Violence, witchcraft and devil worship!

The naughty things your pooks gets up to when you aren’t looking…

Well, today’s entry in my week of banned books is a series of books I absolutely love and one that was so feared, it sparked book burnings! Of course, it’s the series that began with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US, where they changed the title from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, an act that caused me to buy all mine from the UK so I could be sure to get the real British language without having it Yank-ized.

I still have my “Muggles for Harry Potter” pin which I wore with pride when it looked like a handful of vocal people were going to get the books banned from way too many school libraries on the basis that they promoted witchcraft and satanism. If those concerned people had actually read them, they would have recognized the tales of good vs. evil, where kids got rewarded for standing up to their peers and doing right even when peer pressure was to do wrong, as a single example of the moral standards of the books. It created all kinds of heroes and anti-heroes, and gave kids a dozen different ways to see themselves as special, whether they were quiet and bumbling or mocked for liking to study or a jock.  There is so much depth to these books that I’m sure they will be studied for decades to come. I’ve already read some scholarly works on them.

By the time the last book of the series was published it also became clear that there is Christian allegory there for those who want to study it, but like the best fiction, not preachy or blatant and certainly easy to ignore or miss if you’re not looking for it.

Harry Potter and the magic of his world and its characters will forever own a corner of my heart.

These books inspired thousands, if not tens of thousands–or even more–to read.  Kids who were slow readers plowed through these tales no matter how long they got, and came out the other side with a love for books and a desire to read more.  If that’s magic, I’m all for it!

From Time magazine:

“In 2001, a group of parents in Lewiston, Maine, staged an old-fashioned book burning to torch a series of books they claimed were promoting violence, witchcraft and devil worship. (The fire department intervened before the first match was struck, and the protest’s organizer settled for a pair of scissors with which to mutilate the books.) Though Harry Potter was still in his literary infancy, the boy wizard’s saga had already garnered its fair share of opponents; similar public displays of contempt occurred across the country.” Follow the link to read more.