Harry Potter and the Evangelical Christian
As you know, I've been a big fan of the Harry Potter books for about a year now. Now, I'm sure this has been thought of before - I know there are books out there on looking for Christian messages in Harry Potter - but because I haven't read those books, and probably won't, you're going to get my take on this.
This is not to say that one is in any way related to the other, but a few weeks ago it struck me how very much like the culture of the magical world the culture of evangelical Christianity is. We have our own bookstores. We have our own musicians, and music labels, and radio stations, and TV stations. We have entire systems of government within our churches. We have our hospitals and our schools. We have our own lingo, and to hear it most people wouldn't have any idea what we were talking about. We have things in our homes that the average person would think were strange or wouldn't understand at all - different books, different kinds of art, Bible verses plastered all over the walls. Our faith to a lot of people probably seems like "magic". In very many ways, we exist in a world separate from the rest of humanity, one that goes unnoticed or ignored by most everyone who isn't a part of it.
I guess it can be said that any major subculture is like this to some degree, but in this case, being the only one I'm familiar with, I found the parallel particularly striking.