On December 7th a movie called The Golden Compass will be released in theaters nationwide based on the popular His Dark Materials (Random House, 2007) trilogy by Philip Pullman.

Dangerous Book, Dangerous Movie?

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. Philip Pullman wrote his children’s fantasy book The Golden Compass and its sequels 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. I have no intention of telling you what you should or should not do in regard to this film. Maybe we 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). 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 wait at least a week if I go.

I want you to be aware of the possible content you’ll face if you see Compass (content that is to be found in the books 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 parents and grandparents who 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 to lead them to 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 where all people go to face neither punishment nor joy—just a 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.

Think Twice Before Viewing

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 this way: “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. |L

OTHER COLUMNS:
November 8, 2009 - Why I believe in God
October 25, 2009 - Commuting in days of evil
October 11, 2009 - Poets and don’t know it
September 27, 2009 - How Hollywood proves abortion is wrong
September 13, 2009 - Significance
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July 19, 2009 - Visitor-friendly churches
July 5, 2009 - The Shack
June 21, 2009 - When forgiveness fails
June 7, 2009 - Re-imagining Education (Part Six)
May 24, 2009 - We are not alone
May 3, 2009 - Re-imagining education (part five)
April 26, 2009 - Conviction
April 12, 2009 - Re-imagining education (part four)
March 29, 2009 - An evangelistic proposal
March 15, 2009 - Re-imagining education (part three)
March 1, 2009 - He makes me sick
February 15, 2009 - Re-imagining education (Part Two)
February 1, 2009 - Spiritual insecurity
January 18, 2009 - Re-imagining education (part one)
January 4, 2009 - Church and politics
December 21, 2008 - Heaven’s music
December 7, 2008 - The church and marriage
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August 31, 2008 - Modesty matters (part one)
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August 3, 2008 - Staying through the credits
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July 6, 2008 - Tyler Perry and the movies you’re missing
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May 25, 2008 - Another generation grew up
May 25, 2008 - Technology and the Bible (part two)
May 11, 2008 - Technology and the Bible (part one)
April 27, 2008 - What is truth?
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December 23, 2007 - Teachable TV?
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November 25, 2007 - Christians teaching Christians to change TV and film
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October 14, 2007 - The things God values
September 30, 2007 - Movie moments
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August 19, 2007 - There’s a rat in ‘separate’
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July 8, 2007 - Why books matter: the sequel
June 10, 2007 - Books: why they matter
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May 27, 2007 - The universal gospel
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April 1, 2007 - The gospel goes to the movies
March 18, 2007 - What the Bible movies can teach us
March 4, 2007 - What will you hurt for?
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