Harry Potter and the Great Loon

Meet Laura Mallory. She wants to ban the Harry Potter series from libraries in Gwinnett County, 10 miles northeast of where I am writing.

I doubt she has read the books. She calls them anti-Christian. In fact, Harry Potter may be the most christian (small c) series ever written.

The overall story is of a child’s growth in an English Boarding School. Hogwarts stands in for Eton. Magic stands in for technology, for the complexity of the world, and wizards are those who know and manipulate it.

Any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic.  If Button Gwinnett himself, signer of the Declaration of Independence and namesake of Gwinnett County, walked into the hearing room where Mallory railed last week, he would feel himself in the presence of magic.

He would see the flourescent lights, feel the conditioned air. He could touch the large, hard windows, the plastic venetian blinds. He would hear a cellphone or PC and think, no doubt — magic! wizards! (God knows what he would think if he saw the parking lot.)

And he would be right.

Throughout the series the young students at Hogwarts are learning to manipulate a complex and
confusing world, one filled with hard-to-comprehend sciences, and with
moral ambiguity. They seek a moral compass, but as they move forward they
find only more shades of gray.

Harry Potter finds his compass in the person of Albus Dumbledore, his headmaster.
But by the coming of the next book (I don’t want to give much away) he
learns he must become his own compass. And it is this passage, from
student to adult, that Rowling is leading her readers through. Her lessons are entirely moral, and each book is age-appropriate to the character she is writing about.

When the first Potter books came out they were grabbed by young
children. They appeared to be simple juveniles about witches and magic. The first few stories
were, in a way. They set the scene, good vs. evil, with the protagonists as good
and the aim being to wipe out evil "once and for all."

The real world does not work that way.

The later books are increasingly dark, opaque, difficult. Not all is at
it seems. The good guys aren’t all good, the bad guys aren’t all bad.
The real world comes crashing in, and you’re alone on a battlefield far
from home.

This book is dangerous only to Muggles, and Dursleys. Mallory is a
Dursley, a caricature of a Muggle. She accepts the magic of her time as a given, she cares little
for the complexity of the real world. She stuffs her face with the
products of magic — computer networks, fast food, miracle drugs,  SUVs —
with no thought for her responsibility to maintain that world, or raise
children to maintain it.

But we all have that responsibility. All our schools are Hogwarts. All
magic is threatened. The good guys aren’t all good, the bad guys aren’t
all bad. And you, young reader, have the terrible job of sorting
through it, with only a little knowledge to guide you.

Onward christian soldiers.