To start today I'd like to read to you from a web site called "The Great Harry Potter Debate" by scholar Elycia Arendt,
The only school worldwide to ban Harry Potter so far, St. Mary's Island Church of England Primary School in the United Kingdom, used Christian rationale to denounce the book. Headmistress of the school Carol Rookwood said in her press release,
Our ethos on teaching comes from the Bible. The Bible is clear about issues such as witchcraft, demons, devils, and the occult. It says clearly and consistently from Genesis to Revelation that they are real, powerful, and dangerous. Throughout it insists that God's people should have nothing to do with them. Urquhart "Home News")
[Rockwood] goes onto say that the books are "as dangerous to children as a child molester" (Sapsted 4). Many parents in both the U.K. and U.S. agree with Rookwood. Formal attempts to ban the books have been made in New York and Michigan, as well as grassroots attempts in individual schools such as Lakeville, MN (Draper B1).
What is it about Harry Potter that bothers religious fundamentalists? Why does a religious movement based around a body of myth, complete with an omniscient, omnipotent deity, have to worry about stories of children with magical powers? What can we as free-thinking individuals do about the current movement to take the magic and imagination literally out of our culture and replace it with the medieval kind of simple faith that drove the Feudal system of Europe for centuries?
These questions are important to me. Since the age of 8 I have spent my life creating, writing, and producing fantasy and science fiction role-playing games and fiction, both for children and adults. And since that time, I have come under fire from those religious fundamentalists who would brand me as a worshipper of dark forces and an occultist hell-bent on corrupting their children.
Even when I was 10 years old in middle school, I was targeted. Due to changes and growth in the government school system, my parents became worried that I would be academically hindered by the special "split sessions" they had designed to get their middle schoolers through a transition period. They sought a useful alternative, and found one in the guise of a fundamentalist Christian school that they felt at the time would provide a more stable and academically challenging environment.
My first year was actually quite good. Not a very social child from the start due to hyperactivity issues, I finally found people who at least claimed to like me and put up with me. They made me feel a part of their Christian family and I enjoyed the interactions a great deal. That my academic side was being neglected would not become clear until much later. To this day, there are chunks of World History and Evolution Theory that I keep discovering that I have missed. Imagine my surprise when I found out that there were two fellas named Napoleon! Julius Caesar did not invent the Caesar salad, either!
My first real run-in with the witch-hunt aspect of the Fundamentalist Christian movement was to come shortly after that. You see, in my 10th year, I began to read fantasy fiction. Starting with the overtly Christian symbolism from the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, I soon graduated to Professor Tolkein's non-overt Judeo-Christian paradigm, and from there to the wild and wooly realms of Michael Moorcock and sword and sorcery fiction.
And at the same time, I discovered a game the likes of which I had never seen. Born out of the war-gaming hobby, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons fuelled the flame of my imagination like nothing else. Yes, I had spent my youth before that pretending to fly spaceships, fight monsters, and finding magical treasures, but here was a set of rules for that sort of thing. Here were guidelines in the form of an 8 ½ by 11 black book with the statue of an efreet (which happens to be elemental spirit of fire straight from the Scherezade's 1001 Arabian Nights) on the cover. Here were ideas to use in creating a world of the imagination and then setting that world in motion to become a living, breathing interactive experience for not just my own dreams, but also my friends' dreams.
For those of you who have never played role-playing games, let me just explain briefly. They are essentially interactive improvisational dramas usually guided by a single person who is in charge of keeping the story moving and playing the "extras" in the cast. The players in these games each play their own character in the story. Like an ensemble-cast television show, each of these characters brings their strengths and weaknesses into play as the story progresses.
The games are endlessly fascinating when done well, and dreadfully boring when done poorly. There is a fairly high threshold to begin spontaneously playing RPGs because, frankly, it requires a certain level of intelligence to begin to grasp some of the difficult concepts in most role-playing rules. After the referee has learned the game, however, she should be able to teach others to play with no problem. Everybody knows how to make believe (even if some of us may have forgotten how.)
Contrary to what some fundamentalist Christian groups will tell you, the games do not involve naked worshippers performing a goat sacrifice or summoning demons. Christian heresies like Satanism have nothing to do with the game. Aside from occasionally drifting into mindless male power fantasies, Dungeons & Dragons has absolutely nothing to do with traditional Satanic belief systems.
Naturally being enthralled by this book, I carried it everywhere I went, including school. I was very innocently trying to get a group of players together when I let someone else borrow the book to read. Before I knew fully what had occurred, I was called before the Principal of the whole school, a man gifted with the unfortunate name of Ulvling. Ulvling told me that I should take the book that I loved so much, the book that I had asked of my parents for an Easter gift, this game that I was enthralled with, he said I should take this book and burn it.
Now, I had bought into their Christian forgiveness, their Christian ideas of loving one's neighbor as themselves, their Christian sense of goodwill and charity, chiefly because my grandmother was a Christian and had already introduced me to those fine aspects of the Christian tradition.
However, my grandmother was also a friend of the Library, she started taking me when I was very small and when we read through the stacks there, she started ranging far afield, taking me to "Already Tooken" bookstores as she called them - used bookstores where you could turn in a bunch of pre-read books and get store credit for them. She got her trashy romance novels and I bought my John Carter, Warlord of Mars. She loved books and so did I. And not only did she teach me that you never write in a book, but she also taught me that nobody should EVER burn books.
