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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7774418" data-attributes="member: 4937">The two things aren't alike.For anything, there is always a small amount of people that are outraged about something.  The interconnectedness of modern media tends to create a platform that can magnify the actual scale of concern, without actually giving people any concrete sense of how widespread the outrage or concern actually is.  That someone protested 'Harry Potter' doesn't surprise me.  But I'd guess that disapproval among Christian groups in the United States for D&D at the height of the Occult scare hit 50% or higher.  A comparatively high scale protest, but which attracted less media attention, was concerns within the Christian community concerning Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' series, and I invite comparison between how well accepted the Harry Potter series was on both sides of the pond, compared to how well Pullman's work was accepted in still largely religious America compared to the largely post-Christian UK.  Pullman's work certainly 'raised some hackles' in a broad way; protests of Rawlings work was a blip largely confined to a few highly insular fundamentalist groups.In the case of Harry Potter 'hysteria' I can feel pretty safe in saying it did not remotely match the scale of the occult panic with respect to D&D.  The groups that are offended by Harry Potter very strongly overlap the groups that think for example that CS Lewis and Tolkien were Satanist promoting occult ideas.  That these groups represent a miniscule fraction of the evangelical Christian movement is hardly something that needs to be said.  In the vast majority of even evangelical churches, using or quoting Tolkien or CS Lewis in a sermon illustration is considered perfectly acceptable, and for that matter, considering the mid-story conversion by Rawlings to Christianity, the later books are decidedly pro-Christian in context.Similarly, while I hardly have a survey I can point to prove this, I think I can safely present myself as subject matter expert, and say that while there certainly would have been congregations that objected to fantasy as a genre as a whole, they are vastly outnumbered by the congregations that object to explicitly occult and Satanic content specifically.  This things have a scale to them, and while you may be right that some response would have been forth coming, I feel fairly safe in saying that had the comic book code been in effect on all of TSR's publications, and had no overtly occult symbolism been used, the scale would have been so small we wouldn't have been having this conversation.</blockquote>

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