that possibility. The thing about being in a closed society like a fundamentalist church is that from the inside, it seems logical. Everything fits together as long as you don’t allow in any doubt, and the worst doubt of all for fundamentalists is the possibility that the book they’ve based every bit of their lives on isn’t infallible, because it’ll destroy their entire world. It did for me, to my eternal benefit.
One of my most effective days as a teacher was back in MN, when one of the rabid touring fundamentalists was on our campus that day, and my students were up in arms. “It just makes no sense!” they kept saying. I was able to bring them into an entire sociology of knowledge discussion about knowledge systems and about the internal coherence of the fundies’ system, as well as its incommensurability with my students’ own system, and modernity.
Amanda writes:
True Amanda! It must be 25 years now, but I am still appalled when I think about the fundie mother interviewed after she had taken a case to the Supreme Court about books in the local library.
Her quote was “We must put bounds upon our children’s imaginations.”
That is the one of the most worst statements I think I can ever recall hearing someone say in all seriousness. I so feel sorry for her children to this day.
oooh, would I like to smite that woman with a cheesebomb!
This box that I’m typing into seems really small and comments appear pretty close together vertically, almost on top of each other.
On topic, as someone pointed out in an earlier thread, many wingers believe that knowing about or educating about something is the same as endorsing it. This applies to fiction as well. Writing about magic is an endorsement of magic, and writing about non-Christian heroes is an endorsement of non-Christian heroes.
If you look a Christian fiction, it is not judged based on writing or plot or characterization, it is judged almost solely on the moralizing. These people fundamentally don’t get fiction, for them all fiction is allegory.
When looked at in that way their objections make perfect sense.
Man, just wait until The Golden Compass comes out, and those books start getting more attention. The entire theme of those fantasy novels is about killing God and tearing down organized religion. If they were freaking out about Pokemon and Harry Potter before, neither of which provide the least bit justification for their hate, they’re going to have an aneurysm over Golden Compass series.
Bah, I meant to specify the movie version of the book, which is coming out this winter.
gruyer may be tart, but it’s not bitter enough, my dear grenadier.
At first I thought that woman was hilarious; I mean, spitting angrily but with clear satisfaction that Harry Potter would have been “put to death!!!1!! But then the camera cut back to the young minds she was warping, and it didn’t seem quite so funny.
All good points, Amanda — and MAJeff.
I’d like to suggest that another reason the religious extremists are so upset about HP is that it’s just cooler than the bible.
I mean, really, the most appealing bible story for a kid is the birth of Jesus, and even that can’t hold a kid’s interest the way flying on broomsticks can. The HP characters are more compelling to kids, and kids would rather read about other children than boring old adults any day — especially if the boring old adults are going on about sin and shame and the will of god.
Put it this way, we have every HP and several versions of the bible around the house, and my 8-year old has read some of the Harry Potter books more than a dozen times. Total bible readings: zero.
If the fundamentalists want to compete with that, they need a better story. But they can’t change their old story because that would destroy the basis of their fundamentalism. Catch-22. Oh, well.
All good points, Amanda — and MAJeff.
I’d like to suggest that another reason the religious extremists are so upset about HP is that it’s just cooler than the bible.
I mean, really, the most appealing bible story for a kid is the birth of Jesus, and even that can’t hold a kid’s interest the way flying on broomsticks can. The HP characters are more compelling to kids, and kids would rather read about other children than boring old adults any day — especially if the boring old adults are going on about sin and shame and the will of god.
Put it this way, we have every HP and several versions of the bible around the house, and my 8-year old has read some of the Harry Potter books more than a dozen times. Total bible readings: zero.
If the fundamentalists want to compete with that, they need a better story. But they can’t change their old story because that would destroy the basis of their fundamentalism. Catch-22. Oh, well.
I really don’t have much to add on the idiocy that is Potterfear, just stopped by to give mad props to Jesus Camp (the film clipped above). It’s such an amazing documentary, giving uninterrupted voice to the evangelicals to present their message as they want it presented, and letting the viewers judge it as we naturally would if we were actually there. It plays so fairly with the issue that, even if you aren’t like me and didn’t grow up around people like this, you can still know that your wariness of this brand of Christianity comes from a human desire to see people living healthy lives, and not just from a form of liberal cultural imperialism as the conservative movement is quick to claim. Not to mention, the movie is freakin’ gorgeous. And the filmmakers just happen to be women.
