All the silly fundamentalist flap about the Harry Potter novels promoting New Age religion got me to thinking: What exactly would be the religion of Rowling’s wizards and witches? They seem to have a complete underground society with its own government, educational institutions, industries, businesses, banks – but no churches or temples. And how many human cultures have lacked a religion of one kind or another? Hogwarts is modeled, apparently, on British public schools like Eton – which, I believe, have chapels and include relgious instruction in their curriculum. But Hogwarts has nothing of the kind. The students celebrate Christmas, but why is never made clear; there is no other indication that they are Christians in any sense. Nor do they seem to worship any non-Christian gods. Is it just that magic is their religion and they see no need for another?
Perhaps this is something Rowling has never mentioned because she quite sensibly wants to stay as far away from it as possible.
Hogwarts recognizes Christmas and Easter, so the British wizarding community is at least culturally Christian.
True, Hogwarts does seem to drop the religious life seen at many public schools, but that may be either a peculiarity of the wizarding world, or a recent development at the school.
What cmkeller said, plus the fact that Rowling likely did not want to put any religion in the book in order to not push beliefs on the children who read the books. Harry as a character is supposed to be an ‘everyman’ who accomplishes great things. He’s ‘just Harry’, yet he ends up being famous and daring, and accomplishes the most amazing things, with no extraordinary magical talent. If Harry was a devout anything, children from different religions wouldn’t relate as well, and he would lose some of that everyman status. I think Harry is meant to encourage people to believe that anyone can accomplish anything, as long as they do what is good in their hearts and stay true to their friends. That’s the whole idea…no reason to mix religion into it.
Religion is pretty much ignored in children’s and YA literature these days. It’s rare to find any characters, even in realistic books, who go to church. Only evil people are allowed to be religious in secular books (the homophobic, charismatic pastor…the moneygrubbing televangelist… the oppressive and illiterate fundie parents…).
It would be unusual and eleict a lot of commentary if Harry did have a religion. That he doesn’t is just Rowling going with the conventions of children’s books.
Can I suggest that religeon being much less a part of life for most Brits (than say, Americans) has something to do with the irrelevance of religeon in the books?
England is a secular society. It would jar to force a religion on to Harry. Hogwarts has his Christmas and Easter because that’s what is familiar culturally to Rowling and Rowling’s audience.
Besides, religion is a personal thing, isn’t it? Harry could be Buddhist for all we know.
If I had to make a guess, I’d say, being raised in the Dursley household, he’d have no real faith, but may be nominally Anglican for holidays and such. Or he may not be religious whatsoever.
Britain today is very secular. Religion plays a very small part in most people’s lives, and regular churchgoers are very unusual under the age of 80. The Dursleys are probably Anglican, got married in church, had dudley christened, and occasionally attend a wedding, funeral or Chirstening in church (though they are all moving increasingly into the secual domain), and that’s about it. Harry will have had some religious instruction at his Muggle primary school, but although this focuses on Christianity, it also teaches about the other major world religions, and is not preachy.
However, I know what you’re really asking is why the wizard don’t appear to have any religion. I guess it would be difficult for them to hold to any of the faiths in the Muggle world, since so much of it would be fact and not faith to them: Jesus’ miracles would be nothing to them - in fact they’d probably say he was a wizard. They wouldn’t need religion to explain the inexplicable, they have magic for that.
However, magic doesn’t explain ‘why’ we’re here and what our purpose in life is, which is one of the other main roles of religion. So perhaps they do have a religion of some sort that attempts to tackle this question. But because it’s more limited in scope than religion in the Muggle world, it has never had much of an influence on general wizarding society. It would also probably be practised at home at the discretion of the parents.
I’m putting waaay too much thought into Harry Potter these days.
I’m presuming here that spoilers from the first four books are allowed.
One other indication, then, is that Sirius is Harry’s godfather. Now, that word might be used a little differently in England, but to me, that implies at least that Harry is, at least nominally, a baptized Christian of some sort.
It’s also mentioned many places in the books that love is a very powerful force in the world. It’s harder to say, on this one, but this could be taken to be a religious statement.
And people certainly have souls, and there’s the implication that not even the blackest of magic can destroy a soul (even if we don’t know what happens to it).
