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Connie Neal is the author of What's a Christian to do With Harry Potter? and The Gospel According to Harry Potter (Westminster John Knox Press).

How did you get started on this?

I'm a mom, that's how. Actually it was before any controversy in the Christian community.  I'm very much involved in my children's lives and [the mother of] one of their friends said, "I've just read the most fabulous book.  Sarah loves it.  It's about this little boy who finds out he's a wizard and he goes off to this school to learn witchcraft."

And I went, "Oh, lovely." So I read the first book thinking I was reading it to explain to my kids why they couldn't. I could see immediately that it would be enormously popular. As I looked at it, it did not take me very long at all to decide that this was something tremendously useful for an involved Christian parent.

What do you say to people who say the problem with Harry Potter is that it encourages kids to dabble in witchcraft, divination, sorcery, and casting spells? The Bible says God abhors these things.

I absolutely agree that God abhors them.  I abhor them. One of the things that convinced me to take on Harry Potter with my children was I saw that it would be a tremendous tool for me to help them learn spiritual discernment.

I took them to Deuteronomy 18. I made it clear to my children that we are totally against witchcraft. But, I said to them, "Here's what we're going to do: What [J.K. Rowling] has done is she's mixed really fun, wonderful, creative creatures with some things that actually are real according to the Bible.  And so I want you to practice sorting it out.  As I'm reading the story, raise your hand if you find something that is also real in our world and then we can go to the Bible and understand it."

I went through and made sure that my children understood every single thing in these stories so that now they really are better able to help their non-Christian friends who are reading these stories.

In the stories you really see the dangers of the occult. You see the dangers of evil.  So I turned it into really some tremendous lessons on spiritual discernment. For all the fear that [the books are] going to be leading kids into the occult, I've not found any real children who have become occultists because of Harry Potter. 

There was a four year old who jumped off her counter on a broom, thought she could fly, and got hurt. And there are kids who will, you know, dabble with casting spells.  And they might get on a website and go to another one.  Therefore, that is all the more reason that we, as parents, must engage it.

What else do you say to opponents of Harry Potter?

If you start dissecting literature in this way, you end up looking at The Chronicles of Narnia and saying, "The Magician's Nephew.  My goodness."

Witches and magicians and wands and spells have been a part of children's literature throughout the ages. A lot of the accusations that have been made against Harry Potter have been selectively ignored when the same Christians are looking at the Narnia books.

One of the heroes on Aslan's side in Voyage of the Dawn Treader opens up a spell book and she casts a spell. It actually works. Aslan shows up. And then he says, "Do you think I wouldn't use my own magic?"

So for a person who sets out with an intent to find something specific to fill, they will find what they're looking to find. C.S. Lewis said that anyone can find almost anything in a book if they're determined enough.

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November (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46