Not So Wild About Harry

I’ve ignored writing on all things Harry Potter over the years, but this weekend forced me to change my mind. With my wife’s sister’s family down for the weekend, we were looking for things to do. Unfortunately for us, the city we live near was in the grip of Pottermania and half the activities in town were geared to the release of the latest book.

I’ve written a few posts about the world of fiction in the last couple weeks, but this isn’t going to be a diatribe about J.K. Rowling’s billions or the quality of her writing. The problem is not one of literary aspirations. To me, Harry Potter is a symptom of the much larger problem.

When I was a kid I watched Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and any host of shows that featured magic. Some Christians would say that I was leaving myself open to all sorts of negative spiritual forces for doing so, but what no one could claim then is that they knew real witches. I certainly didn’t at that time. There weren’t any girls in my school that fancied themselves to be a witch (or even sympathetic to the witch’s cause.) The worst thing you could say about some young woman was that she had the lousy ’70s and ’80s fashion sense to dress just a little too much like Stevie Nicks. But witches? Nah. In fact, it was more likely that guys could be accused of witchcraft because Dungeons & Dragons was insanely popular by the time I graduated from high school. At Carnegie Mellon University in the early 80s I knew guys who skipped all their classes just to play D&D, sitting around getting high and drawing arcane symbols on the walls of their dorm rooms.

While some of the signs for a groundswell were in place even when I was a child, it can be argued that the later syndication of those TV shows I mentioned above lowered the defenses for witchcraft for the generation that came after mine when added to later societal changes. Today, everywhere you look, you can’t seem to get away from all things Wiccan or pagan. In fact, I have to believe that the fastest growing religion in the United States is not Islam, but the same one that has captured so much of the British population in recent years, Neo-paganism. Sorcery, vampire cults, an affinity for the goth lifestyle, even postmodernism—all of it has roots in paganism. Couple this with a societal outlook that is rational but growing more irrational by the day, and Neo-paganism looks ready to explode in the West.

Why? Nature abhors a vacuum. Especially human nature. With Christianity on the down side in the Western world, people who are searching for answers, particularly those answers that cater to humanity’s fallen need to have power and control, are finding what they want in paganism. Earth religions are picking up adherents left over from the New Age movement, the children of the Haight-Ashbury crowd, and the rise of “organic culture.” (My wife and I are trying to get an organic farm going and it is shocking how much the “religion” of some organic farmers is rooted in goddess worship and fertility cult thinking.)

Earth religions have been around nearly as long as there has been a planet with that name. The Bible contains numerous commands of God to keep trees and natural distractions away from His altars lest they be construed to have anything to do with the worship of nature (Deut. 16:21 is an example.) The entire religion of Astarte/Ashera/Ishtar that bedeviled the prophets and kings of the Old Testament is the same earth goddess worship we see today (much of it penetrating Christianity in the form of the Roman Catholic Church’s Marian cult.) There truly is nothing new under the sun.

With the desire to worship the creation rather than the Creator comes the desire to control the creation; this leads us to witchery and the rise of Wicca as a religion to be reckoned with in the United States. While the number of self-identified witches, pagans, and Wiccans is wildly variable (anywhere from 100,000 to over three million adherents in the United States), the one truth is that their numbers are growing rapidly.

But nowhere has there been greater capitulation to Neo-paganism than in the UK. With studies showing that less than 3% of the population of Great Britain attends church on the weekends, Neo-paganism has filled the void left behind by the abandonment of Christianity. Even some high-ranking church officials in that country have been linked to the ancient Druid religion, and druid gatherings have been picking up in number, with more and more people flocking to see druidic ceremonies performed.

So it comes as no surprise that Britain gave Harry Potter to the world. Say what you will about the books, they are certainly a phenomenon we’ve never seen before. The problem here lies in the fact that Harry Potter could very well be the poster child for Neo-paganism. As a recruiting tool par excellence, nothing will break down the walls to the further acceptance of Neo-paganism than a boy sorcerer intent on saving his friends, his school, and the confused, non-“gifted” Muggles from evil machinations that threaten the world.

The problem then of Harry Potter that separates him from other books featuring magic is not only the craze that has developed around the books, but that reality is being blurred. When I was watching Bewitched I knew that witches weren’t real. People didn’t go around saying that they were witches. It put a kibosh on anyone thinking that being a witch was a likely choice of religion. But not so today. In my county alone there are several recognized covens. Elsewhere I had mentioned that a young couple came into the Christian bookstore I worked in many years ago and told us they had just left a coven that was actively attacking the bookstore via prayers and incantations. Needless to say, I was naive to this modern reality.

We cannot afford to be naive. If Harry Potter had hit the scene in the 1940s, I believe his impact would have been negligible compared with today. But given that the environment into which he’s flown is primed for his brand of Neo-paganism, I believe the influence of Rowling’s books is far more dangerous. While some might claim that I’m cutting my own throat as a writer of speculative fiction, I can’t keep silent while a generation’s defense against Neo-pagan thought is being systematically disabled by what many Christians consider a harmless story. Fantasy novels of all kinds are some of the bestselling books in bookstores and it is safe to say that the most rabid fans are the ones who are most likely to self-identify not as Christians, but something more akin to Neo-paganism.

