art, harry potter, and walking on water.

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

---

On the way to the Harry Potter movie on Sunday, my dad asked if the “religious right” had ever gotten over boycotting Harry Potter. I told him I didn’t know, couldn’t remember, but that I was grateful he and mom had never bought into that idea. And he wondered, out loud, why they hadn’t?

My parents, after all, boycotted many things. No drinking. No drugs. No books at the dinner table. No dinner in front of the TV. No “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” No “Rugrats.” No movies with bratty children, lest we follow suit. (I mean, The Goofy Movie was ripped out of our VCR after five minutes of play. I never saw Home Alone in its entirety until I was well into adolescence.) I believe we even wrote a family letter of protest to the executives at Converse tennis shoes when Dennis Rodman became their spokesman.

So, see? My family is no stranger to the boycott.

But books about witchcraft and wizardry? Here, my 11-year-old child! Enjoy!

Thank goodness.

As Dad sat pondering his parenting, I remembered this theme that keeps popping up in Walking on Water, this idea that Christians are somewhat terrified of art, especially art they can’t immediately discern as “Christian.”

“Christian art? Are is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.... To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all.”

It reminds me of an argument I got into with one of my journalism professors in undergrad. I told her I wanted to be a Christian journalist. She told me I wanted to be a journalist who happens to be a Christian. To this day, I’m not quite sure who was right, since I think really, we were arguing over semantics. I didn’t want to write for Christianity Today. I wanted to be a journalist who took her faith with her everywhere she went, who showed appreciation for story and syntax, because I happen to be born of a Creator who appreciates those things.

And I told Dad that maybe the reason we never boycotted Harry Potter was because the Butterworths always investigated things for themselves, asked questions. And my parents trusted me to make responsible decisions. It didn’t hurt that Dad was reading the books right behind me. Instead of making an ill-informed judgment call (and forcing me to do things like read with a flashlight under my bed), my dad read the books, and he knew how silly all those arguments about witchcraft and wizardry were.

I’ve read lots of conflicting reports about J.K. Rowling’s beliefs, and you know what? None of them changes the fact that the Harry Potter stories are Christian. Christian because they are well-written calls to courage and loyalty and friendship and sacrifice. No, Jesus’ name is never mentioned. There is no direct reference to a lion or a lamb or a cross. But on Sunday, as I sat watching those final moments of the book play out on film, I was reminded of just how right and true those stories are.

I don’t know if somewhere out there, there’s a church still burning Harry Potter books and DVDs. But I know that there are believers out there who are scared of fiction not bought from or directly endorsed by their local Lifeway store. Others prefer not to read fiction at all. And that’s just silly.

What kind of believers are we if believe God only works through praise and worship music (which, admittedly, I enjoy) or “Christian” romance novels (hey, I’ve read and liked Redeeming Love just as much as the next person)? Why not branch out and see the power of story and art and creativity play out in other venues, in what L'Engle calls incarnational ways?

I think, really, the whole thing boils down to this, a paragraph found in L'Engle's chapter on "Names and Labels":

When another young woman told me that she wanted to be a novelist, that she wanted to write novels for Christian women, and asked me how she would go about it, I wrote back, somewhat hesitantly, that I could not tell her, because I do not write my books for either Christians or women. If I understand the Gospel, it tells us that we are to spread the Good News to all four corners of the world, not limiting the giving of light to people who already have seen the light. If my stories are incomprehensible to Jews or Muslims or Taoists, then I have failed as a Christian writer. We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.

-- Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water, p. 122.

I want to show, be, and recognize that light, in all possible venues and ways.