His Dark Materials

…is the title of a fantasy series by atheist Philip Pullman. A movie based on the first book, The Golden Compass, is coming out around Christmas. There’s a story on CNN.com about the movie, the books, and the controversy if you aren’t familiar with any of it. I haven’t read the books, so I know nothing about them that I haven’t read in reviews.

Christians trying to respond seem to be lining up on two opposing sides.

One faction says that this is no big deal. It might even be good. The Christianity that Pullman criticizes is a farce. We might even join him in tearing it down. Also, we should avoid another Harry Potter, when backwater, narrow-minded fundies made us all look like knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers. We can and should be nuanced appreciators of culture. Further, this is all only fair. We tried to indoctrinate children using the Chronicles of Narnia, and now atheists are hitting back with The Golden Compass.

I can see the merits of that position, but at the risk of being labeled a Chicken Little, I am more inclined at this point to take the other side. If I had to boil it down to one reason, it would be that I disagree with this quote from the CNN article:

Yet the film’s co-producer, Deborah Forte, said that in 12 years of being associated with the movie and the books, not one young reader has mentioned religion to her. Children love the story and the characters, she said.

Obviously, I’m not calling her a liar. I’m sure no children have mentioned religion to her. But that’s utterly beside the point. Does anyone doubt that Pullman wrote these books specifically to provide a toehold for atheism in the imaginations of children? (That’s only partially a rhetorical question. If you do doubt it, I’ll post some quotes of Pullman’s for you.) It doesn’t much matter if the children themselves don’t understand the point of the books. We’re all influenced by culture – the things we read, see in movies, watch on TV, hear in songs, etc – in ways that we don’t understand until much later, if ever. It’s actually all the more effective, I would argue, when we aren’t conscious of having bought into a specific message. It’s just a good story at first, but later we find ourselves uncritically resonating with increasingly overt re-statements of its themes. (Spurgeon once said that he gave up preaching Calvinism directly early in his career. He won far more “converts” by “lightly seasoning” everything he said with the Doctrines of Grace. Once you’ve gotten your audience to begin reasoning from the assumptions of your system, you’ve won.)

Having said all that, I don’t follow the other side to its fullest and most reactionary conclusions. I won’t be picketing any theaters. There’s no such thing as bad press, and St. Paul himself supports our common experience that forbidding something is one of the best ways to generate interest in it. In spite of this interesting negative review, I will probably read the series myself. Not just for critical purposes (Honestly, what difference does it make if I have an informed opinion about this? Who besides me would care?), but because I like fantasy. If I were a parent, I would not ban these books from my home, but I would insist upon reading them with my children. The “other side” makes some valid points about their merits, I imagine, but it’s one thing to separate the wheat from the chaff as an adult, and another to expect a 10 year old to do the same.