AKA, a podcast, here.
"... J.K. Rowling speaks with unprecedented candor and depth about the controversies surrounding her—from book bans to debates on gender and sex.... Chapter 1: Plotted In Darkness
Chapter 1: Plotted In Darkness/Host Megan Phelps-Roper writes a letter to J.K. Rowling—and receives a surprising invitation in reply: the opportunity for an intimate conversation in Rowling’s Scottish home.... Chapter 2: Burn The Witch
Chapter 2: Burn The Witch
As Harry Potter becomes an international phenomenon, it coincides with the culture wars of the 1990s. In the backlash from Christians across America, author J.K. Rowling is accused of mainstreaming witchcraft and poisoning children’s minds...."
Megan Phelps-Roper grew up in the Westboro Church, which reviled Harry Potter from an extreme Christian Evangelist position.
I've listened to the first episode. It's very well done. Both Phelps-Roper and Rowling have gentle, expressive voices. At the beginning of episode one, Phelps-Roper asks various young adults why Harry Potter was important to them and they all say, more or less, you identify with him when you feel like and outcast and you believe in the great courage that lies within you.
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52 comments:
In the backlash from Christians across America…
I’ve played at a minimum of 100 services a year for the past 10 years at 5 different Christian congregations representing 3 denominations.
I never heard a single mention of Harry Potter at one of these services.
If not for making things up, what would reporters do?
Whatever the Christian complaints were about Potter, they occurred before social media became the public square. The TRA attacks on JKR seem more virulent because they have greater reach.
I'm not a podcast person, so I won't listen, but I'm interested in the interview. "Potter" is not a literary masterpiece; in the past I've dismissed JKR as a lightweight. She's got chops, though, and a steel spine.
"The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling"
Jury forewoman: Emily Kohrs
Funny ol' world; Rowling went from a feminist heroine (ultra-successful artist who crushed the men's world of popular lit while rising from near poverty, overcoming ignorant religious right pharisees, etc) to reviled TERF un-person in just a few short years.
It'd be nice if the people with cultural power would examine the irony of their positions now, enforcing strict conformity of thought while still seeing themselves as brave anti-authority outsiders, but of course that won't happen.
I understand why kids love the Harry Potter books/universe but the magic system itself seemed very slapdash/not thought out when I read the first two books years ago.
I think it was book 4 or 5 where the ministry of magic sends the evil professor to censor the students telling everyone that Voldemort is back and alive.
Rowling knows what the regime is and who they are.
The propagandist reporter was a particularly prescient touch.
The problem is touched on in the post. The people who reflexively attack things like the Harry Potter series because of their cultural preferences think they are better than the nerds and geeks who liked the series. About 90% of the population hates the WEF regime that is attacking us but we are too divided because of the cultural stuff to remove them.
feel like "an" outcast...
Does it star the foreman of Trumps grand jury??
This will have an immense impact
Naah. The people who hate Rowling will continue to do so, and the rest of us don't care.
I doubt it will have an immense impact, but it's nice to think so.
I was slow to appreciate Harry Potter (when the first movie came out, I thought Harry Potter was the author), but I came to love them even if I didn't love the lefty politics of the actual author. But in the last couple years, my respect for Rowling has become immense. She stood up to the mob and spoke the truth.
Some people dismiss it--she's so rich!--but so what? Rich people care what people think about them; rich people crumble in the face of public shaming all the time. Rowling didn't. She stood her ground and stood it well. She deserves all our respect for that, even if we don't care for her politics or her writing.
I listened to both. The second was also good. It was mostly about the evangelical Christian reaction to the books as a gateway to the occult. Interestingly, the podcaster also includes Wiccans and such from back then who say, yes, the books inspired them to look into witchcraft and the occult. I don’t get an occult vibe from those books myself, but more of a good vs evil vibe. I suppose some readers must identify with Voldemort and his minions.
"the backlash from Christians across America"
Who? How many? Did they declare JKR a "witch"?
"the Westboro Church, which reviled Harry Potter from an extreme Christian Evangelist position"
Which was like, what, a dozen people?
Aren't all Christians "extreme" at this point?
Anyway, under prog rule, JKR is worse than a witch: a heretic.
What's interesting to me is that I was very involved in homeschooling in the 90s (which meant a lot of interaction with those loathed "fundamentalists") and I found all parents enthusiastic about the Potter series. Even when it was just the first two books all the parents who had read them could see it was a Christian allegory and drew heavily from literature, history, mythology, and linguistics. It was a fabulous springboard for education.
I'm sure the Westboro group and their followers never cracked the covers. But the media love to spotlight them to tar the other Christians.