If you haven’t seen it yet, go rent it, watch it twice to catch everything, and try not to yell at the TV.
Man, just wait until The Golden Compass comes out, and those books start getting more attention. The entire theme of those fantasy novels is about killing God and tearing down organized religion.
They’ve taken God out of the story altogether, from what I’ve heard. The Magisterium is no longer a religious organization, but some sort of political or otherwise secular totalitarian regime. It pisses me off enough to make me want to stay away from the movie.
I think a lot of this anti-Harry Potter agitation from the fundies is fear of competition. They see a kids flocking to a different belief system, and they fear the kids won’t listen to their song and dance. I’m still an AOLic, and the movie message boards still get a lot of the “pagan demonic” lie; one that’s so patently absurd they must be unable to find anything that is remotely credible.
Ahem.
I mean, really, the most appealing bible story for a kid is the birth of Jesus, and even that can’t hold a kid’s interest the way flying on broomsticks can.
Well, when I was a kid, I was far more taken by the 10 plagues or the Old Testament battles–Samson, Jehu, David and Absolom, etc–than I ever was by the Jesus stuff. The story of David and Bath-sheba and her husband was steamy stuff, after all, with a bit of murder thrown in.
I already said this over at my blog, but god damn! It’s fiction, lady! Fiction is chock full of characters who don’t abide by the laws of nature. I mean, take your pick. If this were the old testament, the cat in the hat would have been put to death! he would have been pelted with stones until his striped felt hat was bursting with blood!
And what about Santa Claus, while we’re at it? No mention of him in the bible. And he’s a pretty witchy character, if you ask me, what with his crazy time-bending elf magic and all. If this were the old testament, Santa Claus woulda been put to death!
kids would rather read about other children than boring old adults any day
I’m not sure I really buy this. Certainly lots of people think this is so, and lots of media targeted at children features other children. Insofar as fantasy is wish-fulfillment, I’d think kids would gravitate towards the adult characters they want to turn into. Sure, Luke Skywalker was supposed to be someone kids would identify with, but young boys wanted to be Han Solo. Likewise with the young Chekov vs. Captain Kirk in Star Trek. And the Lord of the Rings trilogy didn’t feature any kids, either.
And now that I’ve embarrassed myself by showing that the first pop-culture artifacts that come to mind are limited within a specific genre, I will be quiet now.
[blockquote cite=Constantine]And the Lord of the Rings trilogy didn’t feature any kids, either.[/blockquote]
Well, from a kid’s point of view it did. To a kid, a kid is a small adult who gets inappropriately condescended to.
I’m still trying to decide, and I’ve been reading their blogs for years, whether the anti-fantasy religious people actually believe in black magic, as they resolutely claim to. It is plausible that they just see any rival fantasy as a dire threat, and there are certainly Bible passages that support the idea that anything religionlike that isn’t the Bible is not just misleading but of the devil.
Jenny, that’s why there’s a (fortunately) small contingent of fundamentalist Christians who condemn all fiction as “lies”, and refuse to “corrupt their children’s minds” with it. They seem to be honestly unable to tell the difference between a story and a lie.
Having grown up in a church with those scary people, the basis of most of their fear of Harry Potter is their belief that anything not “of the Bible/God” is “of the Devil”. Add in the fact that the books are blatantly about wizardry, and OF COURSE they are evil/satanic in their minds. I can’t convince my mother that my Buddhas/Shivas/Kwan Yins are not evil demonic gods…I just like to look at them from an artistic point of view, but she thinks I am going to burn in hell because I “worship false idols”. Sheesh.
There are a couple of other reasons that make HP “evil” to the fundies.
1. The protagonist is in direct opposition to his parents and acts against their wishes and without their supervision. They aren’t his real parents, of course, but they represent the honor-your-father-and-mother stuff. Fundies hate stories that don’t involve the parents, though parentlessness is of course one of the hallmarks of stories that kids love.
