Harry Potter and the Messiah

I just finished the new Harry Potter novel. I can see why pre-teens might find it less fascinating than earlier ones. Harry is now 16, and finds himself in love, as do his friends. There is a lot of snogging at Hogwarts.

These stories set against a single major story arc, the struggle of the wizard community against Voldemort, which is one of good and evil. The evil is growing toward a climax, presumably to be resolved in the final book, the next one. I can see how this could be unsettling to younger kids, but then fairy tales have always featured evil in the form of wolves, witches, dragons, evil queens and step-parents, etc.

While there are some evangelical Christians denounce these books as stirring up an unhealthy interest in witchcraft and the occult, I would argue that they are very Christian books, this one more so than the others. Like the Lord of the Rings saga, they are providing lessons about good and evil, the necessity of courage and the counterintuitive idea that good can win by the individual courage and faith of the small and weak. It is the nature of evil that we cannot avoid confronting it. It will never leave the world in peace. However, we can't defeat it by adopting its methods, nor by abandoning our faith and principles.