Rowling is a hero. She has stepped out into the arena and exercised her right to Free Speech. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud.
But she's already rich. It's tough to cancel and hurt her. Us not-so-rich people aren't so lucky.
… D. All of the above.
Being a podcast person myself- lectures, speeches, interviews, advice, TEDtalks(lately)- I’m looking forward to listening.
The books are inspired works. Layers of meaning in e/one. And the author, a rags to riches phenom. W/a stubborn streak for goodness &Truth. My kinda gal.
The Christians that objected to Harry Potter also object to the writings of C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien. They exist, but it takes some serious searching to find them in the wild.
Within that story is an analogy of the current religious fanatics, woke transactivists, who also have tried to metaphorically burn Rowling at the stake. As Tolkien can attest to, the impetus for inventing your own fantasy world is being able write about characters who are unaffected by our worldly concerns in order to focus on those universal experiences of life and death, virtue and honor, destiny and free will. For all their schooling the most woke among us insanely insist free will doesn’t exist. They know will exists but they want us to voluntarily limit the “free” part and just do what they say. Wokism is fealty to authority and anathema to free will.
Rowling understands this so much better than her critics and enemies.
FWIW, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod warned children from reading the Potter series because, IIRC, of its largely favorable and sympathetic portrayal of the use of magic (AKA witchcraft).
Wen our daughter said she quit reading the first HP novel because of that warning, we raised the subject with our Missouri Synod pastor who had never spoken about the books or the church's official position. He basically said, 'it's a kid's book about made-up magic where the main characjavascript:void(0)ters are doing good. It's OK.'
The creepy fake Christians of Westboro get a lot of press for their anti-Gospel antics but represent mainline Christianity about as accurately as Biden’s description of megamaga does. Your big clue would be their famous “God hates fags” abomination, one might even say blasphemous speech. Activism of any flavor tends toward the extreme and rarely represents a consensus.
This professional PR move is an interesting victim play by Rowling, especially the choice of podcasts which are the preferred format for olds (much like Facebook).
Won't move the needle among the people who are critical, but might sell some HP books as presents from grandparents who see her as some sort of hero for spouting off on social topics.
If not for making things up, what would reporters do?
Look for work? There is a pretty good discussion of this in regards paleontology with David Hone here.
I read the first few Harry Potter books (until they got too long and dark) to our sons, who attended a K-12 school run by an Evangelistic church at the time. Unsurprisingly, everyone at the school was adamantly against HP without ever having read any of the books. But no one hassled our boys about it. My wife had conversations with a number of people about HP, mostly pointing out that -- if they had not read any of the books -- they were just adopting someone else’s opinion of them on no basis and urging that they read at least a little of ‘Sorceror’s Stone.’ They uniformly listened politely and didn’t denounce us before the congregation.
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The school sent home a single anti-Potter flyer, provided to them by a publisher of ‘Christian’ children’s books. It was very plainly commercially based. ‘Don’t buy Harry Potter. Buy our books!’ I wish I had scanned it.
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A few years later, the school removed C.S. Lewis from a recommended reading list and the boys’ Science classes were getting weird, so we carried out plans to place them in secular private or public schools.
Lefties don’t just piss on your grave. They dig up your bones and take a dump.
Don Surber in today's substack. Substack is about complaints about how the NYT covers trans news, including JK Rowling
May be the best line I've seen all month.
John Henry
"
Megan Phelps-Roper grew up in the Westboro Church, which reviled Harry Potter from an aberrant and heretical, quasi-Christian Evangelist position."
That said, we were lectured, long ago, that we shouldn't let our kids play with He-Man toys because they supposedly had a connection to the occult. We ignored that counsel.
Burn the witch!
The old "culture wars" of the 80s and 90s were so quaint. My mother wouldn't let us listen to KISS when we were young, because they were Satanic. Years later I got to hear KISS, and it turned out they aren't Satanic at all. They just suck.
Thanks, Mom.
The term "womyn-born womyn" gained usage and popularity during the second wave feminist movement. In 1978, the Lesbian Organization of Toronto adopted a womyn-born womyn-only policy in response to a request for admittance by a transgender woman who identified as lesbian.
(Snip)
Key anti-trans proponents in the second wave feminist movement included Janice Raymond, Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly, who were proponents of womyn-born womyn policies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn-born_womyn
Have all these womyn been deplatformed for their duoubleplusungood wrongthink? If not, why not? Isn't it time to "dig up their bones and take a dump on them"? Even those still alive?
The term "womyn-born womyn" gained usage and popularity during the second wave feminist movement. In 1978, the Lesbian Organization of Toronto adopted a womyn-born womyn-only policy in response to a request for admittance by a transgender woman who identified as lesbian.