2. Many of the same fundies who hate HP love Lord Of The Rings, and that has a wizard in it, in a large and powerful role. So why do they hate HP but not LOTR?
a. In LOTR, the wizard is male. While HP himself is male, there are female wizards, and female students, and of course the book itself is written by a woman.
b. There’s also the fact that Gandalf is really the only wizard other than Sauron, so they can sort of stand in for God and Satan (same initial letters after all). The protagonists don’t have magical powers; they might be given special little boosts by magical beings, but no one is being encouraged to think much about what it would be like to be magical or have those powers.
I think they hate kids reading fantasy because it’s only a short step for them to realize the bible is fantasy.
Saw the preview for The Golden Compass and it didn’t look good, and i’m a fan of the books, at least the first two.
Actually, I disagree about the Bible being less “cool” than Harry Potter. The Bible has plenty of “cool Factor” it’s jsut deliberately deemphasized by modern preachers.
Still, plenty of biblical heroes are passable wizards.
Moses, of course, is usually portrayed a wise old magic man with a staff. Aaron not only caries a wand, but speaks Parseltongue.
And it’s not just the Old Testament.
Besides raising the dead, Jesus runs around turning water to wine, casting out demons, and controlling weather. His disciples are apparently pretty hardcore too. One of them (John, I think) offers to smite Jesus’ enemies with fire from the sky.
There’s no shortage of badass dudes and magic in the Bible. Modern Christians just try not to dwell on it.
But… everyone is basically out questing to kill God… how are they going to explain that part? o_O
I’m still trying to decide, and I’ve been reading their blogs for years, whether the anti-fantasy religious people actually believe in black magic, as they resolutely claim to.
When I was one, I certainly did believe. Of course, I also believed humans were only 6,000 years old as well. I’m better now.
But all snarking aside, the belief wasn’t so much in magic as a force, but as the working of fallen angels, of Satan’s demons, who were real, not just the darker sides of our inner natures.
Just to brighten up the “religious nuts are depressing and scary” theme a bit — the religious non-nuts are pretty tuned into Potter. I was at a Catholic school’s mass last year, and the sermon was based around Potter - IIRC, the theme was friendship & community. Had the kids pretty riveted.
I’ve been pretty convinced that The Golden Compass movie was going to suck since they took Stoppard off the script. IIRC, the press release saying “no! no! we will
kowtow appropriately tobe respectful of religion” came out around the same time, and I don’t like the picture that coincidence makes.They’ve taken God out of the story altogether, from what I’ve heard. The Magisterium is no longer a religious organization, but some sort of political or otherwise secular totalitarian regime. It pisses me off enough to make me want to stay away from the movie.
Actually, God, or “The Authority” turns out to be simply a really powerful angels (angels being the first conscious beings to appear when elemental particles of consciousness started to form into structures). He gets killed in an underwhelming scene late in the trilogy.
The funny thing is, the HP books actually do promote a lot of traditional Christian values– emphasising love as all-important, noble sacrifice protecting and saving others– and the anti-establishment discourses are also very much in keeping with Jesus’ teachings.
It’s like that wants religion to keep the best part of itself hidden, or something, and Potter is threatening to spoil the pretence.
Ack, that’s supposed to read “It’s like that religion wants to keep…” etc.
Trust me to spoil my punchline.
The comments look fine in the SeaMonkey browser.
I’m too lazy to look it up, but I believe that there is a passage in Leviticus that says “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”, and it’s actually suppose to translate into English as ‘poisoner’, which would make a lot of sense.
Remember that the witches of Endor whom Saul consulted did foretell his future, and that the Pharohs’ priests were able to turn their rods into snakes, albeit Moses’ staff turned into a snake that ate the others.
There is plenty of support in the OT for the existence of magic, wizards, etc. and the fundies deal with it by saying its’ all bad.
I can’t convince my mother that my Buddhas/Shivas/Kwan Yins are not evil demonic gods…
A friend of my fathers’, a man who taught high school and college classes before becoming an administrator, once in all seriousness warned me about studying Asian religions and belief systems because of the BS he heard about them in his church, which is a small Protestant denomination that is popular in my hometpwn amounst some of the socially ‘elite’.
Comment box should now be bigger and comments now slightly more spacious. Anyone not seeing it?
I wonder how much of the original story will remain when they make a movie of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, which is more specifically designed to upset Christians.
I personally think that Harry Potter is rather too conservative at times, and the primacy of the heteronormative family is on quite a display, in some chapters.
I’ll just read all the comments before posting myself next time, shall I?
