Navigating Under the Radar

            On December 7th a movie called The Golden Compass will be released in theaters nationwide. You may have already seen some amazing scenes in a trailer for this film based on the popular His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. What you may not have seen yet is the kind of controversial dialog that surrounded movies like The DaVinci Code, or the Harry Potter films—Christians pointing out the harm or lies these films were sure to spread. Personally I am pro-Potter, and when I wrote about the Code for this column I told you not to worry too much—it may have been a pack of lies, but the lies were obvious and questions the film raised were opportunities for witnessing. The danger of The Golden Compass is that its anti-Christian bias is flying under the radar of pop-culture awareness and its target is children. The simple truth is this: Philip Pullman wrote his children’s fantasy book The Golden Compass and its sequels specifically to attack Christianity: to paint a picture of the Church as evil, of God as the enemy of mankind, and of Christians as unthinking puppets who have given in to lies.

            I never want to pass judgment quickly on a movie, a TV show, a song, or a book. I believe in engaging culture, not running from it. So I have no intention of telling you what you should or should not do in regard to this film. Maybe we all need to see The Golden Compass so we can be ready to respond to it. Or maybe the producers of the film will be reigning in some of Pullman’s anti-Christian sentiments, and the movie will be fairly harmless (I’ve read conflicting rumors about that possibility). I know that if I decide to see it, I’m not going to do so in the opening weekend because that’s when movies are made or broken—a good opening weekend at the box office is a sign to the studios to spend more money advertising the movie to get more viewers to see it. So I’ll at least wait a week if I go.

            So though I’m not into hate mongering or judgment passing, I still want you all to be aware of the possible content you’ll face if you see Compass (content that is to be found in the books which young people will doubtless want to read even if the movie version does play down Pullman’s anti-Christian themes). Then you can look into it yourself, especially those of you parents and grandparents who, having seen a trailer for what looked like a really good family movie, were considering taking children to see it.

            In the novels, the Church of an earth parallel to our own exercises control in every aspect of human life. Representatives of the Church torture children in order to save them from sin and reject science as heretical. Wisdom, creativity and advancement have come to mankind not through God but through the efforts of the angels who rebelled against Him. In other words, the demons are the good guys. These “angels,” by the way, are not angels in any biblical sense (see quote below)—they’re in some way physical, they eat, live, die and fall in love (there is a homosexual angel couple in the story). Pullman’s afterlife is a place more akin to the Greek concept of Hades to which all people go where they face neither punishment nor joy—just continuous, dull existence. One character in the trilogy calls Christianity a “powerful and convincing mistake.” Here’s how Pullman envisions God (referred to as the “Authority”) in The Amber Spy Glass, book three of the trilogy:

God the Creator…was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves—the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are....The first angels condensed out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told all who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie.

This “Authority,” who has passed himself off as God turns out to be a senile old man (angel) who can’t think straight and simply longs to die.

            While Pullman denies that his books are an attack on Christianity specifically (though he certainly focuses on Christian structures, images and terms), they are at least an attack on any belief that God, if He exists, has made Himself known in the world. The crux of the trilogy is the idea that the material universe is all there is. Pullman ends the trilogy with a vision of his own paradisal world, the Republic of Heaven. Central to that world is, in Pullman’s words, “a sense that this world where we live is our home. Our home is not somewhere else. There is no elsewhere. This is a physical universe and we are physical beings made of material stuff. This is where we live.” Pullman has summarized the His Dark Materials books thusly: “My books are about killing God.”

            I couldn’t agree more with this summary of The Golden Compass and its sequels. That should not be enough for us to rush into a panic, but it should be enough for us to look more carefully into at least one movie we thought about seeing during the Christmas season.