Marginal Christianity

(I have shamelessly stolen this approach and some of its main ideas for this piece from Chris Crass,” Expecto Patronum: Lessons From Harry Potter for Social Justice Organizing,” Sunday, December 15, 2013, Truthout ) J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is far more than a work of young adult fiction. Like Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles and Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , her Potter stories encode a way of being she promotes. It’s not the Christian vision underwriting the Lewis and Tolkien tales. But neither is it antithetical to it. Rowling’s vision seems to reflect the kind of secularized Christianism that used to order life in the West. I say “used to” because of late He Who Must Not be Named and his Dementor and Death Eater minions are shaking the already rickety foundations of that secularized Christianism. They are the antagonists that threaten Rowling’s similar world in the Potter stories. And that attack is focused on Hogwarts, the wizarding academy ...

Opposing the church in our world is a foe of great power with its own design on world domination. Whether we personify this power in a devil figure or see it as an impersonal power or force is less important than recognizing the existence of malignant intent in the universe and its strategic plans to usurp God’s place in the world. I like to picture this power as an unholy trinity – Mars, Mammon, and Me. The undoing of our Hogwarts, the church, has its focal point in the primacy of the self, the power of “stuff”, and the efficacy of violence.