Harry Potter is just one instance of ‘new strategies being brought to bear against mankind’ (15). He claims that ‘we are living in a vast multi-dimensional war zone, a great deal of which is invisible to our eyes’ (15). O’Brien was persuaded to take up the cudgels against Harry and so wrote, inter alia, Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture. O’Brien in a state of acute anxiety over Harry Potter. The consensual reality of the mainstream West excludes another set of parents of an evangelical or fundamentalist persuasion, like the three who contacted Canadian Catholic author Michael D. The difficulty arises when parents disagree about reality. In this light the reality we provide for ourselves and our children is a roughly consensual fantasy narrative which works well enough for us to get by together most of the time. I base my argument on the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) notion that reality is itself a fantasy. I am more concerned in this essay with the medievalism of the Christian Right response, based on their own beliefs and their (sometimes critical) readings of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s medievalism than with the medievalism of the books themselves. I have taken the furore around the Harry Potter series and the threat it has posed for conservative Christian communities in North America as a case study to address in a small way the large question of how reality is forged and maintained and how it is eroded. This undermining is nowhere more apparent than in fantasy fiction. In fact, trust in an abiding reality of any kind, Christian or otherwise, has been severely undermined since they were writing it in the mid-20th century. As Tolkien and Lewis feared, the spiritual reality they sought to maintain has been further undermined since their time. Their writing upheld that central reality of the spirit in the face of its threatened demise in a materialistic world. Lewis’ ‘medieval model’ provided the security of an orderly, meaningful, abiding reality. Both men made worlds which were medievalised in various ways the setting for enticing glimpses of what Lewis called ‘the only real “other world” we know, that of the spirit’ (On Stories 12). Lewis wrote, in different ways, the Christian reality they desired their writing upheld that reality in the face of its threatened demise. The fate of reality in medievalist fantasy fiction: Harry Potter and the Christian Right J.
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