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Wild About Harry — Who’s Really Breeding Atheists and Witches?
By Nicole Chardenet, Bristol
"I became an atheist at age 9 despite a severely Catholic mother," the man e-mailed me, responding to my opinions on religion he found on the Internet.
"The family next door are real fundamentalist Bible-thumpers," a friend told me at a mutual friend’s pre-Thanksgiving dinner. "I was talking to their 10-year-old son and asked him if he had fun trick-or-treating on Halloween. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go trick-or-treating,’ he told me. ‘I had to go to church that night. I hate church!’"
"I used to be Catholic, but I’m better now," another friend, who dabbles in Wicca, likes to say.
"I used to be one of those door-to-door intolerant Jesus freaks," a Pagan relates on the Internet. "I’m deeply ashamed of the way I used to be."
These comments are quite typical of what I’ve gotten in nearly twenty years of getting interested in religion (not-so-coincidentally at the same time as I left my birth faith). Today these comments are catching my attention more than usual because of the latest religious fuss over the Harry Potter craze.
I admit, I’m wild about Harry. I have all the books, and have read and re-read them all. I adored the movie, saw it twice, can’t wait for the video. Can someone please tell Ms. Rowling to get snappy with Book #5? I don’t care if she just got married, she’s got a fan base to take care of!
I’m both confused and amused by some people’s fears that the Harry Potter books, centering around a young wizard and his friends at a magical school in England, teach children atheism. Mostly because there is no religion in the books whatsoever, although they must not all be total atheists because they celebrate Christmas and sing Christmas carols. (But they don’t spin the dreidel! Or light the Yule log! Anti-multicultural bastards!)
More understandable is the concern about witchcraft, in the sense that witchcraft and magic are a central theme of the books, but rather in the same sense that this theme is also to be found in such classic children’s literature as The Wizard of Oz and fairy tales. (Oh, and yeah, the Bible. You know, raising of the dead and parting of the seas and consorting with women with familiar spirits and turning water into wine. But somehow that never gets mentioned in the same breath as Harry Potter, just like people forget about Biblical rape and incest and the slaughtering of babies and tossing women to the dogs when banning books with sex and violence in them.)
Anyway, there is also a whole genre of books, aimed mostly at pre-teen girls, about child or teen witches that no one ever makes a fuss about—probably because they’re not nearly as popular as the Hogwarts set. I remember reading them when I was a kid, and finding them around the house when I lived with a woman with a young daughter.
Which is why I find it hard to believe that any kid is going to turn atheist or Pagan because they read Harry Potter. This is because—and I say this with utter sincerity, without an intent to flame or offend the religious—the two biggest breeding grounds for atheism, secularism, and Paganism are fundamentalist Christianity and Catholicism. And neither has an upper hand over the other.
(That’s something I like to remind Pagans about, who can be anti-Catholic and anti-fundy at times. "For all your griping about them, you owe them BOTH big favors—if it weren’t for Catholics and fundies, Wicca would die out!" And they do concede they get far more new members from conservative religions than from those who read Mists of Avalon.)
The folks who don’t let their kids go trick-or-treating, the ones who make them hate church—they’re the ones who are most likely to turn out future witches and atheists, not the kids who dress as ghosts or Britney Spears and bug their neighbors for candy. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who credited their current religious belief system, or lack thereof, to celebrating Halloween. More than a few of them, though, could speak rather knowledgeably about the existing pagan elements of Christmas.
And I’ve looked. I’ve read the stories on the Internet. I’ve talked to ex-religionists for many years. Did you know there are virtually no support groups for ex-Lutherans, ex-Quakers, ex-Methodists, ex-Congregationalists, ex-Wiccans, or ex-atheists? There are a ton, however, for ex-Catholics and ex-fundamentalists. And not a single one credits their turn from Christianity to impersonating ghouls or boy band members and collecting enough candy to send an army of dentists to Europe, or because they thought Samantha Stevens was really cool. They do, however, cite rigid, joyless religion and anti-female, sex-phobic, anti-historical and anti-scientific religious upbringings.
What really confuses me is people who are afraid of inadvertently teaching their children "pagan rituals." Have they ever done the research? Honestly speaking, Halloween today is far more devoid of remnants of pagan rituals than Christmas. People miss this because Halloween looks more like what we imagine ancient religion to have been like, if you can imagine ancient Celtic mothers going through their kids’ stashes and saying, "I don’t think so. I read somewhere that those Pictish types bake funny weeds in brownies and give them to children." Check out the prevalence of the Mithras cult someday—like before next Christmas—and you’ll find that the Persian god Mithras was born on December 25, was unjustly executed and yet rose from the dead shortly thereafter, and he was doing it before Jesus did. And those are just a few of the ancient Lord’s similarities to the newer one.
Really, if you want to exorcise the paganism from Christmas, you’re going to have to do a lot more than banish the tree. And for the record, if you do, if you make Christmas as utterly devoid of charm as you have Halloween, you will probably be pushing your kids closer to a life of atheism or alternative religions than if you just let it all be.
Just deck the halls and do the Santa thing and don’t worry about it, and maybe they’ll never find out how many virgin-born ancient pagan deities died and rose from the dead after a couple of days. Or how Dionysius turned water into wine …
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