While most of my friends remember elementary school as the time they discovered Harry Potter, I remember third grade as the year when I read Judges 19 and learned about gang rape.
I no longer recall exactly why I was reading that Bible passage that young. I would like to say that it was in preparation for my private school’s annual Bible Competition, which was like a regular quiz bowl with the bonus of “sword drills,” where would would lift our Bibles in the air, hands grasping the binding, count to three and then furiously page through to find Amos 2:10 and try to be the first to read aloud.
But back to Judges 19. I regularly read my Bible. I was excited to. Not only did the drama of the stories interest me – miracles, the apocalypse – I saw reading it as an act of devotion to God, by which I would grow closer to him. I counted the minutes until I could sit and read it, which is the only reason besides competition prep as to why I was possibly reading about the Levite and his concubine, and the Levite being demanded by the men of the city for sex. Spoiler: the concubine is offered in his place.
But what horrified me the most about Judges 19 wasn’t the gang rape, but the visceral aftermath: the man took his concubine’s battered and assaulted body home and cut into the 12 pieces, sending each to a tribe of Israel.
I was never told to skip the graphic portions of the Bible – except for Song of Songs, of course. To read about the joys and pleasures of sex was forbidden, unlike reading about rape, incest and genocide.
But Harry Potter and his ilk were verboten. The leaders in my Pentecostal church children’s group warned us against reading about the boy wizard, because it would “open doors” to demonic presences in our lives. Presumably, we would fall into witchcraft, casting spells and losing our faith in God.
This mirrored wider Christian discourses at the time; critiques came in the form of books like Harry Potter and the Bible: Harmless Fantasy or Dangerous Fascination? The Menace behind the Magick and Chick tracts like “The Nervous Witch,” which attempts to link reading Harry Potter as a gateway to occult practices.
My own family took it further than Harry Potter: I wasn’t allowed to read The Chronicles of Narnia, despite the strongly Christian allegorical elements in CS Lewis’s well-known books, because of the presence of a witch. This was the only reading restriction I questioned, sneaking a copy of The Magician’s Nephew in school. Perhaps it was the otherworldly exploration of the Biblical creation narrative that swayed me. But, otherwise, I accepted my lot and largely filled my time reading missionary narratives.
I only read Harry Potter much later – my second semester of my junior year of college in my children’s literature course. More than anything, I was surprised at how benign the story was. Yes, there were witches and sorcerers and magic, both good and dark. But it wasn’t a groundbreaking moment. I turned the pages. I read. I went to bed.
I will admit, though, that as I read, I felt a creeping anxiety that I was opening some kind of door to witchcraft or the like, as I was told as a child. You can take a girl out of fundamentalism, but that doesn’t automatically take fundamentalism out of the girl.
Within the strain of Christianity in which I was raised, the Bible is infallible and absolute; it is God-breathed; it is a living document. So if the Bible says that the God created the world in six days, and the Bible was written by God through prophets and disciples, who are we to question it?
Further: if God saw fit to include recountings of horrific violence – whether a gang rape or a world-ending flood – in the Bible, how are we to approach that? In the case of Judges 19, when the concubine is offered in place of the man, how is a woman to read it? After all, the act of the men of the city having sex with the man is described as a “despicable thing”; the act of having sex – it isn’t even called rape – with the woman isn’t condemned, but completed as an act of compromise.
This was more damaging than anything else I could have read even if the Bible does affirm women in other places.
Fiction, on the other hand, wasn’t only fallible, it was without God, in some cases. While it’s absurd to say that Harry Potter presents anything close to representing reality, it does reveal a world that operates outside of Christian principles, where the presence of God was not required for morals. Perhaps this is most frightening of all to the fundamentalists who oppose it so vehemently, though the same could be said of many works of fiction.
It was only as I began to study in literature in college that I spoke with people of faith from outside of my fundamentalist bubble and began to understand there are different ways of approaching the Bible. While most still believe the Bible to be a foundational religious text, they bring the understanding of cultural context and interpretive fluidity. I also met Christians who had read beyond the Bible, who freely read as children and who were balanced and healthy individuals.
It is then that I began to learn I could hold my beliefs in one hand, and in the other, hold books that present other worlds and even opposing views, and be OK. I’m still learning and reading my way out of fundamentalism.
