Harry Potter's Not the Problem
by Gary DeMar

Laura Mallory is a concerned mother of three. She wants the Harry Potter books removed from the library of J.C. Magill Elementary School where her children attend because she says the books, which have world-wide sales of more than 300 million, glorify witchcraft. She has embarked on a fool’s errand. I’m always amazed when I read stories about well intentioned parents who want this book removed or that course dropped as if these minor changes will result in an educational reformation. It’s not going to happen. The sooner parents learn this, the sooner they will save their children from things worse than witchcraft like the belief that public education is a neutral endeavor designed to equip young people to be objective learners. Based on what the courts have decided over the years, the public schools are “religious (Christian)-free zones.” In a word, they are atheistic. You would think that the majority of Christian parents would be concerned about this. They’re not. They continue to believe that public education can be saved. It can’t. Mrs. Mallory is spitting in the wind when she doesn’t have to. Her children are being co-opted everyday by witchcraft by the “philosopher’s stone” of the magic-laden and irrational worldview of materialism.

Non-Christians understand the importance of education better than most Christians. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler stressed “the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service ‘of a new national state.’”1 The government school system would be the means to a truly diabolic end:

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already . . . What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they 2will know nothing else but this new community.’“ And on May 1, 1937, he declared, “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”

Educational control was taken away from parents and local authorities and “Every person in the teaching profession, from kindergarten through the universities, was compelled to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League which, by law, was held ‘responsible for the execution of the ideological and political co-ordination of all the teachers in accordance with the National Socialist doctrine.’“3 The State was to be supported “without reservation” and teachers took an oath to “be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler.”4

The Nazi worldview was comprehensive. The goal of Hitler was to remake the social and moral climate in the image of the Nazi worldview. “In Germany there was Nazi truth, a Nazi political truth, a Nazi economic truth, a Nazi social truth, a Nazi religious truth, to which all institutions had to subscribe or be banished.”5

All competing worldviews had to be eliminated. Under the leadership of Alfred Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, “the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany.”6 Martin “Bormann, one of the men closest to Hitler, said publicly in 1941, ‘National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.’”7 While we hear a great deal about the suppression of Jewish thought, little attention is given to Nazism’s most formidable rival—Christianity. War correspondent William L. Shirer wrote, “We know now what Hitler envisioned for the German Christians: the utter suppression of their religion.”8 The internal intelligence agency of the Nazi SS “regarded organized Christianity as one of the major obstacles to the establishment of a truly totalitarian state.”9

Public schools have become the new worldview battleground. Christians are fighting on the enemy’s soil when they should be building their own educational kingdom. Harry Potter is a symptom of a larger crisis that is easily fixed if parents take the responsibility of educating their own children and refuse to turn them over to the State.

1. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 248–249.

2. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 249.

3. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 249.

4. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 249.

5. C. Gregg Singer, From Rationalism to Irrationality: The Decline of the Western Mind from the Renaissance to the Present (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1979), 28.

6. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 240.

7. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 240.

8. William Shirer, The Nightmare Years: 1930–1940 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), 156.

9. Donald D. Wall, “The Lutheran Response to the Hitler Regime in Germany,” ed. Robert D. Linder, God and Caesar: Case Studies in the Relationship between Christianity and the State (Longview, TX: The Conference on Faith and History, 1971), 88.