Putting the fun in fundamentalist
It’s been a long time since I was 12 (a bit over a decade, in fact), but a brief scene from the seventh grade still stands out in my memory. I was in my classroom. We were having a free period, and I was spending it reading Memoirs of a Geisha. I remember it like it was yesterday; my Reading teacher yanked the book out of my hands and said, “Why are you reading that? That’s bad!” with a smile on her face.
To this day, I don’t know if she was kidding (because she did give the book back to me afterwards), or if she was serious, but I still find myself asking, “Why? What made that book ‘bad’?” I might have been 12, but I wasn’t an idiot. I knew reality from fiction, and reading about the sensationalized lives of Kyoto geishas didn’t make me want to go forth and hit on drastically older men. (Though it did leave me with a bit of an obsession with kimono, which lingers to this day.)
It was just a story, and, like all stories, it allowed me to take a break from my life to see things through the eyes of a nonexistent someone else. I never saw the book as “bad” because my interpretation of it wasn’t bad. I didn’t put any malice into my reading. I didn’t focus on the obviously sexual aspects of the book; I latched onto the parts that I, as a 12-year-old girl, could relate to. (We were the generation who sang along to the Spice Girls’ 2 Become 1 and that was a bad, bad song.)
If that was baffling, what was even stranger was discovering that, at around the same time, grown people (zealots put the “fun” in “fundamentalists”) were trying to ban Harry Potter because — wait for it — Harry Potter is evil! Harry Potter encourages witchcraft. Harry Potter attracts the gullible youth toward paganism. Harry Potter challenges your faith.
If you question your faith because of an obviously fictional children’s book about an 11 year-old boy who discovers he’s a wizard, you have to consider the possibility that you didn’t have much faith to begin with. This is triply true if the reason for your doubt is The Da Vinci Code. Seriously?
My generation — or those of us who liked to read, at least — grew up with Harry Potter. We were “impressionable tweens” when the books first came out. I didn’t see any people my age brandishing sticks of wood and trying to Avada Kedavra the people they hated then, and certainly not now. (Though I think a good number of us are still waiting for our Hogwarts letters. Give it up, guys.) It was never about the magic, as entertaining as the magic was. It was about the reality behind the fantastic.
Harry Potter is about the triumph of good over evil. In the words of JK Rowling herself, it’s about making the choice between what is good and what is easy; something a lot of people in our local government need to learn really, really fast. It’s about finding strength in unity and friendship. It’s about overcoming adversity. It’s about self-sacrifice. And, yes, it’s about the power of love. It’s about a great number of good things that Jesus would probably approve of.
Where’s the devil in that?
Many of the fundies (they are a small but very loud minority — I know that the majority of religious people are sensible folks who don’t think this way, thank God!) who say that books like Harry Potter are evil, or that rock music is evil, have never read the books and never listened to the music. They just see the words “School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,” or look at pictures of the admittedly scary-looking people in death metal bands, and they freak out. The truth is, a lot of the time, the evil they see is of their own making. The evil they see is even more imaginary than the hallowed halls of Hogwarts. They haven’t even bothered to know what it is they’re judging, they just judge.
Of all things to rail against! If anything, books like Harry Potter impart valuable life lessons to anyone who’s willing to learn them. Without having to preach from a pulpit, they talk about treating everyone with respect, they talk about overcoming differences and working together towards a similar goal (world peace, Miss Universe-style), they talk about realizing your potential, they talk about forgiveness and redemption, they talk about finding hope in a bleak world, and most importantly, they talk about doing what is right.
Surely something that good can’t be that bad.
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You can e-mail me at vivat.regina@yahoo.com.
