Mild About Harry

At first blush, Timothy Ralston seems like any other professor at Dallas Theological Seminary. He has a gray beard, neatly parted hair, and a vast knowledge of Christian scripture.

He's a Harry Potter fan.

To some evangelical Christians, Harry Potter is the devil's work. For them, the July 21 release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the Potter series, isn't a date worth celebrating, as it is for much of the secular world. Instead, it's one more sign that the Apocalypse is near.

In 1998, when the first Harry Potter book came out, many Christians condemned the children's novel for its positive portrayal of magic and witchcraft. Some groups demanded that school libraries remove the book; others burned it. In 1999 the American Library Association named Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone the year's most protested book.

But over the last few years, there has been a subtle shift within the evangelical Christian community over the Potter books.

Connie Neal, a former youth pastor, was one of the first Christians to defend the Potter books. Ironically, Neal first read the books so that she could explain to her children why they wouldn't be allowed to. But after finishing the first book she said she realized the books weren't evil; they were actually good, filled with themes and symbolism which Christians could recognize and embrace. She has since written two pro-Harry Potter books geared toward skeptical Christians: What's a Christian To Do With Harry Potter? and The Gospel According to Harry Potter.

When Neal first began releasing her books she received many angry e-mails accusing her of leading children into the occult and of being a blasphemer who would wind up in hell. The e-mails sometimes reduced her to tears and eventually led her to remove her e-mail address from her Web site.

Neal says that in recent years she has noticed a big difference in many Christians' attitudes toward the books. In 2001, she debated Richard Abanes, a Christian writer who has written several books against Harry Potter, at the Christian Booksellers Association Convention. Neal said 90 percent of the people there were anti-Harry Potter. In 2002, her book The Gospel According to Harry Potter was blacklisted among most Christian booksellers.

But in 2005, things began to change. At a CBA convention that year, hundreds of readers approached her to share how much they appreciated her Potter books. Only one who approached her was anti-Potter, and another was still leery about the books.

"People have, I think, come to understand this is really a complex issue. This is not, 'Am I for or against witchcraft and children using witchcraft,' the way it was presented originally," Neal says. "In a nutshell, what I've seen happen is the people who were loudly denouncing Harry Potter have just gone quiet. From what I've seen, I doubt if you will see any major Christian media come out with a Harry Potter-bashing this time around. It's like a non-issue."

So what has turned the tide? Many people give credit to the Harry Potter movies.

"This idea that these books were dangerous was largely dispelled by people's experience with the movies," says John Granger, author of the book Looking for God in Harry Potter. Granger says that people who didn't want to take the time to read the books were willing to see the movie.

Another factor, Granger says, is that the Potter books didn't contribute to a widespread increase in children turning to black magic.

"Believe me, if there had been any significant rise in the real-world numbers of occult members, the Harry Potter critics would have had a field day," he says. "You'd have read about it on the front page. But there hasn't been. If anything, if we can trust Massimo Introvigne, the Italian social scientist, he says there's been a decline in the occult in Europe and the United States for the past 10 years."

Still, not everyone's wild about Harry. "A large portion of the Christian intelligentsia has endorsed these books, but they are endorsing a worldview which is anti-Christian," says David Haddon, a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Haddon has published an article in The American Spectator titled "Child-on-Child Crime" in which he shares his conviction that Harry and his friends are an extremely poor role models for our children. "Rule-breaking and lying are Harry's middle name," Haddon says. "He lies about everything."

Haddon is also concerned that the books are giving children a negative view of authority and confusing children about the difference between wrong and right.