By the time Harry Potter reached America, the righteous were ready. Back in England, conservatives had cheered author J.K. Rowling as a role model for mums on the dole, but when the books crossed the Atlantic, fundamentalist Christians had an entirely different reaction—banning Harry Potter.
Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian organization, cautioned that “witchcraft … is directly denounced in Scripture.” “The problem,” explained a letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “is that witchcraft and sorcery [are] something neither children [nor] adults should play around with.” As one parent warned the Columbia, South Carolina, school board, “They are trying to disguise things as fun and easy that are really evil.” By mid-1999, the New York Times reported, evangelical preachers across the nation were pounding Harry Potter as the work of the devil and pointing to his success as a sign of Satanic strength.
The campaign against Harry flopped. A handful of school principals banned the books but promptly heard from furious parents, teachers, students, and local newspapers. “If parents object to magic,” huffed a Georgia editorial, then “they object to childhood.” Even Focus on the Family reported that by the end of the year no organized Christian group had called for a ban or a boycott.
Why? What’s Harry’s secret? Harry Potter challenges the fundamentalists by charging into homes and schools with a rival moral vision. Harry arrives at Hogwarts both thrilled and baffled. The magic world is all new to him—a perfect metaphor for the mysterious transition into young adulthood. The books grapple with a profoundly moral question: what makes someone good? Like so many teens, Harry is discovering new powers inside him, and he worries about whether they render him a bad person.
When students enter Hogwarts, a magic hat sorts them
into houses. The villains inevitably go to Slytherin. Harry puts the hat on his head and it purrs, “Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness.” “Not Slytherin,” Harry begs, “Not Slytherin.” The hat acquiesces and assigns him to Gryffindor. But the near miss torments Harry. What evil did the magic hat see in him?
Finally, at the end of the second novel, Harry blurts out his fear to the wise old headmaster, Albus Dumbledore.
“ ‘Professor, the Sorting Hat told me I … should be in Slytherin,’ Harry said, looking desperately into Dumbledore’s face. ‘The sorting hat could see Slytherin … in me, and it—’
“ ‘Put you in Gryffindor,’ said Dumbledore calmly.
“ ‘It only put me in Gryffindor,’ said Harry in a defeated voice, ‘because I asked not to go in Slytherin….’
“ ‘Exactly,’ said Dumbledore, beaming once more. ‘…It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’ Harry sat motionless, ... stunned.”
Harry is stunned, as the Catholic magazine First Things points out, because he finally comprehends that existential moral truth: goodness lies not in who you are but in what you choose, what you do. This is Dumbledore’s wisdom, and it is Rowling’s favorite theme. Of course, choosing good and tolerating differences is Morality 101—for adults. We require something a bit different from teenagers: we require them to toe the line. Which brings us to why the kids love Harry Potter. And what we adults might learn from their reaction.
Parents love Harry Potter first of all because he got the kids reading. The image of teenagers—even teenage boys—unwired and barging into bookstores runs against every intuition adults have about the younger generation. Boys reading? Conservative Christians fretting over witchcraft never had a chance.
But why are the kids reading? What’s in the books for Samantha, my eleven-year-old niece? Why are entire junior hockey teams marching into Barnes & Noble talking about Quidditch? For one thing, the books are profoundly subversive. There’s the whole elaborately devised magical world that many parents don’t know about, and teenagers delight in the ignorance of their Muggle parents.
Better yet, most of the adults in these books are deeply flawed. At Hogwarts the teachers drink like fish; the gentle giant, Hagrid, positively staggers through the first three books. (In the real world of American high schools, teachers on a trip to France get clobbered if one of the kids sneaks a sip of the demon Beaujolais.) Professor Gilderoy Lockhart, author of Magical Me, turns out to be a narcissistic fraud. Professor Trelawney is a New Age flake. Professor Snape, the potions master, is a slime. Cornelius Fudge, the minister of magic, is a dithering ass. These people constantly boss the kids around. But most of the adults are knuckleheads. The kids disobey them and, as a result, save the day. In Prisoner of Azkaban, for example, everyone tells Harry not to leave the school grounds. Naturally, he immediately scampers out through a forbidden passage. By the end of the book we learn that Harry’s father, one of Hogwarts’s great mischief makers, would have been highly disappointed if his son had never found any of the secret passages out of the castle.
Potter père need not have worried—his son leaves no rule intact. And look at the consequences. “I seem to remember telling you that I would have to expel you if you broke any more school rules,” Dumbledore says after one episode. Before Harry and his friends can protest, the headmaster continues: “Which only goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words.” They break the rules and end up with a special award for bravery. No zero tolerance at Hogwarts. Small wonder our kids love that school.
Contrast Dumbledore, eating his words, to the real world of high school discipline. Each time a terrible incident sprays across the newspapers, the fear of wild kids rushes to the political surface. The Columbine tragedy provoked a great rash of legislation signed, sealed, and delivered in time for the current school year. House Republicans tried to legislate that the Ten Commandments be posted in every school. In Oklahoma parents got the green light on “paddling, spanking, and switching” their kids. Indiana decided that teens would not be permitted to pierce their navels (or anything other than their ears) without a note from Mom or Dad. Tennessee makes Mom sign off on body piercing in person. Louisiana law requires teenagers to “sir” and “ma’am” their teachers. Some Texans proposed getting the execution age down to eleven.
A celebrated Victorian moralist, Anthony Comstock, prefaced his own 1873 book of dire warnings with a line that neatly sums up the whole post-Colum- bine buzz: “Each generation of youth is sent out into the world as sheep in the midst of wolves. The danger, however, is not that they will be devoured … but that they will be transformed into wolves.”
J.K. Rowling imagines something entirely different. In her books, the kids are the central agents of their own lives. They make choices. Weigh judgments. Wrestle with freedom. There are no hints of controlling wolves or facile allusions to Lord of the Flies. Dumbledore is not going to legislate yes-ma’aming. Of course, Dumbledore’s way brings its own modest inconvenience—call it a touch of anarchy. When the students all assemble at the start of the year, for example, the headmaster “leads” them in singing the school song. Naturally, there’s the Hogwarts difference: each chooses a favorite tune. They all finish in their own time (and key) until everyone is listening to the Weasely twins sing their very slow funeral dirge.
“‘Ah, music,’” says Dumbledore, wiping his eyes. “‘A magic beyond all we do here!’”
Perhaps Hogwarts offers a better way. Maybe our own teenagers would flourish with more freedom, greater responsibility, and wider tolerance. It sure works for Dumbledore. And my guess is that that’s just what tickles my slightly unruly niece, Samantha. And delights the mobs of kids who’ve confounded the education Jeremiahs by falling in love with a book.
James Morone is a professor of political science. His next book, Hellfire Nation: Morality Politics in America, is due out in the spring.