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The #HarryPotter and #JKRowling issue has been absolutely fascinating to watch over my life.

I was raised in a conservative Evangelical-ish community and reading the books was an act of subversion. There were people that legitimately believed that the books were cultist, and they weren't all that wrong if they used the academic definition of a cult -a small community religious practice. What made Harry Potter subversive, where as other fantasy stories like Star Wars weren't, was that the whole youth culture was happening outside of adult view on the Internet. This was before Facebook or Reddit and before just adults really had a presence online. Teens would spend hours and hours in their online community that their parents weren't a part of. And this worldwide online community operated like a cultist religion. They were creating their own language, mythologies, mores, taboos, and rituals in real time. And it had it's priest, who often personally participated in the online communities (in fact she created them). And she borrowed from and contributed to the myth creation. It provided a form of spiritually that many of the teens involved were lacking in their lives.

Fast forward a generation. Today the stories are complete. A young adult picking up the books for the first time today isn't involved in the subversive online cult of the 1990's and 2000's. There are no more speculation or fan theories being created. That's now relegated to nostalgia. Today, a young adult can read the complete stories and judge them not for what they were, but for what they are now. And they are finding many problematic errors. Racism, antisemitism, ableism, slavery, plot holes, etc. The stories are complete and are now being critically read as complete stories.

And the priest, who was lauded as supportive and wise while the cult was growing, is being judged by a new generation that wasn't involved in the myth creation. She is being judged for what she is now, not was she was back then.

What we are seeing in real time, and this is fascinating, was the creation and deconstruction of a new religion in a post-Christian America. It's also not just Harry Potter, but also techno-utopianism, and other sub-cultures. I suspect that this generational rise and fall of new cultish religions will accelerate as the tearing down of other people's beliefs and communities becomes a more popular pastime.

#religion #cult #millenials #genz