You don’t understand the fundamentalist view of magic or the supernatural.
In that view, there are only two sources of the supernatural God (and His agents like angels) and the Devil (and his agents like demons). If something supernatural is going to happen, one or the other must make it happen. You make it happen via supplication of some sort - praying to God, say, or using a satanic ritual. By definition, God is only going to help people who 1) are following God’s plan and 2) are properly giving God the credit. You cannot fight evil by asking for Satan’s assistance - if Satan is helping you to fight evil, he’s doing it only so that he can cause more evil. Christ even says in the Bible that it’s impossible for one demon to drive out other demons - a house divided against itself cannot stand.
So, let’s look at Moses. Lots of miracles - staves into snakes, plagues, etc. At one point, water is produced from a rock and the outcome is that Moses is banned from entering the promised land. Why? Because Moses made it look like producing the water was his power and his effort, not God’s. (There may be other interpretations; this is certainly a popular one).
Look at Harry Potter instead. There’s no mention of God, no reliance on His power, and no glorification of God. So we know that God is not supplying the power. Therefore Satan is providing it. And if Satan is providing it, he’s doing so only for his own evil ends. Even if Harry Potter believes that he is doing good, it’s impossible for him to achieve any net good.
So… what about the magical wardrobe? Well, first of all, the kids don’t claim the wardrobe is their magical power - it’s just an oddity they use to travel through. They can’t control it in any way. Second, the wardrobe exists only to serve God’s purpose for Narnia (that is, that the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve will arrive to defeat evil).
This is why Tolkien is more open to criticism from these kinds of people than Lewis is. Tolkien has few overt mentions of God and more people using magic.
He was a High Churcher though (he even believed in Purgatory) and it was theorized he’d have converted to Catholicism if he’d lived longer.
OTOH it should be noted that there are various divisions of fundamentalists from simple Evangelicals like say Billy Graham to theological hardliner neo-Puritans who are nonetheless quite tolerant of drinking, smoking, and other cultural issues to Jack Chick type who think everything outside of their theological paradigm is part of the Papist-Satanist conspiarcy.
I think it has a lot to do with the reaction to fads. New, suddenly popular, things are more likely to be treated with suspicion. I’m thinking here of the reaction to role playing games in the 80s, which was similar to the reaction to HP, except there was a media circus as well. Hey, did you know that the Israeli army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons? I didn’t. According to wiki, playing it will lower a soldier’s security clearance.
Tolkein and Lewis being Christians doesn’t signify. Rowling describes herself as a practising Christian.
Also like to say that Wendell’s timeline for the rise of the religious right in the US seems off. The Moral Majority was around well before 2000.
Also also, would like to note that if the OP means “Fundamentalist” as in “American Evangelicals” (which often seems the case), other subsections of religious groups have reacted against HP, such as Orthodox Christians and Muslims.
This seems pertinent. It’s pretty lackluster, really, by Chick standards.
I think the question has been answered fairly well. By the way, contrary to Wendell Wagner, who otherwise made excellent points, the Religious Right started to gain real power in the 1980s, which is when we saw the the rise of groups like Focus on the Family and the Moral Majority. They were both founded in the late 1970s, but their incipient political power became apparent in the 1980s (of course the Moral Majority was disbanded in the late 1980s). The late 1970s and early 80s also saw the precipitous rise of TV Evangelism and the increasing number of non-denominational, fundamentalist, evangelical Christian churches. It was in the 1990s, especially 1994, that we saw the rise of the Religious Right as a major political power in the GOP, and the necessity of GOP candidates kowtowing to the Religious Right in order to win primaries. It’s only gotten worse. Let’s hope the zenith of their influence has passed.
There are plenty of fundamentalists who decry the popularity of the Lord of the Rings as much as any fantasy novels. But I do think the Harry Potter series receives more ire than the LOTR movies did because of its setting in modern times, the absence of a clear divinity or omniscient moral guide in the novels and movies, and that its main protagonists are children. The Chronicles of Narnia gets a pass regarding the last point because of the explicitly Christian morality and divinity that runs all through it.
Lots of evangelicals have issues with C. S. Lewis and paganism, despite the allegorical nature of his work. Lewis always said that Christianity was never meant to contradict fundamental aspects of older religion, including pagan religions, but rather that it completed and thereby superseded them. For him, Christianity was still the final, complete truth, but Lewis argued that no religion is utterly without truth, including pagan religions. Lots of fundamentalists are uncomfortable with this, and the ways in which paganism comes out in his novels.
Sorry for the threadjack, but I just wanted to say Jack T. Chick is hillarious, as would anyone else be who believes all sects and religions other than certain ultra-fundamentalist protestant groups and the entirity of Islam, were founded by Satan.
Why the apparent tolerance for Islam?
because he believes Islam was instead, an evil Catholic plot to destroy true Christianity in the middle east :dubious:
After his conversion he was high church. But the claim was that he was raised as a Catholic, and he wasn’t. He was raised as an Anglican, and not a notably high-church Anglican.