Sorry, Pai.
Oh gods yes, can’t be pushing that heteronormality in a retro kids book, heavens no… ::eyeroll ^^10::
Yeah, I agree totally about the heteronormativity. I’d like to see more (in fact any) females at the top of the power structure too– there’s lots of 2IC females, but men are still at the head of the cultural and moral hierarchy. There’s a lot of cool commentary in Harry Potter… but there are some areas in which falls short.
Why do they pick on Harry Potter? Well, the woman says it herself. Warlocks are an enemy of God. Simple. Remember the witch at Endor? There’s evidence of that all over the Bible. From:
“Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them.” Leviticus 19:31
or
“There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to The Lord; and because of these abominable practices The Lord your God is driving them out before you. You shall be blameless before The Lord your God.” Deuteronomy 18:10-13
to:
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places”
Ephesians 6:11-12
Its part of the narrative. Harry Potter, or warlocks have to exist and be a threat, or everything christians believe, have invested their lives in, have denied their desires for, etc is Hogwart. Or is that wash. Anyhow.
As difficult as Jesus Camp is to watch, I loved that film. It put the absurdity of the christian faith IN YOUR FACE. Because you see, the woman is bang on right, biblically.
Great post Amanda. Thanks for this one…
They’ve taken God out of the story altogether, from what I’ve heard. The Magisterium is no longer a religious organization, but some sort of political or otherwise secular totalitarian regime. It pisses me off enough to make me want to stay away from the movie.
That’s strange — I thought Philip Pullman had said (and I’ve only just recently started the trilogy and have only done a bit of research) that he wouldn’t want movies made from the books unless they stuck with the theme. I’d like to read more about what they’ve done with the Magisterium, if anyone has a link.
At some point, someone’s going to point out that there’s all sorts of magic, good and bad, in the Chronicles of Narnia. Let them go after C.S. Lewis for a while.
Really? With Harry Potter? On stage?
“I haven’t had this much sex since I was a Boy Scout leader!”
[Sudden silence]
“I mean, at the time, I was dating a lot.”
Indeed. And a bunch of these people hate him too, along with all the materialism at Christmas, which is supposed to be all about Christ’s Incarnation and hating oneself. They keep the stockings, though… just so there’s something to put the lumps of coal in.
Yeah, Madeleine L’Engle in A Swiftly Tilting Planet had a fire-and-brimstone preacher exclaim that “Storytelling is of the Devil!” The woman on the receiving end pointed out that Jesus told stories all the time. They tried to burn her as a witch shortly thereafter.
And dagnabit! Blogsome apparently doesn’t work with “killfile”. You proprietors had better be quick on the bunny video trigger. Or will registration solve all such problems?
A Christian loony says Harry Potter would’ve been put to death and she got scattered applause. That’s just great. But please don’t mock the dipshits. This fascination with fictional persons should be encouraged among the right wingers and fundies, since it will certainly help us for a significant percentage of Republicans to vote for Jack Bauer next November.
As for the Golden Compass movie and religious sensibilities, that’s just PR bullshit. If the movie makes money and encourages people to read the books, then the later films will be better matched with the source material. If the movie flops, then they’ve blown it and the author’s work still is out there. Hollywood, for all it’s complainers, is very conservative in the old sense: it’s a business. The bean counters rule that world.
As for no children in Lord of the Rings: hobbits are pretty much children. Brave, inspired to do great things, able to say what they think, and not so worried about what the big people will think of them, the hobbits were the most human of the heroes.
HUGE FUCKING SPOILER ALERT
The irony of Christians who accept the Narnia books going after the Potter books should not be lost on anyone who reads the Aslan walk section of the Deathly Hallows.
SPOILER OVER
Fundamentalists (a) have difficulty telling fiction from reality, and (b) really believe in witches and black magic. Hence the Potter hatred . . .
I’m somewhat comforted by the fact that the kids in the video seem bored to death. Gives me hope for a future generation.
mds- The stockings thing is actually based on the original St. Nikolaus. Wikipedia has a good article if you’d like to learn more.
I think one of the reasons fundamentalists see these books and fantasy in general as a threat is that they show that good and evil is clear (or at least subject to debate) without one reference to the bible or God. That morality can be based on rational thought and not based solely on an appeal to authority is antithetical the fundamentalist christianity. If you accept that morality is rational then you can judge the acts of God as recounted in the Bible. He doesn’t come off so good.
