This compass leads straight to hell!

November 24, 2007

Guest Post by Morbo

A few years ago, my daughter and I read “The Golden Compass,” the first volume of British author Philip Pullman’s trilogy titled “His Dark Materials.”

We moved on to the second book but never finished it. Now I’m thinking we made a mistake. A movie version of the first book opens Dec. 7, and the Religious Right is throwing a fit. If the Religious Right does not like this series, it must be worth looking at.

Baptist Press (BP), an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, is warning Christians about the film and the books.

“The entire series has been dubbed the ‘anti-Narnia,’ with Pullman regularly expressing disdain for C.S. Lewis’ fictional world and even once calling it ‘propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology,'” reported Baptist Press. “He has sought to write a completely different fictional tale, and he has succeeded. He said in a 2001 interview, ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief,’ and two years later told another newspaper, ‘My books are about killing God.'”

BP notes that the series is very popular and is marketed to school-aged children through the Scholastic Books firm. Naturally, this being the United States, some of the more controversial themes of the series have been toned down in the film version. But BP still warns that interest in the movie will lead more kids to the books and from there straight to hell.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in America. While there are many fine Southern Baptist in this country who still hold to the Baptist view that separation of church and state is a good and necessary thing, the leadership long ago went over to the Jerry Falwell camp. In Washington, D.C., the Southern Baptist lobbying office operates more or less as a Religious Right group.

These folks need to take a deep breath.

Some conservative Catholics got all worked up when “The Da Vinci Code” sold 40 million copies and was made into a film. You might have noticed that this did not bring the Roman Catholic Church to its knees.

Likewise, millions of children read the Harry Potter series, which fundamentalists have also attacked. The final Potter book was published in the summer. Christianity appears to have survived.

Hollywood is in odd place these days. After the success of “The Passion of the Christ,” some executives got the idea that maybe there was something to these religious movies after all and green-lighted a number of other pious projects. They have not done as well, but they do serve a niche market.

Now a movie is coming out that might be critical of religion — although to me it sounds like the overt criticism has been removed. (In the film, the church is called “the Magisterium.”)

Chances are, most kids will look at this movie as a cool adventure story with nifty special effects. (The book features armor-plated bears, flying witches and all kinds of interesting characters.) Adults who see it might pick up on an anti-religious message — but chances are those folks have already made up their minds about God.

In short, if your faith is so weak that it can be shaken by a film adaptation of a kid-lit book, it wasn’t of much use to begin with.

These folks need to take a deep breath,
and then sing that old Doobie Brother’s song:

Jesus is just alright with me, jesus is just alright, oh yeah
Jesus is just alright with me, jesus is just alright

I don’t care what they may say
I don’t care what they may do
I don’t care what they may say
Jesus is just alright, oh yeah
Jesus is just alright

That ought to help them make it through the day.
If not… they need to remember there is only 30 days until Santa alights on their roof bearing gifts in the name of baby Jesus.

  • Coming from a Baptist family myself (grandfather a minister, two cousins ministers), I have to tell you that they don’t seem like nuts, well maybe my grandfather. A little uptight, but not nuts. Maybe the big shots in the convention could take some hints from them and spend their extra time feeding the needy and doing bake sales to help rebuild homes which weather and fire have destroyed. Build communities with charity not venom.

  • The first book is definitely better than the other two. But yes, the trilogy is definitely about killing God.

    Here’s how much cooler British religious authorities are than ours. More here, including links to a public debate with Pullman.

  • Fundamentalists are the “recovering” alcoholic (who really isn’t) dining in the restaurant who can’t stand the fact the couple across the room is having wine with dinner without a problem. They’re the white-knuckle ex-drunk one step from disaster who wants their problem to be everyone’s problem (to solve for them).

    As Garrison Keillor points out, if you take one Baptist fishing with you, he’ll drink all your beer, but if you take two they won’t drink any.

  • I will grant that, for many, their faith must be demonstrably weak for it to be so foundationally shaken by a mere story—and yet, I also feel that there is a symbiant picture here that deserves equal attention, in that the powers behind Xianity as it exists today recognize that, should the people be given any viable alternative to the brimstone-fire of the pulpit and the collection plate, they will undoubtedly choose that alternative. I’ve got the books; I’ll buy a copy of the films.

    It’s a much better way to support the economy than to further feed some future Benny Hinn type, after all….

  • Why I think many Christians who fear other ideas fear them and oppose them so adamently:

    It is a simple psychological response and has nothing to do with perceived notions of right and wrong.

