Harry as a Role Model?

In stark contrast to yesterday’s blog musings about Harry as an eduring hero, News24.com ran a story documenting some of the Christian protest against the Harry Potter series, including the charges that Harry Potter cannot be a role model since he practices magic, and that the series teaches moral ambiguity.

The magic argument I have dealt with elsewhere and will certainly take up again from other angles.

The moral ambiguity argument has been one of the most irksome anti-Potter squabbles I can imagine. I’ve heard this from Christian after Christian, and I just don’t get it. Here’s a sort of summary of the complaints: Sometimes Harry and his friends lie. Sometimes they get away with lying. Sometimes they break school rules, get away with it, and even get rewarded for it.

Now here’s the shocker for the Christian moralists who are upset by this: it happens in real life, too; and it even happens in the Bible. In the Old Testament in particular, some folks get away with horrendous evils, and the text never condemns them. In one particular instance, the New Testament praises a prostitute for lying to protect God’s people.

Somtimes our neat little modern conservative moral guidelines don’t fit very well.

But even though Harry and his friends do sometimes lie (wrongly), break school rules, get away with it, and sometimes get rewarded for it, let us not forget that this is realistic! What would the Christian moralists have? A book with characters who are all perfect, always make the right decision, and if they do make the wrong decision, get exact amount of retribution the immorality deserves? What world are they living in? What purpose would such a series of books have other than to paint a picture of a world that does not exist, that we cannot relate to?

Much better to have flawed characters who make the right decision when everything is on the line and who transform over time than perfect characters that have no connection to real life.

One may want to argue that at least the Bible contains within it the proper standards of morality, even though some characters within it break the standards. But isn’t this the purpose of Dumbledore? Isn’t it Dumbledore who told the truth about Cedric Diggory’s death at the end of Goblet of Fire, stating that the truth is preferable to lies?

Give me characters I can relate to, not people who could not possibly exist.