I disagree. D&D (role playing games in general, but D&D was the main focus) suffered from attacks by religious groups yet lacks a modern setting and child protagonists. Possibly you have a point with the moral guide thing, but it seems too abstract an idea. No, I suspect it’s largely the sudden popularity that is the parallel here-- both RPGs and HP were fads that attracted media attention, which brought them to the attention of religious groups, who spoke out about them, and then, because of the ongoing media circus, those pronouncements in turn attracted more media attention thus starting the cycle again. Surely there would be moral objections to, say, R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” books due to the intended audience and horror-lite material, but they weren’t in the spot light like HP, and thus the snowball didn’t start rolling.
The First Great Awakening in about 1730
The Second Great Awakening in about 1820
The Fundamentalist Movement in about 1910
The Religious Right in about 2000
was not that these were the beginning of the movements. These dates are more like the high water mark of them. Each of them was a wave, not a spike. It’s not possible to define exactly when each of them began or ended. In some sense, none of them exactly began or ended at all. Each of them arose from something before they formally began and changed into something else as they began to go away.
Furthermore, the dates are a little arbitrary. What are the chances, even if one was able to precisely define the high point of each of them, that the four dates would be separately by exactly 90 years? I’ve just memorized these four years because it simplifies explaining what was going on.
Obviously, popularity alone is not enough. In general, fundamentalists dislike all things occult, whether fiction or not. “Goosebumps” has been attacked, too.
Maybe Harry Potter with occult plus huge popularity is sufficient to explain everything, but I’m sure the factors I named exacerbate the situation. I think you’re under-appreciating how much the strong presence or absence of holiness or divinity affects fundamentalists views of whether certain works are acceptable or not. It might be the most salient point condemning occult- or pagan-based works of fiction, and D&D of course gets it pretty badly for lacking this as well. In fact, there were Christian-based fantasy role-playing games created in the 1980s to compete with D&D, the main selling point for which was the inclusion of holiness, divinity, and an absolute good.
I’m also sure that Harry Potter’s having been written to directly appeal to children, and featuring mostly child protagonists, is a strong point against it to fundamentalists. They fear the degree to which it is aimed at corrupting children and leading them away from righteousness. D&D was bad enough. Harry Potter is worse.
But let’s be honest: a lot of fundamentalist fear of these works is based on pure ignorance. Witness Jack Chick’s tracts about them: they’re just foolish to anyone who actually knows the work in question in any detail.
Yet at that very moment, my friends and I were role-playing knights and priests, fighting against evil wizards and demons. Shifted just slightly in context, the fundamentalist worldview reminds me of nothing so much as… traditional Dungeons & Dragons.
Rather than the fad aspect, or even the “contemporary Britain” aspect, I would suspect that the Harry Potter series received greater condemnation because it explicitly included spells, and even went so far as to identify the female spell casters as witches, thus violating these biblical passages:
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.”
“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”)
One other thing to remember is that Fundamentalists are no more uniform in their beliefs than any other group. Some DID condemn Tolkien and some did not. (Tolkien never quite received the general scorn that Lewis did; there are some hilarious condemnations of Lewis floating around on the Web.)
The campaigns against D&D had more to do with Satanic Panic than the fact that role playing games were rather new. From the mid 70s through, maybe 1987 or so, there were a lot of people who were seriously concerned about Satanic cults committing a myriad of crimes including kidnapping, murder, cannibalism, pedophilia, vandalism, etc., etc. It sounds funny to us now, but people took it really serious at the time. The McMartin Preschool Trial in Los Angeles are perhaps one of the best examples of Satanic Panic.
Well, it’s a good question. When I was in yeshiva (used to be Orthodox), I heard various complaints about Harry Potter, from emphasizing the common humanity of people (when we don’t want people to assimilate) to the endorsement of magic. A friend avowedly claimed that a local yeshiva engaged in a book burning of Harry Potter books under the auspices of an eminent rabbi (I don’t believe this story, never saw any other record of it). I know a rabbi who has composed a brief halachic analysis of the feasibility of reading C.S. Lewis and who has determined it’s extremely problematic.
You never know when these sorts of ideas might have been promoted by an individual rabbi or two. Plus, I was curious about Christian fundamentalists…I mean, look, I’d expect at least one or two individual fundamentalist leaders to bash such a popular book.
Was there any objection from any kind of Jewish sources to magic in fiction in the 1950’s when The Lord of the Rings came out? I find it hard to believe that there was any. There were no Christian objections to The Lord of the Rings or to The Chronicles of Narnia in the 1950’s. It was only after Harry Potter books came out that some Christian fundamentalists started by objecting to the Harry Potter books and later extended their objections to Tolkien and Lewis when it was pointed out that they weren’t being consistent. I suspect that it wasn’t until after the Christian fundamentalists objected to Harry Potter that some Jewish fundamentalists decided that they should also object to it.
I think you’re expecting more logical consistency among fundamentalists than is there and that you’re underestimating the extent to which their public complaints are motivated by a desire for publicity. I don’t see that at any point Christian or Jewish fundamentalists decided to carefully search through some wide variety of lliterature to find out which books were objectionable. I think that they started by saying, “Hey, these Harry Potter books are popular. How can we get our names and views into news stories about them?”