(Snip)
Key anti-trans proponents in the second wave feminist movement included Janice Raymond, Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly, who were proponents of womyn-born womyn policies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn-born_womyn
Have all these womyn been deplatformed for their doubleplusungood wrongthink? If not, why not? Isn't it time to "dig up their bones and take a dump on them"? Even those still alive?
Where did this confusion between "evangelistic" and "evangelical" come from?
Althouse, are you quoting someone, or is the conflation your own?
One of my sisters refused to let her children read Harry Potter because she said it was about witches. Which it was, technically. But you might say the same about Narnia, the CS Lewis series, which she loved so I never quite understood the objection. And Tolkein - Gandalf was a wizard, wasn't he? Still, there was a group of Christians opposed to Harry Potter and, naturally, this becomes "Christians" in the media.
But there's a deep reality behind the uneasiness about JK Rowling. She confronts English society as it now is - deChristianized, secular, a welfare state; she did so in a children's series, Harry Potter, and she is doing so in an adult series, the Cormoran Strike series. In both, she asserts that right and wrong still exist as the human imperative, though English society has changed and become secular. She portrays the utter cruelty of sections of the secularists and this makes her books disturbing but she doesn't blame all secularists for all the evil some are doing and this can be equally disturbing.
Only a novel or a series of children's books written by a literary genius like Rowling can really do justice to the complex situations people are living in in our society. In the Ink Black Heart she covers the anti-free-speech element which is now loose and prowling in society. You don't need to read Rowling to understand and oppose it. But if you read Rowling you will understand and oppose it. Naturally they don't like her.
Some day there'll be statues to the Cossack Billionaires - Trump, Kanya West, JK Rowling and Elon Musk - who formed up and fought for democracy. Meanwhile, don't enroll under the banner of the Ostrich; consider the source of the mud that is now flying at all of them. Read the books, sing the songs, buy the merch, sign up for Twitter, clean up the voting laws.
Our jury system is only as good as the smart ethical people, or the unethical morons that populate a jury.
Our education system has been dumbing down the population for decades now.
Challenging the integrity of an obvious fraudulent election is not a crime. It is however a crime if you are challenging those that benefited from the fraud.
A bit off topic but I was reading an article about a middle school that removed urinals from the boys bathrooms. It had something to do with trans rights and equity. I guess it is not fair that some can pee standing up while others cannot. Or something. It did not make a lot of sense.
Anyway, I got to wondering about etiquette in a situation like this. In recent years I have been hammered frequently that men should always leave the toilet seat down. By my wife especially, though it had never been an issue in the first 40 years of our marriage, it became a critical one in the past 10 or so.
So in a gender neutral bathroom, should I leave the seat up? Arguments for: It reduces the chances of the next guy peeing on the seat. And, it lets the cosplaying woman pretend that she is part of the boys club that pees standing up. Even if she really doesn't.
Or should I leave it down? So that the cosplaying woman doesn't fall into the toilet when she sits down to pee? (I've never understood why men never fall in the toilet. Other than Larry David's father)
So what is the proper bathroom etiquette these days regarding the seat?
Maybe we should just go to the squat style toilets that seemed universal in Europe in the late 60s. Only your feet touch the porcelain. https://bit.ly/3EvHl9e
More often they looked like this, though https://bit.ly/3XWQX3X
John Henry
Blogger Dave Begley said...
Rowling is a hero. She has stepped out into the arena and exercised her right to Free Speech. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud.
I gather that you are referring to TR's man in the arena speech. In that context perhaps yes. Of course, he was speaking of the man in the arena. He was less a fan of women being in the arena.
But TR was also the president who ordered the creation of the Bureau of Investigation, over strenuous objections of many congressmen and senators. Too many people, and not the right sort of people, were taking the 1st Amendment too seriously. They were saying all sorts of things he didn't like. Such as promoting socialism, communism, anarchy. The BI eventually became the FBI and has changed very little over the years.
TR would be the first person to shut Rowling down if he did not like what she was saying. Too many people think of TR as "the good Roosevelt". He may have been "The better Roosevelt" which is better than nothing but as someone, I can't quite remember who, keeps reminding us, better than nothing is a pretty low bar.
M ychildren attended evangelical Christian schools, and the Harry Potter books were embraced. We caught rumors at the edges of conversations of Christians who hated her, but they nearly always were the same people who forbade JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, and were thus disregarded by students and faculty alike.
Some people didn't like them, because they didn't have a taste for fantasy/sci-fi or thought they were overdone (they are). But the number of Christians objecting because of "Eww! Magic!" is small. They just attract headlines, like Westboro does.
baby trial. cancel culture
"the choice of podcasts which are the preferred format for olds (much like Facebook)."
