Growing up in the evangelical church in the piney woods of east Texas, the world felt circumscribed by an ever-present fear—not just of sin but of ideas that might challenge the worldview handed down to those of us in the pews. Everything outside the Christian framework—including secular music, television, and books—was discouraged. Just as I signed multiple purity pledges throughout my preteen and teen years, promising to avoid not just sex but even impure thoughts, we were taught to practice absolute abstinence from dangerous ideas. Not that those dangerous ideas necessarily always came from the annals of great historical thinkers or even figures from the contemporary political climate. As it happens, the most famous of these examples was a widespread prohibition on Harry Potter. To read about witches and wizards, I was told, was to open oneself to the occult and risk spiritual ruin.

This concept of heterodoxy isn’t simply that these works contain themes or ideas counter to Christian teaching; the central belief about ideas is […]