Christianity, J.K. Rowling and Witch-Burning
A reply to the ‘Dean of Harry Potter Scholars’
My occasional articles on J.K. Rowling’s mythology recently came to the attention of John Granger, the ‘Dean of Harry Potter Scholars’. Granger has written and lectured on the subject of Rowling’s mythology for many years. An interview with him turns up in a documentary, in one of the Harry Potter movie DVDs. Granger wrote a brief article on my Medium posts. I’ll start by correcting his comments concerning my views on Christianity. I’ll then move onto the controversy surrounding Rowling’s t-shirt on witch-burning.
Jungian Christophobe?
Granger calls me a ‘Jungian Christophobe’, despite the fact that I happen to be indifferent to the Christian worldview. He’d be better off reserving the term ‘Christophobe’ to those millions of previous victims of institutional abuse by the likes of priests and nuns within the Christian Church. I imagine they have every good reason to be phobic of Christianity. By comparison, speaking as a third generation atheist, I’ve rarely encountered the church.
Granger’s comment is interesting when compared to Jung’s own views of the church:
‘…no religion is so defiled with the spilling of innocent blood as Christianity.’
‘…the world has never seen a bloodier war than the war of Christian nations.’¹
Perhaps it’s no great surprise that Jung later said of the church, ‘There is nothing there for me but death.’
I have to say I’m in agreement with Jung’s comments. For clarity, I think we should also remind ourselves that Jung wasn’t antagonistic to the church. He was just occasionally outspoken.
J.K. Rowling the Fundamentalist Christian?
Granger states that I wrote two:
‘…borderline wing-nut character assassination pieces on ‘Rowling the Christian Fundamentalist Transphobe’.²
He’s referring to my two analyses of Cormoran Strike, in which I suggest that J.K. Rowling is transphobic. But I never said she is a ‘Christian Fundamentalist Transphobe’. The quote does not turn up anywhere in the articles. I’ve never referred to Rowling as a fundamentalist Christian. By comparison, I’d say she is a moderate, Episcopalian, or at least she was several years ago. Their membership here in Scotland has fallen by a third in the last six years, so perhaps she’s left.
The two articles Granger refers to can be found here:
Disgusting Christians?
Granger states that I have an ‘over-the-top…disgust for all things Christian’. Not true. For example, I also published The Timeless Quaternity, on Medium, which is, among other things, an appraisal of the quaternary symbolism in the Book of Kells. That dates back to an article I put online in the early 2000s. I’m not averse to Christian mythology or art. I enjoy Christian choral music.
Granger quotes me as saying that Rowling ‘advocates “her own patriarchal, superstitious Christian movement”’. I never said that J.K. Rowling advocates any view for the Christian Church. For me, ‘advocates’ is too strong a word. By contrast, I guess she holds a quiet, reserved view of her religion, like most British Christians.
Granger has taken the quote above from my remark on historical witch-burning by the Christian Church. This was in relation to Rowling wearing a t-shirt stating, This Witch Doesn’t Burn. The Christian church has an appalling history of abuse. Obviously, it’s a different Christian movement today, compared to the 1600s, but what was the psychology that led to their witch-burnings in the first place? I think it’s a question worth asking, seeing as witch-burnings still happen in our present time.
The Controversial T-shirt
A large number of people still think that witch burning is something from the distant past. Robert Anton Wilson once bridged that connection by reminding his readers how Bernard Shaw had once met Richard Wagner in his youth, and how Wagner himself, as a boy, had witnessed an actual community burning of a ‘witch’. I remember being spooked out when reading that in the past. But if we open our eyes beyond Europe, to the Global Village, a more disturbing picture emerges. The next time Rowling wants to display her t-shirt online, she might consider the people who are still lynched and burnt to death in places like Jharkhand, India, where 4 elderly people were hunted down and lynched for ‘witchcraft’ in 2019. In Tanzania, seven were burnt to death in one outbreak of witch hysteria in 2014.³ According to one report, around 1000 children were murdered for ‘witchcraft’ in Nigeria, between 1999 and 2009.⁴ The Pentecostal Church drives much of the mania in Nigeria. If Rowling’s t-shirt is supposed to be a joke, she might care to look at some of the burn victims who’ve recently survived real witch-burning. If instead, it is a serious statement of verbal attacks on herself, she could consider that, unlike the unfortunate victims mentioned here, no one is building a bonfire for her. If these recent witch-burnings had occurred in the UK, I shouldn’t think she would have worn her t-shirt online.
