Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Many Christians avoid J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series due to a perceived conflict between its themes and Biblical Christianity. Yet according to the author of a recent biography of J. K. Rowling, there is much more to the picture. Listen to our full conversation.

Christians can, and do, legitimately disagree over whether the popular Harry Potter series is appropriate or not. Yet increasingly, liberals and conservatives, including many Christians, find in the series’ author, J. K. Rowling, a champion for free speech, women’s rights, and biological reality.

Although this change of heart towards Rowling may have prompted some to rethink their approach to Harry Potter, many continue to keep Rowling’s crowning literary achievement — and the bestselling book series of all time — at arms length.

Earlier this year, I spoke with the author of the only complete biography of J. K. Rowling, and a close friend of mine, about the long-overlooked religious dimension to Rowling’s life and work.

As Solomon Schmidt, the author of A Pen to Change the World (Skyhorse Publishing, 2026), notes, Rowling’s connection with Christianity runs much deeper than her literary appreciation for Christian fantasy greats like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien — and certain superficial semblances between her writings and those of Lewis and Tolkien.

Rowling’s Christian Background

As a young girl, Joanne “Jo” Rowling was baptised at St Luke’s Anglican Church, in the small town of Tutshill in Gloucestershire, England. Importantly, she was baptised of her own free will — despite being raised in a non-Christian family. Throughout her teens, she regularly attended St Luke’s by herself. The pastor whose teaching she sat under during this time was, according to his son, an “orthodox evangelical”.

Says Schmidt:

“Throughout her entire life, she has shown a great interest for, and passion for, admiration for — almost love for — Jesus and his story.”

Indeed, during her twenties, Rowling worked for a Christian ministry in London called Christian Aid.

Nevertheless, the connection goes deeper. For the astute reader, Harry Potter includes countless biblical allusions and themes — from minor details to central plot points.

While some of these elements can be traced to the literary influence of Lewis and Tolkien, many of them stem from Rowling’s own attitude to Christianity.

Schmidt goes into some detail in our podcast conversation — although be warned, the episode includes some very serious spoilers.

Rowling’s Religious Themes in Harry Potter

The biblical parallels in Harry Potter are not incidental, but neither are they accidental. According to Schmidt, Rowling intentionally injected Christian elements into the stories because she found them so appealing from a literary standpoint.

Recent literary scholarship has also recognised this.

In her monograph, Evil in the Christian Fantasy of C. S. Lewis and J. K. Rowling: From the White Witch to the Dark Mark, Dr Sarah Winters discusses the shared Christian conception of evil that informs both C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Rowling’s Harry Potter. Winters is an associate professor of English studies at Nipissing University in North Bay, Canada, and she contends that “the high fantasy of Harry Potter is deeply infused by the Christianity of its author” (4).

“A reader can reject immortality as a belief but cannot fully understand the politics of The Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter without understanding that the characters who engage in those politics are, in Lewis’s sense, immortals. And correspondingly, a reader cannot fully understand the problems of evil in these texts without understanding that evil, for Lewis and Rowling, is a metaphysical and real phenomenon that cannot be solved by mere mortals. My argument is, therefore, that we do not know how to understand good and evil in high fantasy [including Narnia and Harry Potter] without understanding the language of transcendence and immanence.” (13)

Indeed, according to Schmidt, Rowling even admitted to downplaying the Christian elements in the series during its release. Why? Not because she was ashamed of it, but because she was afraid that the fact would give to much away about the book’s climax and plot!

Following the release of The Deathly Hallows in 2007, Rowling commented:

“To me, [the religious parallels have] always been obvious… But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going.”

Yet while Solomon Schmidt points to a litany of facts about Rowling and the Harry Potter series that he thinks offer reason for Christians to ease off on the book burning, he does admit that there is another side to the story that deserves to be recognised.

Although we didn’t get the chance to discuss that aspect of Rowling’s life, I plan for Solomon to be back on the show at a future date to give the other side of the argument. If you’d like to hear this and other future conversations that help to challenge echo chambers, subscribe to the podcast wherever you choose to listen to your favourite shows.

___

Image courtesy of Suzelfe via Wikimedia Commons.