Ross argues that Hitch is reading the Harry Potter books through a godless glass, darkly:

It’s true that the Potter novels aren’t an explicitly Christian fantasy in the same sense as the Narnia books (although Christian themes and motifs abound in Rowling’s universe); what they assuredly are, though, is a series in which the central moral difference between the protagonist and the villain revolves around each’s attitude toward his own mortality, and each’s faith (or lack thereof) in the soul’s survival after death.

Actually, this is one of the things that always bothered me about the internal logic of the Potterverse. Series heavy Voldermort’s core motivation—almost his defining characteristic—is fear of death. And I hope I’m not giving away anything if I say that the dramatic apex of the final book concerns whether Harry is prepared to sacrifice his own life in order to stop the aforementioned heavy. And yet this is a world in which no faith at all is required to believe that people—or at least wizards—routinely survive death. The grounds of Hogwarts is absolutely lousy with ghosts and animate, sentient portraits of late headmasters. It is sometimes hinted that these phenomena are merely “impressions” or copies of the departed—is there a difference? Accio Derek Parfit!—but it is, at any rate, unambiguous that a next-life exists, and that the dead sometimes communicate with the living. Moreover, there’s no hint of Hell. So this aspect of the stories has always been a bit puzzling.