Just last month, evangelical Christian Harold Camping captured mainstream America’s attention with his numerology-based prediction that the Rapture would occur on May 21, 2011. Believers emptied their bank accounts, quit their jobs, and prepared for their heavenly ascent, while more than 800,000 nonbelievers RSVP’d “Yes” to the “Post-Rapture Looting” event on Facebook. It is clear, as Lee Quinby writes, “America has apocalyptic gusto” (Millennial Seduction 18). Quinby’s Millennial Seduction describes how binary classifications and accompanying value judgments have come from the Book of Revelation to dominate American perceptions of ostensibly secular matters, including race (white vs. minority), gender (male vs. female), sexuality (straight vs. gay), and class (rich vs. poor) (8).
According to Quinby, apocalypticism can be best understood “in the Foucauldian sense as a regime of truth that operates within a field of power relations and prescribes particular moral behavior” (Anti-Apocalypse xv). In America, where church and state are supposedly separate, and where allegedly “all men are created equal,” the dualism of Revelation has shaped the culture in decidedly undemocratic ways since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. At various times in American history, all of the following have been accused of being tools of the Antichrist:
bankers, biofeedback, credit cards, computers, the Council on Foreign Relations, feminism, Freudian psychology, the human-potential movement, Indian gurus, “international Jews,” lesbianism, the Masons, Montessori schools, secular humanism, the Trilateral Commission, Universal Product Codes, and the United Nations – and the list is certainly not comprehensive. (Kirsch 220)
As Quinby and Kirsch have demonstrated, belief in the apocalyptic regime of truth is pervasive throughout American society. Even moderate, secular, non-fundamentalist Americans “hold to notions of divine origin and metaphysical evil,” which are the foundations of the dualistic morality of the Biblical apocalypse (Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse xii).
Prior to the release of the last book in 2007, the Harry Potter series had sold 121.5 million copies in the United States; on the first day the seventh book was available, Americans spent about $170 million buying 8.3 million copies (Rich). That’s almost a hundred books per second. The overwhelming popularity of the series ignited a debate within the American Christian community between fundamentalists, who believe the story is dangerously subversive to Christianity, and more moderate Christians, who point out biblical symbolism in the series and the triumph of Christian values like faith, love, redemption, and the victory of good over evil. On one hand, American critic Richard Abanes, author of Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick, argues that the Harry Potter series contains “spiritually dangerous material that could ultimately lead youth down the road to occultism” and promotes “unbiblical values and unethical behavior” (6). On the other hand, in God, the Devil, and Harry Potter: A Christian Minister’s Defense of the Beloved Novels, John Killinger highlights parallels between Harry Potter and the New Testament in an attempt to prove that, ultimately, “the master plot, the one underlying the entire novel, is the critical struggle between good and evil” with Harry as a stand-in for Christ and the evil wizard Voldemort representing Satan (38).
Christian supporters of the series deserve some credit for recognizing the significance of good and evil in the series. Still, to say that Rowling’s message about that dichotomy is evidence that the story promotes Christian morality is a misleading oversimplification. Opponents of the series seem to appreciate the subversive potential of Rowling’s work, but their accusations of black magic, paganism, and unethical behavior misidentify her target. There are some, however, including Abanes, who do correctly perceive the challenge to Christian morality in the Harry Potter books. After extolling the virtues of the strict “moral boundaries” in the Lord of the Rings series (“rooted in Tolkien’s devout Christian faith”), Abanes lambasts Harry Potter, in which, he claims, “Rowling’s moral universe is a topsy-turvy world with no firm rules of right and wrong or any godly principles by which to determine the truly good from the truly evil” (234, 245).
This ambiguity seriously threatens Abanes’ fundamentalist view of Christian morality, which depends on rigid definitions of good and evil. Unfortunately, Abanes weakens his argument when he succumbs to the fundamentalist tendency to criticize the books for being “little more than occult-glamorizing, morally bleak, marketing sensations filled with one-dimensional characters” (233). One-dimensional characters, by definition,cannot be morally ambiguous. Throughout Harry Potter and the Bible, Abanes struggles between this kind of dismissal of the series as inane, poorly written, and “filled with crude jokes, crass remarks, gratuitous violence, gore, juvenile antics, and just about every other ploy used in today’s action-packed PG-13 films and video games” and attempting to portray the series as dangerously subversive and compelling enough to tempt readers away from Christian morality (243).
Abanes’ adherence to rigid morality is not a characteristic limited to American fundamentalist Christians. Even the more moderate Killinger tries to present each character as ultimately destined to be either good or evil, although he acknowledges that throughout the story, “good sometimes looks like evil…and evil often masquerades as good” (Killinger 40). In the last two pages of his book, however, he finally concedes that the message of the Harry Potter series is to “accept life on its own terms – the evil with the good” but then, of course, has to quickly admit, “This is the one point at which the Christian vision sticks and can go no further, but must finally remain dualistic; it recognizes that evil cannot entirely be absorbed by good. The devil and his angels must be cast into the lake of everlasting fire, for they will never repent” (Killinger 185-186).
Killinger downplays the importance of this final concession, but acceptance of “the evil with the good” is the core message of the Harry Potter series. Harry Potter does not simply present the unequivocal triumph of good over evil; instead, it features a struggle to transcend the apocalyptic dualism that promotes conflict between good and evil. Furthermore, Rowling promotes an alternative to traditional apocalyptic morality by creating characters who do not fit neatly into the binary categories of good or evil. As I will show, the moral message of the Harry Potter series doesn’t support the traditional Christian moral system found in the Book of Revelation, then, but threatens it.
