Not at all. As I and others have said, England is a secular society. Religion, on the whole, isn’t that important.
It may have been a while since I read the first four books, but I really don’t believe this is true.
Can you point out a single “event that has significance in Harry’s life” that doesn’t directly relate to the mechanations of the plot? No matter how seemingly unrelated an event or episode may appear to be to the plot on initial reading, I’m sure eventually we discover that it either set up a later plot development or at the very least exposed us to some seemingly trivial aspect of the Harry Potter universe that later becomes crucial to the plot, but would have seemed arbitrary and capricious if we had not been introduced to the concept earlier.
I’m pretty sure there were some oblique references to religion, but now I can’t…
Ah well, I have no time to search through four books to find some reference, which may or may not exist.
However, don’t most UK boarding schools have regular religious assemblies (Chapel)? Or at least a chaplain?
Atheist. The phrase “good book” has nothing to do with Harry Potter.
The introduction of the Quidditch players moving in posters. And Ron (?) poking the soccer players because they didn’t move - or something like that.
It’s all to add colour to the world.
Well, they celebrate Christmas, but that holiday has become so secularized anyway that it doesn’t mean anything.
And I guess Harry Potter is sort of a Christ figure, it could be argued.
Hogwarts is based in Great Britain, which as many posters have said here is a mostly secular society.
Seamus Finnegan and Parvati Patil are Hogwarts students.
To my mind, Seamus would be nominally a Catholic and Parvati nominally a Hindu. As both of these children were offered places in Hogwarts, we can only assume that the school has no overriding religious affiliation, barring children from divergent Muggle religions.
There’s another fantasy writter who has something similar going on in some of his stories which could be a very similar approach. In many of Terry Pratchett’s stories, the main action involves wizards, which live in a huge school that teaches them, well, how to be wizards. It mentions many times their lack of interest in religion due to the fact that, they know gods exist, they deal with them on a daily basis, sometimes often on a personal basis, and therefore, they really see no need to pay them any more attention than necessary. The concept of going to church, or any other structured form of worship for one god is seen as silly and a waste of time. It could be something like that in Harry’s world. When dealing with a plot device surrounded by supernatural forces of both a good and evil variety, the concept of a single organized religion begins to seem rather silly. I mean, once you recognize that God, Yahwe, Allah, Vishnu and Buddha all DO exist, along with a slew of other gods and the like, why bother going to church every Sunday?
Again, another point where spirituality and religion go their separate ways.
I could be wrong, though.
Fortunately that’s not true, or we’d be bogged down with a few chapters worth of Harry’s fanasies about Cho and, um, self-discovery. Some significant things are highly private, so maybe in this series religion is one of them.
I just finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and, without spoiling any plot points, I can state that once again Rowling steers wide and clear of religious matters. There is one point when Harry asks some questions about the nature of the afterlife – but not even a ghost can tell him anything about it! And, as in previous volumes, there is no hint of any wizard engaging in any kind of religious worship, or discussing any religious belief-system, or even taking any god’s name in vain. Sometimes they swear “By Merlin’s beard!” And I don’t think it’s because they revere Merlin as a god.