    It is based upon their personal inner truth that they are evil and need guidance from outside (religion, rules, authoratarianism etc) Because this is how they feel they think that EVERYONE else is also evil within. And so they cannot then help but perceive anything that weakens that outside religion/rule etc as a destructive force of society.

  • If the Religious Right does not like this series, it must be worth looking at. — Morbo.

    I hope you’re joking. If you aren’t, then all I can say is that you would have made a good little communist 🙂

    Books, especially children’s books, should not be read because they indoctrinate; they should be read because they are well-written and tell a good story (or have clever rhymes). The “hidden message” can then be discussed, if one wants to. But the first and most important thing is that books ought to be fun to read, not a chore; they ought to catch and keep the child’s imagination.

    I grew up with a lot of propaganda books thinly veiled as “story”. And some of them were fun but many were not. The lousy ones I just ditched and/or forgot (if I had to read them, for school). The good ones I still remember, more than 50 years later.

    US does the same thing, to an extent. One of my childhood favourites — Gianni Rodari’s 1955 “The Trip of the Blue Arrow” — which I wanted to read to my son, was not available, because Rodari was too much of a communist to tolerate and had never been translated into English until after his death.

  • I read the BP article you linked. It does not mention kids going to hell because of these books.

  • to me it sounds like the overt criticism has been removed. (In the film, the church is called “the Magisterium.”)

    Um – “the Magisterium” is in the books too. And Magisterium is an actual Roman Catholic “thing” that refers to the authority of the Church on Earth. Here’s a wikipedia bit about it. Not referring to the Church as “the Church” but as “the Magisterium” only makes it MORE about the Catholic Church than before. (The Church in the books is actually a “what if the Reformation had succeeded without splintering the Church – the Church is still unified, but there is no papacy, and the headquarters is Geneva, not Rome).

    The film won’t have an overt anti-religious message. The anti-religious messages in the first book only come at the end – in the last few chapters where Lord Asriel’s plans to overthrow the Kingdom of Heaven and kill God come to light. It’s been confirmed that those are not part of the movie (and are, in fact, kind of incidental to the story of the first book anyway – it’s more setup for the second and third books).

    All of this leads me to believe that we will never see a sequel to “The Golden Compass” in theaters. If they went out of their way to remove the small bit of anti-religion theme that exists in the first book, I doubt they’re going to be comfortable filming the third book where “the Authority” (aka God) is killed, or even the second book where Lord Asriel begins his war against the Kingdom. I just don’t think that Hollywood has the stones to do it.

  • I’m still waiting to see which movie studio will have the guts to adapt James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah. The premise of the book is that God exists… and he’s dead. The villains are a Manhattan atheist society (who want to cover up the 2-mile long corpse that proves God’s existence) and the Vatican (who want to cover up God’s undeniable demise).

    No subtext there.

  • I read that the screen adaptation played down the anti-church essence of the book. I thought that was a shame, because I disagree with Libra that a book can’t have a moral compass(forgive me, lord). What kills fiction is when you push your message overtly, what Lawrence called “nailing it down.” He concluded that “when you try to nail something down in a novel, you either kill the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.” Neither of these happens here.

    This is an enchanting wonderful book and the anti church thrust of it grows slowly and seductively. It is worth reading or watching though, not because it irks the religious right(pace, libra) but because it has compelling characters–I never would have thought that in my late forties, when I read this with my son, I would find myself captivated, totally enthralled by a talking, steel forging, fighting king of the bears. A great adventure, and is true to its own moral code, what Booth called the Rhetoric of Fiction. Pullman has made something truly marvelous here and to lose sight of it because you’re worried about churches is to lose sight of the soul of any novel.

  • I have to think authors do a little dance of joy – straight to the bank – when a religion cranks up the whine-o-tronic. Those of you who are old enough must remember how piles of The Satanic Verses appeared in every bookstore after Rushdie incurred the anger of some cranky Ayatollah. If I were slightly more cynical I’d suspect a mutual agreement between the writers and the Enraged Religious Organization.

    Congratulations Mr. Pullman, please inform your accountant s/he’ll be working overtime this year.

    tAiO

    And Tom Cleaver: Best damn analogy, period.

  • It challeges the Baptist where it hurts…Faith through fear of punishment. You heard the minister (ium)…watch this and you’re going straight to hell. You know, place of permanent punishment created by the god that loves you but sends you anyway if you don’t do everything he tells you to do. The one who can only stand by and watch while those that believe in him destroy the earth and kill non believers in his name. HELL! (and these people have a voice in American Politics?)

