Movie blockbusters The battle of the wizards By John H. Adams The Layman Volume 35, Number 1 Posted February 8, 2002 A furious fuss has emerged among Christians over magic, as in J.K. Rowling’s The Sorcerer’s Stone and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the blockbuster films that packed ‘em in before Christmas. So whose magic and whose wizards are suitable for impressionable young minds? The argument goes this way: Tolkien, being a devout Catholic, used magic and wizardry as metaphors for the Christian life; Rowling, being an Anglican who’s not particularly revealing about matters of faith, uses magic and wizardry to entertain – hence youngsters are lured into the occult. Newspapers and magazines have weighed in by the ton, the Internet by the gigabyte. On December 30, Google (a Web search engine) turned up 2.2 million pages for The Sorcerer’s Stone and 1.39 million for The Lord of the Rings. Considering that, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, sports were declared the great and necessary American diversion to restore normalcy, Google checked out America’s most widely watched athlete: Michael Jordan. At year’s end, he had produced 1.3 million page hits – and Air Jordan’s season began long before either film was released. Google could find only 220,000 page hits for the St. Louis Rams, who had the best record in professional football at the end of 2001. The spells of the two fantasy writers were cast upon theater screens in pre-Christmas blockbusters. With a five-week head start, The Sorcerer’s Stone racked up ticket sales of $286 million by the end of the year. The Lord of the Rings was closing the gap fast with sales of $154 million in just two weeks. What happened in the theaters spilled over into a side show. In Alamogordo, N.M., Pastor Jack Brock of Christ Community Church ignited a “holy bonfire” to burn Harry Potter books, which he called “an abomination to God.” Other burnings were sighted, too. But a livelier carnival was what people were saying about Muggles and Hobbits. Christianity Today gave a brassy salute to The Lord of the Rings, proudly noting Tolkien’s deep Christian faith. Even so, the magazine repeated its affection for the Potter series. “An evangelical viewer must be rather stubborn to find The Sorcerer’s Stone worthy of contempt,” wrote CT reviewer Douglas LeBlanc. The Boston Globe quoted a minister who noted that the big difference may have been audiences, with adults favoring Frodo and children favoring Harry Potter. But the venerable New York Times, in a column about Oscar possibilities, found neither film of sufficient merit to make its list. The Lord of the Rings drew a mention with a caveat: “Too long, too confusing, too silly.” The supposedly more staid Wall Street Journal was more bullish. “This fantasy can be charmingly down-to-Middle-earth, but by the end, which leads right into next Christmas’s installment, you know you’ve been visiting a world truly governed by magic.”

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