Wait a minute, Chronos – don’t the Dementors destroy human souls, by eating them?
Of course, Hogwarts is infested with visible, audible ghosts, so the wizards must know something about the afterlife. It’s never made clear whether everybody turns into a ghost after death. What I find remarkable is that nobody seems concerned about spiritual matters at all. All these bright, adolescent kids, starting to grow up, exploring the world, feeding their curiosity – and religious questions never even seem to come up in late-night bull sessions. So are as we can tell, none of them even think about such things.
SciFiSam beat me to the supposition that the Dursleys are nominal Anglicans. I wouldn’t even be surprised to hear that they are on some committee or other in the church if it’s politically appropriate. Heck, they might even be on the vestry.
My own English godfather never provided much in the way of religious instruction, but the distance between England and America may well have been a factor. No doubt if we’d stayed in England, I would have seen more of him – he was one of my mother’s childhood friends. Certainly my expectation of what the role of “Godfather” entails does include some guidance, support, etc.
Here’s where my money is: Harry was told he was Anglican and chided on the rare occaisions when he dared question religion, but the Dursleys were too ashamed of him to take him to church. I’d also suspect that pure-blooded wizarding families like the Weasleys are rather fascinated by the trappings of Muggle religion, especially with regart to the peculiar awe some Christiand have of turning water into wine.
Anyway, that’s my tuppence or two cents, depending on which culture’s dominant at the moment.
I susspect like most non religious Brits the Dursleys would be Church of England, HP’s real parents sound somewhat new-agey in their discription, which would add to the Dursley’s disslike of them. I susspect if the Dursley’s are church goers, HP would have been left at home after the first magical accident occured. “Is this wine meant to be the blood of Christ?”,
'Yes",
“funny it doesn’t taste like blood, oh wait no, now it does.”
…
Well, if we want to start injecting serious thought of this kind into a children’s adventure tale, we should realize that we are not watching tapes of “24 Hours In the Life of a Hogwart’s Student.” We are reading a story about a specific adventure, and only those instances and conversations dealing with the plot of that adventure are shown.
There may indeed be church services on Sundays, but since none of the mechanations of the plot happened then, we do not read about it. There may be religious classes, and in-depth religious discussions that go on for hours in the dorms, but since they do not affect the plot, they are not included in the story.
Please, the books are long enough without including non-plot-related information.
One of the things that struck me about the Harry Potter books is how well-structured they are. Even the most trivial incidences that you think are only showcasing the wonderful “magic” environment are not only interesting reading, but they come back later to become relevent to the actions involved in making the plot work.
My impressions are that in the Harry Potter universe, “witchcraft” and “religion” are two seperate things. Magic has nothing to do with religion, so just as any of the Harry Potter characters could concievably belong to any of the various British political parties (they don’t talk much about that, either), they probably subscribe to the same religious mores as the rest of British society.
Sorry, I don’t buy that. Rowling tends to show any event that has significance in Harry’s life, and religion would certainly be significant, even if he were only a lipstick Anglican; spending an hour a week at church over the course of four novels is surely worthy enough to mention. And note that the religiousness of wizards brings a whole new set of interesting questions that would be very intriguing to explore; do they interpret Jesus as a wizard? Would a very powerful wizard today (Harry?) be the reincarnation of the Messiah, while Voldemort is the incarnation of Satan? Rowling likes to show how everyday mundane stuff translates over to the wizarding world, from transportation, to candy, to sports, to mailing letters, etc. To not have any reference to religion whatsoever is a deliberate evasion by Rowling.
Whether this is a good or bad thing is subject to debate. I think that in a children’s book, this omission may be a good thing, but I’m not sure if Harry Potter can really be classified as a strictly children’s series anymore. Even Rowling herself does not limit herself to that categorization. If her evasion of religion comes from her own desire to bypass it, then that’s fine. But if she’s scared of violating the “children’s” genre rule and secretly wants to address religion, I hope she goes for it. Sure there’s gonna be a whole new set of backlash, but the Harry Potter series is first and foremost J K Rowling’s baby, and if we label it as something that it’s not intended to be, then too bad for us.
it just occurred to me- not even in the Narnia books are obvious religious trappings portrayed in daily Earth life, and I would recommend them as the best spiritual fiction of the 20th Century
