Why do you tolerate the Harry Potter movies?

It would be so nice if good and evil came with clear labels: ...

This movie is about imaginary people who fly on broomsticks, so it's Evil; that movie is about a talking cucumber, so it's Good. This person wears a tall black hat, so she's Evil; that person spends Sunday morning in Church, so she's Good.

Good and Evil are real forces. Witchcraft -- "Wicca" -- is a real religious movement. We tend to group a number of odd and largely-unrelated religious movements, fads, and groundless superstitions together under the term "the occult". That is an over-simplification, that allows us to vilify without understanding. Real witchcraft *is* un-Christian. While it is reasonable for Christian parents to be concerned about something that might lure their children away from the Christian faith, children routinely read about people from other religions without risking apostacy. We rarely debate whether our children should read every-day story-books about Jewish people (for example "The Diary of Anne Frank" which is on most middle-school reading lists, the mystery "Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home", Chaim Potek's excellent "The Chosen", the lovely old classic "The All of a Kind Family") or about Muslim People (Debra Ellis' excellent "The Breadwinner", Marguarite Henry's "King of the Wind"). In my childhood, missionary societies published stories depicting the cultures to which their missionaries were headed. Stories about other religions just help us understand the plurality of worldviews among which we live. Some Christians consider Wicca differently from Islam or Judaism because of mistranslations in the Bible where the word "witch" has been incorrectly used. Be assured that the ancient Hebrew language did not have a specific word for "priestess of the Northern European nature religion". The ancient Hebrews didn't even know that the Celts existed.

So, if there were any reality, any actual validity to the depiction of witches in Harry Potter, I would still find it unobjectionable. But, in fact, the "witches" depicted in Harry Potter are drawn directly out of mediaeval folk-tales, with no basis in reality. They are imaginary. In the same way, singing, dancing cucumbers are imaginary. The Bible deals with the reality of spiritual issues; not with imaginary things used to populate fictional stories. So, to determine whether a movie or story is moral or not, we need to look past the superficial labels borne by the characters, at the morality of the themes.

I've read all four Harry Potter books. I *don't* find them to be unprecedented wonders of imaginative fiction: I grew up on Mary Norton and E. Nesbitt and Alan Garner. I do have issues with the paedagogical assumptions that seem to underpin Hogwarts as an institution: I hope my children never find school to be an unpredictable place where the staircases change direction while you're climbing them and the adults are more interested in point-scores than in nurture. The admiration afforded Harry seems misplaced: frankly the Muggle-born Hermione seems to be the one who actually exhibits talent, skill, intellect and diligence. But, the overall message Anne has taken away from the books was best summed up by Dumbledore in "Goblet of Fire":

 "Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you
 have to make a choice between what is right, and what is easy,
 remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and
 brave."

Or, in older and more noble words, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends". If that is what my child remembers as the theme of these books, I can tolerate a great many moving staircases.