Sixty-one percent of Americans have seen at least one “Harry Potter” film. Given that just 45% of us [Millennials] — and a barely higher 50% of American Christians — can name all four Gospels, it’s no stretch to say that Gryffindo and Slytherin… are better known than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
— TARA ISABELLA BURTON, PhD, millennial Christian scholar
Is the Harry Potter series an entire theology? (Photo by Lozikiki/Creative Commons)
Imagine that Christianity has finally been declared dead due to lack of believers.
Imagine that most churches and cathedrals have become Harry Potter Centers, where “Potters” go for fellowship and study.
Tall-steeple Christian sanctuaries have become museums. Copies of Bibles, which the people known as Christians used to study and live by, are displayed as relics of yesteryear.
In the future, these Potters who worship at the altar of Harry will drop off their little Potters every day for two weeks in June — for Vacation Potter School.
The deification of J.K. Rowling’s answer to Jesus will be complete. Dress up in your finest costumes and come worship with us any Saturday, Potters. No baptism required.
The irony of Potter Theology is, clergy draw on the books for sermons every Sunday.
Now, you may say I’m a wildly imaginative dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
Tara Isabella Burton, a millennial who holds a PhD in theology from Oxford, makes a strong case in the online Religion News Service that millennials and Gen Zs use the Harry Potter books as sacred texts.
Burton notes that “Harry Potter” isn’t the first 20th-century cultural property to have doubled as a quasi-religion:
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“As early as the 1970s, ‘Star Trek’ — among the first ‘fandoms’ in history — offered its devoted fans a vision of morality and the human condition rooted in the humanist, positivist secularism of its creator, Gene Roddenberry.
“Likewise, in the 1990s hundreds of thousands of nones identified themselves as Jedi, the priestly class of space samurai in the ‘Star Wars; movies, on national censuses in the U.K., Wales and Australia.”
The 1990s in America — I remember them well. Stars Wars was all the rage, but so was the church in America.
In the wake of the Christian-friendly Reagan years, many Christians even in mainline churches felt there was a new Reformation sweeping the God-blessed USA. One only had to look at all those pious people highlighting their Bibles in the popular megachurches.
It was by no means only conservative Christianity. The progressive brand was on the rise as well; Jim Wallis and his Sojourners magazine and bestselling books were all the rage.
In the future, churches will be “Potter Centers.”
Christianity in America ain’t dead yet, even if it’s been terribly Balkanized — and bastardized by a president who undoubtedly could not name even one of the four Gospels. (See my definition of Trumpianity here.)
But the future of Christianity is looking like something we can’t imagine. The enormous irony being that Rowling’s books are like theological magic dust for preachers and priests: they will be preaching sermons based on Harry Potter characters and stories this Sunday and every Sunday till our Lord sets things right. (As we aging true believers in the traditional God believe.)
Read TARA ISABELLA BURTON’s take on where the worship of Potter is headed, here, and let me know what you think.
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