I’ve heard some people place a lot of the responsibility for Harry Potter becoming popular at the altar of the US Christian Right. Considering their wealth, reach and influence it seems plausible to me!

What’s your recollection of that era?

  • @whatalute
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    31 year ago

    I feel like Harry Potter became mainstream/popular in my area roughly around the release of the third book. Or at least that’s when I remember becoming aware of the series. I was in elementary school and attended a small non-denominational christian school. It kind of just depended on the families, some were fine with it, like mine was. My mom read the first book to my younger brother and I as part of our nightly reading together. It was just emphasized that this was a fun fictional story and not real. There were other families who didn’t like the concept of magic but were otherwise ambivalent, and of course some were convinced it was all a ploy by satan trying to convert children to witchcraft. The details are all pretty fuzzy, but I think the stances generally tended to follow the denomination of the family, but not always.