"Oh," my mother’s friend says, noticing the book under my arm, "is that Harry Potter?"

In fact, it’s the fourth one. I wasn’t going to yield to the hype, but a good friend--a high school teacher a little older than I am--told me I was missing out on something really special and insisted I read the first one. And he was right. I consider the first two to be a very high order of children’s story, and the third and fourth have engaged my twenty-three-year-old writer’s imagination on their own merits. The hype still irritates me, but the books are good. I say something like this to Annemarie.

Annemarie’s brow furrows. "Samantha is really into them," she says. Samantha is her seven-year-old niece, not quite a year older than her son, Luke. "Luke wants to read them too... but I don’t know."

"Yeah," I say, thinking of some of the imagery in the book I just put down, "I guess he might be a little young. The first one’s pretty mild, though; I can’t think of anything that would scare him--"

"Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean that," Annemarie says. "I don’t want him reading that stuff at all. You know what they’ve been saying about her, and about those books--all over the country, kids are so obsessed by those books, and some of them have joined cults--and so I told my sister, you know, you’d better be careful what you let Sam read. They say, what’s her name, Rawlins, is really a devil-worshipper--"

I sincerely can’t believe I’m having this conversation. "I’ve heard that too, but that’s just ridiculous. It’s like what they used to say about Dungeons and Dragons, and you know I do live-action role-playing--"

She looks at me a little dubiously. I don’t think she ever made the connection before, and I kinda wish I hadn’t made the comparison. "This is different, though," she says, "it’s real. I didn’t really believe it either, but then at church they showed us all this article she wrote, saying how she really was a Satanist and how she put all this subliminal stuff into her books, and--"

"I’ve seen that article," I say. "It was written for a satire magazine called The Onion. It wasn’t written by her at all."

But Annemarie does not seem to be convinced.

"Anne," I say, "have you read the books?"

She hasn’t. And this is where I start to feel my blood pressure rising. This is what always pisses me off about these conversations, in fact--whether they be about science fiction, LARPing, French food, gardening, or seminars in American history. If you’ve tried it for yourself, you’re allowed to express your informed opinion. But if you don’t know what you’re talking about--

"Anne," I say softly, reasonably, "maybe you should take a look. Next time you’re at your sister’s, pick up the first one, flip through it--see what you think. Maybe you’d be okay letting Luke read it if you read it with him. The magic in them isn’t bad--it’s not about the Devil or anything like that--it’s not a religion, the books never address the question of religion at all. It’s magic like--like Mary Poppins, or the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella."

"Oh," she says, with surprise and relief.

"Yeah, like that. It’s not even as much a religion as the Force in Star Wars--"

"Oh, Luke loved Star Wars," she says. "We went to see The Phantom Menace, and he just loved the swords and the ships and the way they make things fly with their hands--"

I lose the rest under the sound of blood pounding in my skull. "The Force", after all, is much closer to a religion than the magic of Harry Potter. And I personally have a bigger problem taking a five-year-old to a movie where the Devilish-looking bad guy kills the hero than I do reading him a book that mentions divination and the enchanting of a car to make it fly. I don’t say this. I’m going for conversion, here, not a shouting match. Instead, I say,

"Well, if you were fine with that, and he liked it, I really think you should take a look at Harry Potter. Just read through the first book, and see what you think. You might be surprised."

And she might not change her mind. What I have expressed to her is my opinion. Hers might be different. But I could live with that if it is indeed hers, and not regurgitated from some other source. That’s really what infuriates me about the Christian backlash against Harry Potter--the fact that 90% of it is uninformed or misinformed. "Have you read the books?" "Of course not, they’re evil." "How do you know, if you haven’t read the books?"

The nut who wrote Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick, still has one up on most of the rest of the protesters. Harry Potter and the Bible, with its diatribes against "the teaching of divination", "recipes for a Hand of Glory", and "Potterethics" (I’m not kidding. I wish I were kidding) makes me snarl and roll my eyes. However, these diatribes contain actual quotations from J. K. Rowling’s works and actual comparisons between said quotations and works of Christian theology. The author, Richard Abanes, has at least read the artist’s work and is addressing it on its merits. And you know what, I think he’s a braying idiot, but I acknowledge that he is entitled to his opinion. Any given piece of art is bound to offend somebody or other, intentionally or unintentionally. It could be argued that sparking thought and discussion--part of which usually involves giving offense--is the purpose of art. Abanes is entitled to give his opinion on the piece. Annemarie is not so entitled to give her opinion to her sister. The difference lies in addressing what the book is about instead of what you think it might be about. There’s a proverb about books and covers. We’ll take it as understood.

