Good for her, and good for you for getting that ridiculous ban overturned. I'm also a Christian, by the way.

My experience with Harry Potter was somewhat different. I was 22 when the first novel was published, and I first discovered the series around the age of 25, just after I got married. My wife and I devoured the books (there were only four at that point) and felt like we had a second childhood. They were wonderful. Then we saw the films (which weren't as good as the novels, but we still enjoyed them).

All around us, evangelical Christian types were horrified that we loved these books. We tried to argue against their wilful ignorance and explain to them everything you've mentioned here - ie that the spells weren't real, but are cod-Latin jokes, that JK Rowling isn't a witch (she actually has a Christian faith herself, by the way), that the so-called "witchcraft" in the novel bears no resemblance to real life witchcraft (which I actually know a fair bit about, but that's another story), that it's akin to Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole once you're off on the Hogwarts Express, and most emphatically, that the novels are clearly a product of Judeo-Christian culture. Not only are they about good versus evil, greed/pride versus humility, and sacrificial love triumphing over death (a Christ allegory present in both the start and especially the end, where it is more blatant than ever), the so-called wizarding world is actually highly "conservative", which ought to endear to such Christian readers. There's not a whiff of adultery, for instance, and everyone pretty much settles down with their first serious boyfriend or girlfriend, getting married and assuming traditional gender roles. Why on earth evangelical Christianity took exception to these books is baffling to me.

But despite all this, those around my wife and I refused to even read them. Ridiculous.

Years later, once the final book was out, we ran into some of these people again. Suddenly, they'd changed their tune because they'd seen the films.

The moral of the story can perhaps best be summed up by paraphrasing Sean Connery's character in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: These people should try reading books instead of burning them.