You guys have gotten most of it, but you haven’t got it all together, and you seem to be rewriting history a bit.
Yes, it was disliked because it glorified magic. And it was disliked because it was popular. And because it was marketed towards children. But it is the merger of those things that made Harry Potter particularly bad. You see, the popularity could only be due to the Satanic magic within the book itself, since any good Christian would see magic and think it was horrible.
And where I say you are rewriting history is in that it was a huge deal when Harry Potter first came out. It’s just dwindled as the popularity dwindled. I’d say that, living here in the Bible belt, at least half of the adults I met thought Harry Potter was bad.
The magic part of this you can see in people thinking Dungeons and Dragons is Satanic. The popular part you can see in people who thought rock and roll was of the devil. Note how the latter seems silly, but the former is still not uncommon.
Hence, now it’s just about the magic, but it became a big deal only because it was popular.
I recall “they” (as a nebulous word meaning “the sorts of fundies who complain about this stuff”) made a big deal about Pokemon too. Something something analogy to summoning demons.
About 20 years ago I recall seeing a book making the case that Star Wars was evil and un-Christian. I’ve tried to find it again but so far haven’t had much luck.
The argument from what I remember was that the Star Wars universe didn’t recognize the Christian God or the divinity of Jesus, therefore the Force was a tool of Satan. Some of the same arguments against some of the other works discussed here.
If these types of believers were actually in control, what a sad and unimaginative world we would live in.
