Say the name, "Harry Potter" in Christian circles and your bound to get mixed reactions. Some people, such as my sisters, faun over one of their favorite fantasy-series heroes. Other people will break out the garlic and pepper spray to ward off the influence of a witch-boy.
Magic has never held a soft spot in the hearts of Christians, or any followers of God, and for good reason. Whatever the magician's story, Christians explain magic's effects in one of two ways: it's either a sham, a trick with no real power (like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat)...or it's playing with the dark forces of Satan and his demons. In either case, it isn't beneficial and can have some seriously destructive side effects. Following the Biblical commands against magic (Exodus 22:18, Deuteronomy 18:9-14), Christians have always considered the use or attempted use of magic in our world to be unacceptable. For much of our history, it was considered a crime worthy of death.
Many Christians make no distinction between the practice of magic in the real world and it's practice in fantasy fiction. While they admit that the magic in fantasy stories is no more real than the elves and other fantastical creatures that inhabit them, they insist that the use of magic in these stories is dangerous, for it could encourage readers to seek out magic in the real world, which is very dangerous. One book in particular that has been accused of doing this is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. In it, young Harry Potter comes to learn that he has been gifted with magical powers from birth and he enrolls in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for a seven year course in learning to harness these powers--and along the way defeats the evil Lord Voldemort. Since Harry and his friends are said to be studying to become witches and wizards, casting spells, using divination and the like, many Christians are strongly opposed to the series since they believe that reading it will lead directly to children trying to practice real witchcraft on their own.
But just how real is this threat? How much of a similarity and a risk is there really? As an avid reader and writer of fantasy, I felt I had to find out. If I was sinning by writing magic into my fantasy stories, if I was unintentionally leading my readers into the temptation to practice what God has forbidden, then I had to know.
I felt that the only real place to start was by researching witchcraft itself, as it is practiced in the real world. After all, if fantasy magic and witchcraft are very closely related, then the risk is high that reading about one could lead to practicing the other. So, I checked out a book that a Christian had written on the results of her research into the witchcraft religion of Wicca.
What I found was at once somewhat alarming. The book opens with the writer's visit to Salem, Massachusetts to interview self-proclaimed witches and find out what their beliefs are about. The town which was once a stronghold of Puritan orthodoxy, the place where even the condemned hated witchcraft and denounced and scorned it, is now a place seemingly overrun with openly practicing witches. Wicca, the author said, is on the rise, and is believed by some to be one of the fastest growing religious groups in America, though it's very hard to pin down since there are no official Wiccan gatherings and many people slip in and out of its grasp without many of their fellow Wiccans even being aware.
Is Harry Potter and the recent surge in magical fantasy stories responsible for this increase in Wiccan numbers? The quick answer, I found, was no, not directly in any case. By no stretch is Harry Potter about Wicca. While Harry's friends may call themselves witches, they bear no resemblance whatsoever to true witches in our world. Wicca, for one, is a religion. While many of it's adherents play fast and loose with their theology, its basic beliefs can be roughly summarized as follows:
Magic has never held a soft spot in the hearts of Christians, or any followers of God, and for good reason. Whatever the magician's story, Christians explain magic's effects in one of two ways: it's either a sham, a trick with no real power (like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat)...or it's playing with the dark forces of Satan and his demons. In either case, it isn't beneficial and can have some seriously destructive side effects. Following the Biblical commands against magic (Exodus 22:18, Deuteronomy 18:9-14), Christians have always considered the use or attempted use of magic in our world to be unacceptable. For much of our history, it was considered a crime worthy of death.
Many Christians make no distinction between the practice of magic in the real world and it's practice in fantasy fiction. While they admit that the magic in fantasy stories is no more real than the elves and other fantastical creatures that inhabit them, they insist that the use of magic in these stories is dangerous, for it could encourage readers to seek out magic in the real world, which is very dangerous. One book in particular that has been accused of doing this is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. In it, young Harry Potter comes to learn that he has been gifted with magical powers from birth and he enrolls in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for a seven year course in learning to harness these powers--and along the way defeats the evil Lord Voldemort. Since Harry and his friends are said to be studying to become witches and wizards, casting spells, using divination and the like, many Christians are strongly opposed to the series since they believe that reading it will lead directly to children trying to practice real witchcraft on their own.
But just how real is this threat? How much of a similarity and a risk is there really? As an avid reader and writer of fantasy, I felt I had to find out. If I was sinning by writing magic into my fantasy stories, if I was unintentionally leading my readers into the temptation to practice what God has forbidden, then I had to know.
I felt that the only real place to start was by researching witchcraft itself, as it is practiced in the real world. After all, if fantasy magic and witchcraft are very closely related, then the risk is high that reading about one could lead to practicing the other. So, I checked out a book that a Christian had written on the results of her research into the witchcraft religion of Wicca.
What I found was at once somewhat alarming. The book opens with the writer's visit to Salem, Massachusetts to interview self-proclaimed witches and find out what their beliefs are about. The town which was once a stronghold of Puritan orthodoxy, the place where even the condemned hated witchcraft and denounced and scorned it, is now a place seemingly overrun with openly practicing witches. Wicca, the author said, is on the rise, and is believed by some to be one of the fastest growing religious groups in America, though it's very hard to pin down since there are no official Wiccan gatherings and many people slip in and out of its grasp without many of their fellow Wiccans even being aware.