  • Regarding “Narnia”, I’ve been listening to the unabridged audio version that Focus on the Family spent a ton of money producing. Frankly, they did not spend wisely. C.S. Lewis was a Christian by all accounts, but in the Narnia books he invokes pagan deities and references equally as much as Christian ones, which are really pretty mild and not what could be counted as rabid evangelical screeds.

    I’ve come to the conclusion that Lewis was simply not a very good writer who borrowed themes and allegories from both sides of the fence to support a storyline that he didn’t have the skill to create otherwise. This doesn’t make him a bad person by any means, but for the Christianist Right to make such a big deal out of him is just ridiculous and makes them look like bigger dummies than they were already. My two cents.

  • Just another stupid issue for the fundies to get all steamed about. How about using some of that angst and money to address some real, actual PROBLEMS – like war, poverty, starvation, etc., etc. Don’t these idiots have anything more important to do than worry about what’s going on in the entertainment industry? Listening to them, you’d think that gay marriage, abortion, and films like this are the greatest threats the American people have ever faced. Not environmental disasters, unstoppable disease, collapsing economies – just gays and movies.

  • carwinrpc, @ 11

    You aren’t disagreeing with me at all; your English is better than mine, is all 🙂

    I’m not saying a book should be devoid of a message; all I’m trying to say is that it should be well-written first — good story, convincing characters, etc, etc. A “message” should come through on tip-toe, secondary. Not like a roaring tank. If the child doesn’t “get it”, then, perhaps, you explain. Or, perhaps, you recommend he/she gives it another chance, a year or two later.

    I didn’t like Winnie the Pooh or St Exupery’s (spell?) Little Prince at 7, but adored both at 14. Didn’t like Narnia at 10, didn’t like it at 16 and didn’t like it at 22 (and don’t intend to give it any more chances). MacDonald’s “On the Wings of the North Windstorm” (I’m sure the original English title is something else) I liked very much at 9 and a bit less later. But in none of those likes and dislikes was the book’s message the deciding factor.

    But reading a book *only because* it pisses off your adversaries, or *only because* it pushes forward your agenda is silly. Ridiculous. It’s enough to turn children away from reading.

  • My faith is certainly not threatened by a movie, however I must say that it is an outright insult and an attack on the Catholic Church to call the organization that the evil witch comes from the “Magisterium”.
    The author obviously hates the Catholic Church and is probably very afraid of God’s Bride on Earth.

  • These people need to take a deep breath and then hold it forever.

    If you are looking for good childrens’ books for the holiday, I cannot recommend strongly enough Jonathan Stroud’s “Bartimaeus Trilogy”. If Harry Potter and The Golden Compass are enough to piss off xians, they will become hysteric in reading this series.

  • Phillip Pullman is a proud atheist and his objective is to bash Christianity and promote atheism. He belongs to secular humanist societies. He hates C.S. Lewis’s Chronicle’s of Narnia, and has written a trilogy to show the other side. The movie has been dumped down to fool kids and their parents in the hope that they will buy his trilogy where in the end the children kill God and everyone can do as they please. I don’t just generally dismiss a movie or book just because someone ‘says’ it’s meant to be something else….but this is worth knowing if you plan to see it. I have heard that he has made remarks that he wants to kill God in the minds of children, and that’s what his books are all about. An article written by Peter Hitchens, (a conservative British columnist), about him said “this is the most dangerous author in Britain” and that Pullman would be the writer “the atheists would be praying for, if atheists prayed.” Pullman said he doesn’t think it is possible that there is a God and he has great difficulty understanding the words “spiritual” and “spirituality.” Philip Pullman has averred that “I don’t profess any religion; I don’t think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.’. Critics of Pullman’s books point to the strong anti-religion and anti-God themes they incorporate, and although literary works are subject to a variety of interpretations, Pullman left little doubt about his intentions when he said in a 2003 interview with They Sydney Morning Herald that “My books are about killing God.” In “His Dar Materials,” trilogy Pullman’s criticisms of organized religion come across as anti-authoritarian and anti-ascetic rather than anti-doctrinal. His fundamental objection is to ideological tyranny and the rejection of this world in favor of an idealized afterlife, regardless of creed. As one of the novel’s pagan characters put it, “Every church is the same: control, destroy, and obliterate every good feeling.” John 10:10 in the Bible says “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” So tell me….would you rather serve the Devil that steals, kills and destroys, or serve God who gives you abundant life for all eternity in Heaven? I choose life….What will you choose?

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