Why do you lefties on here lie so relentlessly? You just make shit up. Easily checked stuff:
"half of all podcast listeners are aged 12 to 34, with listeners 35+ making up the other half."
I'm neutral on the Potter books, but J.K. Rowling's 'The Casual Vacancy' is well worth reading.
Why do you lefties on here lie so relentlessly?
Why do birds fly and fish swim and worms crawl?
I always sort of thought of her as the Stephen King for young adults. Just not as preachy.
The Westboro Baptist Chipmunks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEIqEYP_ZvM
"... you identify with him when you feel like and outcast and you believe in the great courage that lies within you."
And Tolkien is too much like literature.
Potter was not initially embraced by evangelicals because of its valorization of magic and witchcraft. Tolkien and Lewis did not receive the same treatment at the time HP hit the shelves because Tolkien and Lewis were Christians and had already been around for a long time. In addition while they used magic (but not necessarily witchcraft) as devices, they did not valorize the creation, memorization, and use of spells in the way that Potter does.
Keep in mind that the early Potter years were also the years when Dungeons and Dragons were first becoming popular - and not only were fantasy, witchcraft, and magic part of D&D, they were part of your role playing.
And evangelicals are very, very anti-witchcraft.
There is no doubt that one can draw a direct line between the current growth and popularity of wicca, paganism, etc. to the ferment of fantasy and witchcraft popularization of the late last century. In that, evangelicals were correct in their assessment of the effect of the cultural embrace of magic (or "magick") and witchcraft. This also ties back to the rise of marxist feminism as wicca and magick were embraced in their emphasis on the feminine and the goddess as the route to leave the (perceived) patriarchal, phallo-centric, Christianized culture behind.
So yes, many evangelicals opposed the Harry Potter books as entertainment when they first came out. They weren't wrong about the effects in general, but overstated the importance and the duration of said effects. We will have friends who do not allow their kids to read HP or play D&D. We're evangelical (Baptist, to be precise) and my daughter can quote chapter and verse of the Bible AND all of the Potter series. She plays D&D with some Christian friends and can also quote Potter, Tolkien, Lewis, and L'Engel at length.
And don't even get her started on Tom Bombadil.
My kids say I'm a Hufflepuff. But I identify as Slytherin.
I listened to the 1st 2 parts yesterday..
It was pretty good
Temp Blog: Keep in mind that the early Potter years were also the years when Dungeons and Dragons were first becoming popular
lolwut?
Witch trials, warlock judgments, and Planned babies, too.
And Tolkien is too much like literature.
=
wondering if admirers of Tolkien were older when they start to read him than the children cohort who started reading Rowling?
[I have read Harry Potter books and was happily amazed at the enthusiasm of children lining up costumed for book release parties at Barnes and Noble in Charlotte NC. I have not read any Tolkien]
Temp Blog,
I like your comment, but you're just wrong about D&D. I remember D&D when I was a teenager, in the early 80s, and it had already been around for some time.
The one after D&D (this is mid-90s to early-Aughts, I think) was "Magic: The Gathering." There was certainly some Evangelical opposition to that, although I am willing to wager that it was smaller than one would assume from the MSM coverage. That the packets of cards looked so much like tarot cards was part of the problem.
Harry Potter started at the tail end of that phenomenon. And again, the Christians who rejected HP by and large also rejected Tolkien and Lewis. (To be honest, when I read about Christians rejecting Lewis, I didn't even think first of the Narnia books, but of The Screwtape Letters. I mean, a whole package of (apparently) echt diabolical correspondence!
who see her as some sort of hero for spouting off on social topics.
She's not a hero for 'spouting off' on social topics. She's a hero because she's standing up to you leftist thugs.
MDT,
Have you read Lewis's essay "The Inner Ring"? He starts out with a very hilarious take on his Screwtape reputation; And there's also some funny bits in the preface to subsequent additions of Screwtape along the same lines.
D&D started out as Chainmail, in 1971.
Kirk Parker,
Oh, yes, I know "The Inner Ring." A theme he returns to over the years -- it has quite a role in That Hideous Strength, for example.
Related: the long passage in "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" about "I'm as good as you." Screwtape correctly says that even (or especially!) the people who say this don't believe it.
I wish Lewis had been uniformly charitable, but he slips. I remember a piece (in God in the Dock, I think) about Christmas carolers who came by his house on Christmas Eve and bawled out hideously perfunctory renditions of "'Ark the 'erald engles saing" while demanding payment. Yes, it's a scam, of sorts, but in his own terms a small one.
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