What can Harry Potter teach us about faith?

According to Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, the president of Chicago Theological Seminary, a lot:

Children know, from a very young age, that the world is not perfect and that goodness is not always rewarded. Evil is a real presence in the world. One of my children had a third grade teacher whom we eventually realized was not simply harsh, but deliberately cruel. Our son, who suffered with this teacher, knew far sooner than his parents that this teacher hated children. But he was also stuck for a time in the powerlessness children feel when faced with a truly corrupt adult. The Potter books help children realize that there is good and evil in this world and you should not remain passive in the face of cruelty but name it. In the age of the Internet, kids are subjected to cyberspace teasing and threats that make my son’s third grade experience pale by comparison. The teachers and parents in the Potter books are also imperfect and not always right, but the good ones are on the side of the children and the bad ones are not. This is a critical lesson about community and how values are sustained despite the machinations of the wicked.

Another striking theme of the Potter books is that of death. The villain, as I noted above, is named Voldemort, the wish for death. Good people die in the Potter books, both young and old. The wicked also die, but often are able to subvert plans to incarcerate or even kill them. No child growing up in this century is insulated from the violence of war, murder, kidnapping, and a host of other threats to life and limb, both real and fictional. Compared to an average weekday night at 7 p.m. on TV, the violence of the Potter books can seem quite tame, but all the same the books present the reality of violence because the adults in the books cannot always shield children and young adults from these threats. Neither can real adults.

I never got into Harry Potter the way some others did, and I’ve managed to bypass the steady stream of movies made from the books, too. But this essay offers some thought-provoking notions of what lies at the heart of Potter’s appeal — and why this young wizard may matter more than some of us realize.

Photo: Daniel Radcliffe by Murray Close