I’m somewhat comforted by the fact that the kids in the video seem bored to death. Gives me hope for a future generation.
That’s the case for the majority of the film. The filmmakers decided, reasonably, to focus on the kids who were most affected by the camp, but in the background, you get a strong indication that a number of the kids are there because they were forced to be, which isn’t all that unusual.
But what they do to the kids who buy into it is criminal.
Whenever someone is as phenomenally successful as J.K. Rowling has been, especially in an intensely competitive field like fiction, she’s going to get a lot of sniping, from all sides. This overfed fundamentalist is just the flipside of, say, the academics who sniff that the Harry Potter books are insufficiently literary, or something.
This overfed fundamentalist is just the flipside of, say, the academics who sniff that the Harry Potter books are insufficiently literary, or something.
Except that literary academics aren’t trying to turn children into warriors for Christ, and aren’t trying to turn summer camp into the equivalent of an extremist madrassa.
This overfed fundamentalist is just the flipside of, say, the academics who sniff that the Harry Potter books are insufficiently literary, or something.”
LOL. Uh huh, right, “or something”. The academia isn’t calling for or wouldn’t relish in Harry’s execution. I guess bad prose isn’t an enemy of God.
Don’t tell that to Bill Buckley!
I’m sure the wacked fundie brigade is also less than pleased with the no-nonsense, total equality between the sexes in the Potterverse. Sports, government, academia: there is no aspect of life in which men and women don’t sit in the front seat together in those books, and it’s so much the norm that JKR doesn’t even really bother to point it out.
Call St Mungo’s and get a cot ready…
thedrifter: You would be right, if Harry Potter were a real person. Unless there is a biblical injunction against fiction, these people still don’t have a legitimate biblical complaint.
On the other hand, I DO have a problem with the Narnia books being embraced as Christian fiction. The idea of Jesus rising from the tomb to say, “Ha-ha! I memorized the rulebook better than you, so I win!” is just icky.
Incertus (Brian): I think Levi’s encounter with Ted Haggard at the end of the movie seems to predict that Levi will run out of faith. Haggard basically told Levi that he wasn’t channeling the holy spirit when he preached, and sort of told him to manipulate people to get his message out. It was a huge contrast with everything Levi told us about his beliefs, and if it were me up there, I would begin to think that maybe the adults in my church were being manipulated.
Without too many spoilers, I can say that JKR has some serious gender issues. Throughout the series, we’re told and shown that the highest and most noble goal a woman can aspire to is to have children–the more, the better. It’s particularly evident in DH.
Blockquote off.Do the fundies notice in the Harry Potter books that the magical folks, not just the Muggles, celebrate Christmas?
6079, I’ll be happy to take up the gender issue in the spoiler thread on Saturday. (I might have a few strong feelings about this.
) But it’s much harder to argue the point without recourse to DH, so.
The thing that struck me most about Jesus Camp was the fact that Ted Haggard was actually quite…I’m not sure if witty is the word I’m looking for, or just intentionally ironic (even ignoring what we later found out about him). Like, if the religion were somehow forcibly excised, he might be a fun guy to have at dinner parties. But that personality was completely subverted beneath the preaching–which, I suppose, is the point.
*** SPOILERS ALERT FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T READ THE GOLDEN COMPASS BOOKS ***
> > They’ve taken God out of the story altogether, from what I’ve
> > heard. The Magisterium is no longer a religious organization, but
> > some sort of political or otherwise secular totalitarian regime.
> > It pisses me off enough to make me want to stay away from the movie.
> Actually, God, or “The Authority” turns out to be simply a really
> powerful angels (angels being the first conscious beings to appear
> when elemental particles of consciousness started to form into
> structures). He gets killed in an underwhelming scene late in the
> trilogy.
Actually, if I’m remembering the third book correctly, they do find God — he’s an intensely old, decrepit, senile being kept artificially alive in a bubble by the head angel who is keeping him alive-in-the-bubble both for figurehead’s sake (God can’t die!) and so he can rule in God’s name as God’s lieutenant or something. The heroes kill God off by basically opening up the hermetically-sealed bubble and let God just die.
