The Harry Potter Problem

There shall not be found among you anyone . . .  who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. Deuteronomy 18:10-11

Many of you will find this foreign and amusing, but growing up in a conservative evangelical environment, I was quite suspicious of magic. The stage magician was fine, because that was understood to be an illusion and not an actual attempt to tap into some supernatural power. Magic, as usually represented in fictional movies or books though, because of passages like today’s, was considered evil because it represented a collaboration with supernatural forces that were not of God (i.e. demonic). Complicating things further, was that fact that some magical works were deemed acceptable. C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia was fine, but the use of the supernatural force in Star Wars was suspect.

In my teens, I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – still my favorite books – leading to years of reading fantasy, which almost always involves magic. Despite my upbringing, I didn’t struggle with this. As a kid, I loved Star Wars, but I wasn’t tempted to believe in the force. Still, in the back of my mind, I knew today’s passage, which said that sorcery is an abomination to God. So, when my kids wanted to watch Harry Potter, I had to make a decision. I was able to recognize that these were works of fiction and not instructions for life. Just as I didn’t believe in the force as a kid, I recognized that my kids weren’t going to attempt to use magical wands. It was an entertaining story, and we could walk away from it without becoming it.

Still, the question stands – What does God have against magic? Magic, I think, represents the acknowledgment of a supernatural world and our attempt to subjugate that world to our will. Because magic doesn’t involve God, it signifies a connection with a world that is not of God. Anything supernatural that isn’t divine, is by God’s definition, evil.

No one I know though, actually struggles with trying to use magic to tap into dark supernatural forces. We are familiar however, with the underlying motive, which is this – We all desire to take some shortcut to get what we want. We may know that authentic joy is found in making healthy choices and following God’s will, but that involves a lot of hard work and sacrifice. So, we seek satisfaction instead in the short-cut of immediate gratification. Again though, anything not of God is anti-God, which means it’s self-destructive to us. Seeking our joy in immediate gratification is the real fiction. Because we were created by God to find authentic life only in him, it is futility – fictional – to try to find it anywhere else.