Christian Persecution of Women and Children in the UK
We shouldn’t forget that women and their children were still being persecuted in the UK by the Christian Church up to the 1970s. Between the 1950s and 1970s, hundreds of thousands of single, unmarried mothers were forced to part with their babies in a pact between social workers and the church.⁵ Various mainstream churches took part in the process, including the Church of England. In Ireland, the same practice led to the deaths of thousands of babies by criminal neglect.⁶ As for ‘witchcraft’ in the UK, the last two people to be convicted under the (Christian driven) Witchcraft Act were in 1944. One was jailed. Not surprisingly, they were both women.
What I find troubling about the Christian Church is its need to polarise good and evil to such a severe extent. To give one example, the Scottish Episcopal Church teaches a belief in Heaven and Hell, as an afterlife. One extreme or the other. With polarised superstition like this, is it any wonder that Christian culture has a habit of projecting its collective shadow? Rowling (and other religious celebrities) shouldn’t be singled out to shoulder the blame for their abusive Christian Church. Instead, every member of the Christian Church could ask themselves why their world-view generates such abuse.
Getting back to Granger’s quote above, yes I did say that superstition, and the patriarchal power of the Christian Church, play a role in its long history of persecution. Rowling’s publishing house, Pottermore, says the same. I’m just surprised that so many Christians don’t recognise that the same persecution continues into modern times, both in the UK and beyond. It’s not all fundamentalist based. Much of it hides behind a façade of politeness in mainstream churches.
Witch-Burning Treated as a ‘Joke’ in Harry Potter
Rowling’s company Pottermore recently published A History of Magic: a Journey Through the Hogwarts Curriculum, which discusses (among other things) witch-burning and religious hysteria. On the one hand, it quotes a ‘joke’ on witch-burning from Rowling’s Potter mythology.⁷ But then it presents a sober tone, referring to religious mania in the 1600s and the ‘male-dominated’ society of the time. There are, however, no references to contemporary witch-burning. Imagine if another author cracked jokes about the torture and death of Jews in the Holocaust, and then followed it up with a serious account of what the real Holocaust was like, along with accounts of death by fire. At what point do we draw the line as to what is morally acceptable as humour for children’s fiction? Jung once compared witch-burning with the Holocaust. Referring to the church’s previous totalitarian power, he said there may not have been ‘concentration camps or barbed wire’, but instead they used ‘large quantities of faggots’. I wonder if Granger considers this remark by Jung as ‘Christophobic’? Compare Jung’s remarks to Rowling’s immature joking about witch-burning.⁸
Polite Debate or Character Assassination?
Lastly, I’d like to return to my supposed ‘character assassination’ of J.K. Rowling. The articles politely concentrate on (what I consider to be) her transphobia in her fiction. I then link this to her later emotional upsets on Twitter. I think they are directly related. I don’t consider this a ‘character assassination’. After all, I’m sure there is a lot more to her character than her thoughts on transgender people.
Last month (December 2020), a woman she followed on Twitter, was banned for threatening to injure transgender women. The same woman’s abusive remarks towards transgender people had continued for months. She seemed interested in little else. Perhaps Rowling could re-examine her responsibilities as a celebrity and stop following obscure, transphobic people, who harbour such uncivil hatred. Recently transgender, online celebrities have likened Rowling to Covid 19, supposedly as a ‘joke’. No doubt the same people would be bleating if similar ugly behaviour was directed at themselves.
References:
1 — Carl Jung, Both quotes can be found in Civilization in Transition (CW. 10), p. 22, RKP, 1964. 2 — Merry Christmas, Rowling Readers!, John Granger, January 7, 2021. 3 — Seven Accused African Witches Burned to Death, Ben Radford, Seeker, Nov 10th, 2014. 4 — Churches denounce children as ‘witches’, Katharine Houreld, L.J. World, Oct 18, 2009. ‘…in two of Nigeria’s 36 states over the past decade…around 1,000 have been murdered.’ 5 — Christian churches ‘forced adoptions’, The Guardian, UK, November 3rd, 2016. ‘The Catholic church of England and Wales has apologised for its part in women being pressured to hand over babies over a 30-year period.’ 6 — Irish mother and baby homes report to be published, BBC, January 12th, 2021. ‘The final report is expected to find that 9,000 children died in the 18 institutions investigated.’ 7 — A reference to Rowling’s fantasy witches being burnt in the witch-hunts of medieval times turns up in, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. ‘Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burnt so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than forty seven times…’ The ‘witches’ in Rowling’s fantasy are ‘tickled’ by the flames while ‘muggles’ are burnt to death. 8 — Jung, p. 537.