So that moment in Ulvling's office was something of an intellectual awakening for me. But what made me decide to immediately begin my adamant advocacy of role-playing games happened about a week later in an assembly of the entire school, grades K-12, about 500 children or so and all the teachers. Principal Ulveling proceeded to give a sermon on the evils of Dungeons & Dragons. Throughout the presentation, it quickly became clear that Ulveling hadn't even read the book. He referred to people in the game summoning demons during his presentation to the entire school - as if it were a regular, everyday event.
Then he asked if "anyone who'd ever played the game" would please stand. Out of all those assembled students, only myself and one other boy rose to their feet. For the weeks afterward, we were treated to their particular brand of "Christian love" as they reviled us both. Older students would bully us, younger children would stay away from us in the hallways. It got so bad that, by the end of that semester, I begged my parents to put me back in to public school. When suddenly they saw me as someone who summoned demons in his spare time after school, the Christian love and charity that they had been taught and said they believed in became hatred and fear.
So as you can see, I was not surprised when the furor over Harry Potter emerged. The same self-referential scriptural theses are being used to attempt to ban Harry Potter books that have been used against Dungeons & Dragons since it first came out. They say that the Bible instructs Christians to have nothing to do with witches. And then, they say that the Bible is God's Word. They point to the Bible as proof that the Bible is true. This circular logic is impenetrable to their mind and ludicrous to mine.
The media has moved on and no longer reports on this issue. But everywhere I go, especially here in the South, I hear stories of children who "hate Harry Potter" - clearly because their parents have taught them to hate him. I have had children explain to me directly that "We don't have Harry Potter books in our house." Or, when asked if they'd seen the movie, they said, "We hate Harry Potter in our house." Stated as if this was a matter-of-fact.
So what frightens the fundamentalists so? One thing that truly frightens any dogmatic, non-rational tradition is someone who has the capacity for critical thought. When one reads fantasy fiction of any kind, one is forced to leave behind the trappings of everyday life and evaluate a new world based on the invisible camera lens of the mind's eye. No longer accepting life as it is, the reader is free to re-examine his own universe with the same eye-opening freedom, which is the first step towards critical thinking.
Fantasy fiction tends to hold up the individual, in the guise of Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces, as important. The protagonists are frequently the ones who step out of the safety of their secure, stable society and seek instead the wild reaches of possibility. In reading about these heroes, the reader may actually decide to step out of her own safety zone.
Finally, fantasy fiction tends to point towards powers other than the power of a particular Post-Zoroastrian religious tradition of a group of nomadic herders in the Middle East. The most consistent theme I've discovered, however, has been the power individuals have to change themselves, their lives, and the lives of the people around them.
For these three reasons, fundamentalists will always have a problem with characters like old Harry Potter. The term "witch" is a lodestone for their attention. But the more sophisticated of the more fundamentalist religious leaders have ranged far afield from that word. They have discovered an entire popular culture full of these Campbellian heroes, and they want to put a stop to all of them. Thank the good nature of humanity that they aren't succeeding, except in their own limited sects.
Or are they? Is our own popular culture industry helping them? With the advent of video games and television, children are increasingly encouraged to put aside their imagination and their creativity. Entertainment has become something of a passive experience wherein one is simply clicking a button now and then, or just sitting and staring into a screen.
Education has become in many places little more than a series of rote worksheets, standardized tests, and jarringly broken time periods in which a ringing bell brings all questing and learning to a stop so that children can fall into nice single-file lines and troop off to their next interrupted learning experience.
Contrast this with traditional folk storytellers and their ability to engage and interact with their audience. If you have ever seen someone tell a real story to a group of children, engaging them and bringing the light of their imagination alive, then you know. Passive entertainment does not create in children the same spark of creativity and thirst for knowledge that true interactive entertainment can.
When a child reads a book like the Harry Potter books, he sits for hours on end, absorbing every word. In his mind, he creates the imagery of the world. In fact, the chief criticism I've heard about the Harry Potter movie was that it didn't look like the Harry Potter universe as portrayed in the book.
When children sit down to engage in role-playing games, they are suddenly putting themselves in the mind of that Campbellian protagonist. They are able to step outside themselves and step into a role. This role will allow them to evaluate their personal reality in a way by expressing their thoughts in a fantasy context.
For example, my step-daughter Katie has long been extremely shy in some situations. Her Dungeons & Dragons character, Myria the Dwarf, however, is not that way. She is a warrior who carries a large medieval metal club called a mace. She has been charged with the duty of protecting her friends from creatures who would eat them. She has saved their lives, and they have in turn saved her life, many times as a result.
Now, at first Katie frequently had problems deciding what to do in the context of the game. At first, her character resembled more of a Prufrockian milquetoast than a great warrior-woman, tending towards the least dangerous course of action. But when I reminded her that her character was a different person than she, she soon responded by jumping into action. I paraphrased a popular Christian slogan when I said, "Now, Katie, what would Xena do?" With that, she had her character take up her mace and, ululating, go to stand in harm's way.
In closing, I would like to offer this list of the things that free-thinkers can do to inoculate the children they know against the perils of future closed-mindedness. Even those who do not have children, who mayhaps don't even like children, should consider their community responsibility to help fight against the increasing tide of anti-creativity that seems to be washing over us all, and volunteer to help with kids. Frequently, all it will take is a background check and a training session, and many children's groups need your assistance.
In closing, I wish to let everyone know that I have put up a web page on my own personal home site, which is at samchupp.com, in conjunction with this presentation today. Included on that page are link references to the material I've quoted from today and the link for my Kids and Roleplaying mailing list. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you. If anyone would like to ask some questions, I'd be glad to answer them as best I can.