Even worse is the idea of homogenizing a work of art ahead of time, so that it offends nobody. Those who run Harper Collins Publishing have recently looked up and noticed the Harry Potter craze, and have decided to cash in with one of their own. They have received permission from the estate of C. S. Lewis to reissue the Chronicles of Narnia, and to employ writers to create more stories in the same universe. Said stories to be accompanied by a heavy marketing campaign, and the sale of lunchboxes, dolls, diaries, board games, clothing, etc., etc., etc. The very concept of this would make me twitch anyway--Lewis wrote a very complete seven-book story, and I can’t imagine what more could be said that could possibly add value. And the proliferation of tchotchkes is one of the things that annoys me most about the Harry Potter craze. I think the Rowling’s books are too good to be cheapened that way, and this applies a couple times over to Narnia. That only irritates me, though. What enrages me is the Harper Collins memo uncovered by the New York Times. The memo directs that no attempt be made to correlate this marketing campaign with Christian mythology or theology, as that might offend the secular reader and hurt sales. I’m paraphrasing here, but that was the point.

For those of you not familiar with The Chronicles of Narnia-- but why should I try to summarize? The author has described his intent better than I could.

Lewis wrote this to a school-age fan. It’s quoted in an on-line editorial by Lauren Winner. She goes on to emphasize the point: "Aslan the Lion, the hero of the Chronicles, dies, is resurrected, and saves people with his blood."

Stripping the "correlation to Christian mythology or theology" from that is like stripping the religious overtones from the Divine Comedy. Secularizing "the Narnia story" when "the whole Narnia story is about Christ" is going to require rewriting Lewis' entire premise. And whether anyone at Harper Collins is comfortable with that premise or not is beside the point. Lewis is the artist. It's his universe. He knew what he wanted to say, and he said it. Argue against the theme, be offended by it, refuse to let your children read it, fine. But don’t dare revise it out of history. Don’t create follow-up stories that effectively revise it out of history.¹

An artist’s work is what it is. It should be read or otherwise consumed for what it is, and then the consumer can form an opinion. If it offends you, so be it. J.K. Rowling has the absolute right to create a light-hearted universe revolving around children using magic. Stephen King has as much of a right to create Carrie, a significantly darker and overtly anti-religious novel about a child and what amounts to magical powers. And Richard Abanes has absolutely the same right to attack Rowling (or King), declare their messages inconsistent with his religion, and urge fellow believers to boycott, provided he does his research on both the art form and the religion, and isn’t just talking out of his ass. Similarly, the Chronicles of Narnia and anything written in the Narnian universe should be true to Lewis’ theme, and let people be offended and lash back and write The Evangelistic Mission of C. S. Lewis: The Menace Behind the Wardrobe.

Should we blame Harper Collins for not seeing the matter in that light? For not wanting anything to get in secular audience’s way of plunking down money for Aslan backpacks <shudder>? Yes, we absolutely should.

Harper Collins homogenizing its products is slightly--slightly--less upsetting than, say, a school library pulling Huckleberry Finn from the shelves or a teacher caving to pressure to remove The Scarlet Letter (or, hell, the King James Bible) from his syllabus. Harper Collins is not pretending to be an institution of education, higher or otherwise; they’re in it for the money. They’re allowed to invest their money in the type of products that they believe will give them the greatest ROI. Idealism has no place here.

However, Harper Collins politically-correcting its products is tremendously upsetting in a different sense. While there has been no evidence at any time in the ~50 years since C.S. Lewis published his Chronicles that the Christian imagery, or any of the other religious imagery, at all impaired the popularity of the stories, I can see, perhaps, why Harper Collins would worry about it. Why they would not wish to be associated with the Christian backlash against Harry Potter, and with authors such as Abanes. Or with mothers like Annemarie, who reject a book sight unseen based on somebody else’s hysteria.

It’s still not okay. If those who would impose Christian morality are intolerant bigots, those who would purge it are as well. The evils of censorship do not apply only when you approve of what is being censored. And bigotry is bigotry no matter at whom it is directed.

If you think Harper Collins shouldn’t be gutting an artist’s work to market some dolls, tell them so.