And the scene where the head angel gets killed, while possibly underwhelming, haunts me to this day because of the absolute sacrifice made by the people who do kill him. Total and utter annihilation? Gah! That’s even worse than the amorphous non-existence/Part-Of-The-All that is death in this series. (Besides, even though I thought whatsisname was an amoral and corrupt asshole, I really liked his snow leopard daemon. Somehow I never got over my childhood “it’s always worse when the beloved animal dies” reactions….)
Have you read all of DH? Including the epilogue? I’m a huge fan of the series, but after reading DH, I found it really hard to defend Rowling’s gender issues.
McGonagal isn’t what I’d call a rich character by any means, but even with that, she doesn’t have children of her own but she’s effectively the house mother for several generations of Gryffindors. Umbridge and Bellatrix don’t have children–and they’re also sociopathic sadists.
There’s Saint Lily, of course, whose sole claim to fame is that she was a gorgeous redhead who gave birth to Harry and sacrified her life for him, and Molly Weasley, who’s the stereotypical overprotective-but-loving mother. When JKR tries to give the Slytherins some humanity, we get Narcissa being worried about Draco. Even poor Merope Gaunt is only known to history because she managed to live long enough to give birth to baby-Voldie.
I’ll be happy to address Hermione and Tonks after Saturday.
Actually, if I’m remembering the third book correctly, they do find God — he’s an intensely old, decrepit, senile being kept artificially alive in a bubble by the head angel who is keeping him alive-in-the-bubble both for figurehead’s sake (God can’t die!) and so he can rule in God’s name as God’s lieutenant or something. The heroes kill God off by basically opening up the hermetically-sealed bubble and let God just die.
And the scene where the head angel gets killed, while possibly underwhelming, haunts me to this day because of the absolute sacrifice made by the people who do kill him. Total and utter annihilation? Gah! That’s even worse than the amorphous non-existence/Part-Of-The-All that is death in this series. (Besides, even though I thought whatsisname was an amoral and corrupt asshole, I really liked his snow leopard daemon. Somehow I never got over my childhood “it’s always worse when the beloved animal dies” reactions….)
Yes, but it’s made clear that the “God” that they find is actually just the first angel to have formed– he wasn’t really a deity. And the head Angel was the Metatron.
And Darkrose, while I do agree that Rowling has gender issues, I don’t think that her mother-characters are any more developed than her non-mother characters– they all suffer from underdevelopment compared to the male characters, even those who play more prominent roles. For instance, although Hermione does develop as a character, that process of development tends to happen “off screen”, while with Harry, Ron and Neville we get to see some powerful, transformative moments. I’m not sure that I’d see McGonagall’s role as a mother-figure to Gryffindors either. She’s a caretaker, to be sure, but there’s no evidence that she treats her Gryffindors much differently to the way that Flitwick treats his Ravenclaws. Rowling has plenty of female characters that aren’t defined by motherhood (unfortunately, she does have a few that are defined that way, such as Lily), it’s just that those female characters are still defined largely in relation to men– Hermione is important because she’s Harry’s friend, McGonagall because she’s Dumbledore’s deputy, etc.
Man, when I first looked at that, some of those kids looked like she was skinning their puppy.
Please, please PLEASE, people, put spoiler warnings on posts. I haven’t yet finished DH (thanks to the migraine from hell) and I’ve only read the first two Pullman books. (In my defense, I only first heard of them two weeks ago.)
Jeebus haet Potter?
honestly, there’s an interesting dissection one could make there. If one starts with the premise “Magical Powers can only exist through diabolic contract,” it raises all kinds of questions. Can the ends actually justify the means, especially when the only downside to the means is personal sacrifice? What limitations are there to that calculus?
BIBLE SPOILERS FOLLOW:
Of course Jesus returned from the dead. All that time he was “working Miracles” was just stockpiling Horcruxes.
It’s a pattern with many fundamentalists to criticize what they don’t understand. They criticize evolution without understanding the science behind it; they criticize sex ed without studying it; and they criticize the HP books without having read them.
“…and of course the book itself is written by a woman.”
As someone else said at a Harry Potter conference at UC Riverside a couple of years ago (hey! I’m a kid’s librarian,, I had a perfectly legitimate reason for going!), JK Rowling isn’t just a woman - she’s a single mom the horrors! Or, well, she was when she was first writing the series. And her pet charity is one she founded for single parents.
