Did the double whammy of the latest Harry Potter movie (“Order of the Phoenix”) and the last Harry Potter book being released in the same 10-day span crush Christian opposition to J.K. Rowling’s wizardry? With the final installment of the Potter saga on the shelves, evangelicals and other conservative Christians seem to be cooling their campaigns against Harry. Connie Neal, author of “The Gospel According to Harry Potter” and an evangelical, told a reporter recently, “I think it’s changing. It seems the Christian community takes about 10 years to move forward sometimes.”
Major evangelical voices like Charles Colson and James Dobson have long since gotten over their qualms about Rowling’s work. The series’ most vociferous opponents tend to be small groups that agitate to have the Potter books stripped from their local library shelves (The series routinely tops the list of most-challenged books by the American Library Society). So the evidence that evangelicals have moved on to other targets is largely anecdotal. But when a Baptist pastor deep in the Bible Belt calls efforts to evangelize by “eliminat[ing] every other world view” lame, the worm has turned.