Although this may seem like a broad brush, the fact remains that the Harry Potter generation will be the backbone of Neo-paganism in the next dozen years. They’ve been groomed with what on the surface was a mere gripping read, but which planted a seed that will grow into a noxious fruit that we Christians of 2020 will have to confront. We must fight it now and work to deprogram kids before they grow up as enemies of the Lord.

Awaiting Our Revealing

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.
—Romans 8:19 ESV

I can’t tell you why this summer has been a trial for me. We have a great new church with so much promise. My business is starting to accelerate. My wife is well regarded at work and has a vision for her departments. Our son is precocious, smart, and filled with life. And yet I’ve struggled through the last two months with a disconnected feeling that usually foreshadows uncertainty. I’ve never been on friendly terms with that feeling.

My wife told me the other day that life is truly happy for her right now. You’d think that would be enough to snap me out of the funk, but it only buoyed me for the afternoon. The floral colors around me seem dim, every moment of clarity ends in wistfulness, and the chocolate in the ice cream tastes artificial.

Today as I was outside picking a bounty of blackberries that quadrupled our haul from last year, the Lord spoke to me and let me know my problem was that I’m restless awaiting my revealing.

Most of this summer has been oddly dry. I can watch the storms that have drenched Cincinnati part as if cleaved by a massive, invisible hatchet, then pass to the north or to the south, but skipping my little neck of the woods in the distant east. I haven’t mowed my grass in three weeks because it can’t grow without the rain.

But this week the rain clouds held together and hit us dead center. The result has been a massive greening of all the foliage that was brown and dust-caked. Nature woke up and applauded.

The Scriptures tell us that a thirsty Creation longs for more than just water, though. Ultimately its true hope is to see us children of God come into our own. It is out in the seats while we are waiting in the wings. To us players, the question that is always on our minds is, Is it time?

We are waiting our revealing. We are yearning for the day when our name is called and we walk out on that stage to take our bows—the director clapping loudest of all. Each one of us who has been called to act in the greater drama that is the Christian walk longs for that final reward as much as Creation languishes waiting for us to receive it.

I am not there. In fact, whenever I meet a man my age who is clearly far ahead of me, I know that it is my fault and never the Lord’s. Sanctification is a partnership with God. God will give us as much of His enabling grace for it as we are willing to accept, but too many of us are preoccupied with what is passing away.

Yet even if I know that I’ve frittered away time and opportunities because I was lost in my own feeble kingdom, nothing can take away the cry of the heart that says, “Father show the full revelation of your Son in my life by the power of the Holy Spirit.” I covet that far more than Creation does, and though my heart is heavy, it is only so because I know that I am still hidden, waiting in the wings.

I will not be ashamed, nor should any of you be, for all that we are is by the grace of God, even when that grace has had to shore up the building when it’s threatened to fall. The builder is still the Lord and He knows what He is doing.

The berries are bursting, but the taste is not perfection. Only at the marriage supper of the Lamb will they stop their groaning and revel in the sons of God.

Take heart and prepare to walk out on stage when your name is called. The ovation will be glorious.

Three 4 Thursday, July 14th

I’d like to start featuring some bloggers I routinely read, who continue to ask tough questions, provide remarkable answers, and who make me think. Because I know that readers of Cerulean Sanctum are an adventurous sort, I hope you’ll all try something new and check out three blogs worthy of your time (and your blogroll, too!)

So with these three we inaugurate Three 4 Thursday:

Rob over at Miscellanies on the Gospel (sporting a very familiar Blogger theme, I might add) is not a blogger I see a lot of people quoting, and I hope to add my tiny contribution to rectifying this because his is one of my favorite blogs. He consistently examines deep topics and is unafraid to tackle thorny issues. And while you may like the emotional “go for the jugular” writing here at Cerulean Sanctum, Rob’s approach is far more reasoned and more thoroughly presented. In a post much like my own “Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, We’re Not Listening!“, Rob discusses how the Emerging Church movement is challenging Evangelicalism by avoiding the Gospel reductionism and overdeveloped intellectual assent that is rife in traditionally Evangelical churches. Check out “The Emerging Church Movement and the Gospel: An Invitation to Think.” And blogroll this blog; you’ll be better for it.
Diane of Crossroads: Where Faith and Inquiry Meet is in the midst of an examination of revivals in the United States. It is important for us to understand them because history’s revivals influence our current theology and praxis far more than we may realize. Her series starts here, and you can follow it through her links to previous posts in her sidebar. (Diane, we’ll need a summation post with all the links at the end!) Diane is a long-time Cerulean Sanctum reader and commenter. I appreciate all she brings to her blog and what she’s contributed to mine.
Seymour at The Light is Sweet provides a great service to all believers by posting quotes from some of the most Spirit-filled Christians of the past. In an age when so many Christian books seem shallow and our pulpits dispense far too much milk, this blog gives us meat from the hearts of people who knew what it meant to surrender all.

So if you’ve never clicked on any of these, take a walk on the wild side and check ’em out.