While I agree with most of your post, Beppie (feeling it more accurate than Darkrose’s), I disagree with this bit. The `forward leaps’ of Ron, Harry and Neville are more dramatic simply because they are more necessary (especially in Neville’s case). The first book begins with HG already in place as one of the most gifted wizards we will see in the series, and one possessed of a mental and emotional discipline and self-awareness remarkable for her age; she is already way ahead of her contemporaries and her improvement seems less dramatic by comparison. Put in an athletic metaphor, we can’t criticize Rowling for letting Harry, Neville and Ron make dramatic leaps forward in how fast they run the 100 (wow! 13.2 to 11.9!) when Hermoine is already down the track, starting at 10.2, then going steadily 10.1, 10.0, (etc.). There is little drama in the slow, steady improvement of people who are already pretty magnificent to begin with.
Neville is a good character;; but I wonder if you made him exactly the same but a girl some people would have been angry with the hapless, negative characterization of him (especially his gift for plants!).
One final quibble: we can’t measure the gender worth of characters merely how they stand in relation to Harry. He’s the central character, so pretty much every character in the book is is measured by how they stand in relation to him, no? The only way to solve that “revolving around a male” situation would be to have started with the Harriet Potter series and taken it from there.
Seconding what six-oh-seven-nine said. It’s really, really important to remember when evaluating HP that it’s written from a Third-Person Limited POV. Very seldom do we know more than Harry does.
There are things mentioned about Lily Potter (i.e. she was a very talented witch, she was very good with Charms) other than her just being Harry’s mom. Slughorn spends most of HBP going on about how good Lily was in Potions and [SPOILER] like her because she was nice to him. Both of those are related to Harry in that Slughorn credits his being good at potions to him being Lily’s son, and [SPOILER] because Harry’s all that’s left of her.
But we primarily hear about her being Harry’s mom, because that’s the most important thing about her to Harry.
we get Narcissa being worried about Draco.
Well, that I think is for another purpose. I can’t go into detail without spoiling DH, but I think the scene in HBP is to set up the later, very very significant, scene in DH.
And under the Roman Catholic view, rearing children is about … rearing children.
For those who think the epilogue leaves Hermione in a gender-compromised position - read this interview with JKR (obvious spoiler warnings apply) which also brings up another important, caring, badass female character - Luna! And what about Fleur, who gets more screentime than Bill and is known to be a talented witch?
Six-oh-Seven-Nine, I see what you mean about Hermione’s talents, but I did mean more in terms of emotional development. Hermione does get a bit of that in Philosopher’s Stone, where she becomes more rexlaxed about rule breaking due to the troll incident, but other than that the things that really might spur her on as a character are sidelined, or even ridiculed (for instance, with SPEW). There are some other examples I could use, but they contain DH spoilers.
One final quibble: we can’t measure the gender worth of characters merely how they stand in relation to Harry. He’s the central character, so pretty much every character in the book is is measured by how they stand in relation to him, no?
This is true enough for Hermione, but more broadly too, we have McGonagall as Dumbledore’s deputy, Umbridge as Fudge’s deputy, etc. While McGonagall and Umbridge are certainly characters in their own right, they always have 2IC status. Also, with Fleur, although we see her more than Bill, I’m not sure how well her talent comes through. She is the only female champion in Goblet of Fire, and she’s also the weakest (to be fair though, this could be British prejudice against the French as much as it might be sexism, however
). There are again, further points I could make, but they would contain DH spoilers.
Ultimatley, I think that Rowling does some things well in terms of gender, but she still plays on a lot of implicit patriarchal assumptions– so with just about every character we have a mixed bag. Rowling moves away from defining women through childbearing, but at the same time she only raises, rather than smashes the glass ceiling. She provides strong female characters, that any girl could be proud to aspire to, but they are often sidelined.
One area in which I think Rowling does well is in Order of the Phoenix, when Harry discovers, after idolising the man for 4.5 books, that James Potter was actually a complete jerk, and that it’s actually his mother who is more of a role model– Harry needs to let go of his patriarchal assumptions in this regard. (And yeah, this does kind of prove wrong what I said earlier about Lily being defined by motherhood– just attribute that comment to a brain fart, okay?
)