Is Harry Potter and the recent surge in magical fantasy stories responsible for this increase in Wiccan numbers? The quick answer, I found, was no, not directly in any case. By no stretch is Harry Potter about Wicca. While Harry's friends may call themselves witches, they bear no resemblance whatsoever to true witches in our world. Wicca, for one, is a religion. While many of it's adherents play fast and loose with their theology, its basic beliefs can be roughly summarized as follows:
- All is one: everything and everyone in the cosmos is interconnected and of equal value. Wiccan belief is pantheistic (god is the world and vise versa), and many Wiccan's have strong environmental leanings.
- Humans are divine: Wiccans hold that, since all is one and god is all, that individual humans are gods and goddesses in their own right. As such, they believe that they possess divine powers.
- Gods and the goddess: Wiccan belief falls under the banner of neo-Paganism, which revives the worship of ancient pagan gods and goddesses, often significantly modernizing it and lumping the worship of various deities together. Wicca is polytheistic, but its adherents generally worship two main gods: the Horned-God and the Goddess. With the rise of modern feminism, goddess-worship has become a particularly big element in Wicca.
- Personal power is unlimited: Wiccans hold that their own power is not limited by God and that they do not need to pray to Him. They have their own resources to fall back on. Wiccan's are generally highly independent, self-reliant, and anti-authoritarian, which explains why their religion's numbers are so difficult to track.
- "And harm ye none, do what ye will": Wicca does not lay out a firm moral code and there is, in Wicca, no great distinction between right and wrong. Wiccan's believe that as long as they aren't harming someone (or something--since everything is one), they are free to do whatever they want.
- The threefold law: most Wiccan's hold to a form of karma, that whatever anyone does, good or bad, it will return to them three times. For some Wiccan's this fuels a belief in pasivism: for if an enemy nation has done wrong, then surely their karma will catch up with them eventually. While many Wiccan's would agree that there does come a point when we have to intervene, they do not, by and large, agree on where that point falls.
- Consciousness can and should be altered through the practice of ritual: one thing that binds all Wiccan's together is their emphasis on ritual and altered states of consciousness in magic rites in order to tap into and utilize the unseen energies of the spiritual realm. All Wiccan's share a strong sense of and belief in the supernatural, and believe that it can be used, through rites, rituals, magic objects, spells, and meditation to alter the shape of the natural world around them.
However, magic in popular culture does seem to be on the rise, and Harry Potter is certainly a part of this phenomenon. In the past generation, a cold empiricism laid hold on much of the culture, Christian and otherwise, resulting in a rise in atheism and agnosticism and disbelief in the supernatural in general. Even many Christians, influenced by this cultural empiricism, refuse to believe in some of the supernatural realities of the Bible such as special creation, miracles, angels, demons, Satan, and even Heaven and Hell. The current generation--as generations often do--is reacting against this. The current generation has a rising fascination and belief in the supernatural, and a desire to experience it not only through fantasy fiction but also through real life. Since many Christian churches are still in the grip of cold empiricism and cast a dubious eye on anything supernatural--whether good or evil--, some seekers feel compelled to look elsewhere for their real-life taste of the spiritual realm. If they cannot get it from God, they will get it from the devil, and they run straight for neo-Paganism and Wicca (to be clear, I should say that Wicca is not Satanism. It's practitioners do not consciously serve Satan or interact with demons: they do not even believe that such things exist. However, in that Wiccans attempt to--and in some cases, actually do--harness spiritual forces that are not of the God of the Bible, and in that all spiritual forces that are not of God are demonic in nature, in this sense Wiccans can be said to be meddling with the demonic realm--though they doubtless do not know it).
What should be our response, as Christians, to this rising need to identify with the supernatural and interact with spiritual forces? We should not forget that God is the greatest "spiritual force" of them all and that the Bible brims from cover to cover with supernatural events. While some Christians have taken the perspective that such happenings are suspended indefinitely, the Bible says nothing to that effect. As Christians, we have access to the supernatural experiences that people of this new generation are seeking. We should take full advantage of that, rather than trying to deny the spiritual side of Christianity so that we won't appear foolish before the waning tides of atheism. Rather than condemning the supernatural wherever we meet it, we should promote our own "magic" (if you will)--for it is superior to what Wicca offers. While what Wicca offers is a demonic deception, in Christ we have the real deal!
This should shape our approach to magic in fiction as well. Fantasy writers, like myself, should not cease to use magic in their stories. How we treat the supernatural is important, in fiction as in reality, and never more so than now. The magic must go on, but it should be used deliberately. Great care should be taken to "hedge" against the possibility of fantasy magic being mistaken for witchcraft. Good and evil must always be distinguished, and each side may be allowed their own magic to draw on--for in the real world, it is so. Great care must be taken in the way the magic and the supernatural is approached in these fantasy stories. While these stories are pure fantasy, reading them should always inspire the reader to--if anything--draw closer to God and look to Him as the source of spiritual strength rather than turning to any other source. In this way, magic in fiction can become more than simply "harmless": it can become a force for good.
No comments:
Post a Comment